John Wall

British sampling composer John Wall's work creates new compositions from fragments of CD and LP recordings. Interests in classical composition, computer music, and free improvisation are all apparent in the work of this north London composer, who became active in avant-garde music circles in the early '80s. His working process is to reconfigure some of the more abrasive shards of modern classical music. He splices them hard up against an explosive soundbite from metalers Carcass or free-improv from the Derek Bailey school of thought, often parallel mixing these sample arrangements against improvisations record from instrumentalists in his studio. While this method may sound akin to John Zorn's Naked City, though it is less a random post-modern mis-match experiment and his work has the feel of refined compositions. Certainly, one would have to know the recordings of his sampling subjects intimately to spot weather it was Xenakis, Scelsi, Luigi Nono, or Jogn Cage. This stream of avant-garde classical music is a recurring resource in Wall's work and through the albums on his own Utterpsalm label, the composer distilled the same process on a triptych of CDs. The two-year intervals which separate there releases in the '90s is telling of the fact that the composer spent years assembling these detailed texture-poems. This is also accredited to the fact that John Wall was using computer assembling quite early on in the '90s, when the technology was less efficient than in the following ten years. Hence, by the time the Constructions CD appeared in 1999, it was striking the degree to which the new technology had enabled his aesthetic to fully bloom. The work was less a sample-based re-construction as an autonomous composition in its own right. Thus, his work moved away from the...