Album Details

• Artist: James Fella
• Album: Salvaged Tapes
• Label: Gilgongo
• Year of Release: 2008
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2008-10-29

For a relatively short imposition on your time, James Fella gives you plenty of pleasing jolts to the synapse. "Salvaged Tape" is essentially a noise piece, though it is also an assemblage piece, so to some extent the sounds are the result of random finds among discarded sounds and noises. The chance meeting of the incongruous is, in Fella's hands, transformed into a coherent whole.

A pastiche of sounds collected from about twenty or so discarded cassette tapes, "Salvaged Tapes" recycles what was meant to remain trash, and instead became a twenty minute loop of noise, muffled guitar, street and nature sounds, and the odd disembodied voice, speaking for reasons now unknown. There are also brief sections where a beat is heard here, some strings there. Yet the more you listen, the more complete it feels. Fella has taken snatches of sound that were never meant to know each other, and has given them new life as a new entity. That is the essence of assemblage in art, and in outsider art. The freedom to re-make and discover what was hidden in the separate parts is the freedom of the artist, and James Fella has given us yet another example of the music all around us, waiting to be given some attention.

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