The Dramaturgy of Decay

When the first cameras were introduced, some people were terrified the machine would steal their soul and refused to be photographed. A similar fear appeared when early sound recording technologies came about. To record the human voice meant: to split it from the living, breathing body, making a phantom out of it. Mark Vernon’s new LP reminds me of the ancient fear and attraction of recording. There is something wonderfully ghostly about The Dramaturgy of Decay. It contains many distorted voices, close yet infinitely impalpable, out of reach
The voices appear and disappear. They merge with other elements. Sometimes they get submerged, erased. They infinitely become something else. And I wonder: Am I now hearing the sound of the sea, of the wind in the trees? Is this the sound of a haunted house – or the haunted house of sound itself?
Vernon composes a cinema for the ears. Something uniquely textured and immediately present. I think of The Dramaturgy of Decay as a sonic equivalent to the ruined films of Bill Morrison (Decasia, 2002) or Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate, 1991). I hear the tape, the sound of the medium – and I hear it disappearing – I see the end coming. And yet the disappearance is not tragic. There is a vein of humour gently running throughout the album. For all their eeriness, Vernon’s soundscapes carry with them something comfortingly familiar – something delicate and tender like the Super 8 films of Jonas Mekas