Wil Bolton – Quarry Bank

Women pouring through an open doorway, most seemingly in a hurry. One pauses, clutching a satchel, until a large skinny dog appears and barks at her, causing her to flee. The dog is chased away by a man on a bicycle. The second man to appear in the steady stream of frocks also has a bicycle; a third waves his handkerchief frantically as if to rid himself of a bothersome fly or wasp. The dog saunters by once more, as behind the last few stragglers two horses appear pulling a carriage.

Perhaps a few of the departing workers would have had their curiosity aroused by the smallish black box the factory proprietors had set up opposite the entrance – “what new toy are they conjuring up now?” – though they could hardly have guessed at what was taking place. They knew that it was late afternoon, maybe just after five, on a workday, and that for them meant home time. But the little black box was busy transforming this time into an altogether different temporal form, the rules of which were radically different from anything that had so far been discerned or articulated by anyone, including the maverick inventors themselves. A perfectly normal everyday occurrence – that of workers leaving the Lumière factory on the outskirts of Lyon in 1895 – was being transposed from the time of the phenomenon to that of the cinema.

It could be argued that a similar transposition occurs in all ambient and drone music, but the effect seems particularly pronounced in the work of Wil Bolton. It is fitting, then, to find him inside what could be thought of as a giant version of the Lumière Brothers’ camera: the Quarry Bank mill in Cheshire, now a museum. The mill has been repaired and refurbished in order to return it to its appearance as it was in the nineteenth century, when it was one of the largest cotton mills in the United Kingdom. The mill is thus preserved within cinematic time, an amber that never properly sets, but forever repeats. Bolton recorded the sounds of the mill’s antique machinery and water wheels, and used their creaking, clanking and gushing as the basis for dense, dreamlike drones. Dreamlike in the sense of disorientating, hazy, possessing a weight and a heaviness yet not quite resolving into anything solid. The resulting music, like the mill itself and the stream of homebound workers, seems to exist inside a different kind of time, one that on the one hand never stops moving, yet on the other seems congealed into a single affective moment. I found it very difficult to work out how much time had passed as I was listening to “Quarry Bank” – it could have been a whole day, a year, a second, or no time at all.

Given all these transpositions of time, it is perfectly fitting that this music should appear on Time Released Sound: the label is renowned for its lovingly handcrafted packaging that recalls the Arts and Crafts Movement, an aesthetics and ideology that gained popularity during Quarry Bank’s heyday. “Quarry Bank” is a sensitive and absorbing investigation into the persistence of moments in time, bewilderingly beautiful in the way it disrupts empirical concepts of temporality, just as the masterpieces of early cinema do. Rather than reassuring the listener with a slice of safe nostalgia, Bolton demonstrates experimental music’s ability to alter and unsettle our perceptions, opening up new possibilities for the imagination.

- Nathan Thomas for Fluid Radio

www.timereleasedsound.com
www.wilbolton.co.uk