Oz Fritz ~ All Around The World
A boy asks ‘What
Is Your Job?’ to which Oz Fritz replies with a hint of a laugh ‘I
make recordings’. This brief exchange both summarises and significantly
underplays the nature of All Around The World. Fritz has been studio and location
recording engineer for Bill Laswell on more than 60 projects so his name might
be familiar if you’re an assiduous reader of cd covers. The details
of All Around The World’s eleven pieces are provided in the sleevenotes
where the first track is described as follows: “... we voyage from the
Australian Outback to a prayercall in Tashkent and then on to an Arabic horseshow
next to the Great Pyramid in Giza fading in and out to Tamil priests and chanting
monks at the Basilica de Sacre Coeur in Paris.” Fritz effectively presents
a collaged travelogue of street sounds, footfalls echoing in bazaars, the
roar of the Parisian subway, mopeds roaring away on African streets and so
on. There’s also some very wonderful music whose highlight must surely
be Marralyil, recorded in the north Australian outback. Fritz’s recordings
evidently don’t aspire to the (supposedly) pure transcription of ethnographical
location recorders or the sheen of Peter Gabriel’s Wiltshire-based Real
World studios. For one thing he appears intermittently, acting as both guide
and tourist, expert and ingenue. The liner notes acknowledge the influence
of John Cage in the acceptance of everyday sound as music as well as referring
to the underlying theme of the work as “... a practical technology for
preparation and survival of bodily death”. The validity of this claim
should be left up to the individual listener to assess, but such wayward,
Burroughsian thinking is certainly welcome in this quarter. All Around The
World prompts the listener to question whether the world really is shrinking,
whether it’s becoming any less confused, confusing or strange, how partial
the concept of the global village is, and so on. It’s a questing, clever
and committed work which amply repays both passive contemplation and intellectual
engagement.
Colin Buttimer
November 2004