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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
The field-recording music of Philip Perkins (a sound engineer for film scores, who has also worked with the Residents and directed several films) is episodic but not random, naive but not trivial, gentle but not relaxed, slow but not static. His favorite subject is the mundanethat is, background noises heard throughout the day.
Perkins composes symphonies from neighborhood sounds: Apartment Life (197580) is a work of environmental sounds (footsteps, telephone rings, news broadcasts, blenders, crickets, rain, and so on) treated electronically (resonances, modulations, radio interference, slowed tapes), a vast fresco of American life, often brightened by comic juxtapositions that nevertheless reflect the complexity of urban crowds.
Much gloomier and less documentarian, Neighborhood with a Sky contains
the four "concrete" Bird Variations
(that range from brutal pulsation to creepy crackle to cosmic metallic droning to nebula of warped echoes), the
soothing ambient mantra of The Fountain,
the metallic industrial mayhem of Este's Request,
the percussive dance of Equinox Weather,
the slow-motion ghostly and almost psychedelic distorted drones that open Rico In The Birdhouse,
and even the melodic gag of The Black And The White Cat.
King Of The World (1983), which also features a synthesizer, evolves toward a form of concrete-ambient music with archaic tones, while Drive Time, conceived as music for commuting by car, is a sequence of imitations of street music, advertising sketches, and everyday noises.
While Hall Of Flowers is another concrete suite of found sounds, Pacal reconstructs the life of a Maya king sonically, based on objects found in his tomb, and Flame Of Ambition is a themed collection of songs and instrumentals targeting the business world. Rosetta Stone mixes meaningless sounds with spoken words, simulating the way children distinguish between them, while its counterpart, Horizontal, is a melodic suite worthy of the new age. Perkins was, in his time, the ultimate realist of musique concrte. His noise collages were the apotheosis of the civilization of noise, and thus stood at the opposite extreme of Alvin Currans bucolic pastiches. Perkins had no polemical ambitions or miraculous recipes: he merely photographed the city, removing any possible referent from the events.
In the 1990s, Perkins formed the duo Bifurctors with Scott Fraser that released
Gang Of Two (Artifact, 2004).
Perkins has also composed several electronic pieces: South Florida Remote (1988), Berkeley Remote (1989), San Francisco Remote, etc.
Other recordings include:
Virgo Ramayana (And Other Works For Radio) (1992),
Choral Works & The Apsaras (2005),
At The Other End Of The Day (Improvisations 2005-2008) (2009),
The Department Of Strange Weather (2011),
Mister Anyhow (2014),
It Gets The Corners (2016),
Yeah Machine (2019),
which documents performances for "recorded, made, found, purchased and stolen sounds".
Flare (2022) collects solo live recordings of 2019-22.
Undanceable (Artifact, 2023) collects scores for dance.
Thirteen Feet Nine Inches (2025) is another collection of electronic music.
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