Not Your Dad’s Secretarial Pool

As part of the MuseRoule – Women in Experimental Music festival this past May, Audition Records released this wonderful live recording of The Secretaries. The trio is made up of Felicity Mangan, WJM, and JD Zazie and their focus is on found sounds, field recordings and electronics. In an interview that comes with the release WJM describes The Secretaries as “music from the desk.” Managan further describes their music as “playing, jumping, skipping, reversing, sliding, volume …”:

We have been working together since we played our first show at Limbus Europae last year. When we played at MuseRuole Festival in Italy it was the third time for us to play together live, with a couple of sessions in-between. The Secretaries is the three of us working with found and recorded sounds; playing, jumping, skipping, reversing, sliding, volume, etc with our CD playing devices and mixers. When we play together we have fallen into parameters influenced by our ‘music/sound’ backgrounds, WJM plays more percussive, rhythms and impulses sound, JD Zazie plays more field recordings and impulse noises and l play animal and insect noises. Outside of this project we also have two different duo projects; JD Zazie and WJM play as Semerssuaq and JD Zazie and I play as Wet n’ Wild.

The live performance is a wonderful combination of their three different styles blended together in an almost ambient juxtaposition of noises. The sounds whether electronic glitches, insects or other field recordings paint a rich and animated soundscape.

One can only hope that there will be more releases from MusRoule festival.

Artist: The Secretaries
Title: Live at Museion
Netlabel: Audition Records
Release Date: 15 July 2012
CC BY-NC-ND
Download mp3: zip