A couple of years back I was talking with Doug and Max of Hausu Mountain and the example of an hours long recording of a fan kept coming up. We returned to it many times as a negative instance of what they were attempting to accomplish with the label, an overly ponderous and simply indulgent illustration of concept overriding aesthetics as contempt for the listen. I thought it was a funny and fairly poignant measure of how experimental music can lose its way and alienate rather than engage an audience. Conducive's Global Makeshift Wounds has, of course, thrown a wrench in this perfect parallel for artistic decisions bereft of forethought, as it's an album that I'm almost entirely certain is made up of the sounds of many, many fans (or at least the sound of air moving in huge currents around an open space). Its ambient hum is the byproduct of an enormous, bewilderingly and imposing inverted spectrum of duct mazes and spinning citadels that make up the air-circulating apparatuses of most airports. Their howling bowels are the kind of feedback that your mind means to filter out, but Global Makeshift Wounds doesn't leave you with an ejection point or an alcove to escape this blizzard of white noise, so you are stuck with their whirling incessant, imposing and formerly benign presence- confronted with the madness of a background feature promoted to the focal point of your perception. It's an inspired choice to ground the dizzying murmur of an effectively innocuous and constantly moving element of design and interior infrastructure as a locus for the psychological pressure that is magnified by a place that is designed for departures and arrivals but metaphysically manifests as an interminable purgatory- you're always leaving but you're never leaving, you need to go but you have to stay, the exit is eternal and ingress is incalculable. The only thing that is constant is that you are forced to fixate on the cacophonous heave of a prodigiously oversized set of metallic lungs inhaling and exhaling simultaneously above you, an infinite exchange that sucks you up its gills, and once there, turns you inside out like a windsock, evacuating its contents. Now you are like the hollowed bodies anchored in the sky. You have become another open exhaust chamber in a liminal plot of intransigence. Another installation in the guts of a gaseous homunculus. A temporary membrane that mediates a potential reconning with the dormant probabilities of an unfulfilled reality.
