why we love this

Like listening to the field recordings of a quarry on the moon: an eery silence interspersed with the discovery of shimmering sounds which have been fossilized in phosphorescent gemstones.

about the record

It all began eight years ago with a copy of R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World found in a box in a cabin, deep within the Pacific coast rain forest. This catalyst provoked Scott Gailey to draw inspiration from the sublime environment that surrounds his home on the West Coast of British Columbia. This exact landscape had a profound effect years earlier on a group of composers centred around Schafer and Simon Fraser University, including Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Truax, who banded together as the World Soundscape Project (WSP). Where the WSP was primarily interested in field recording as sound ecology - documenting, preserving, and archiving a changing landscape - Gailey explores the musicality of field recordings through various synthetic approaches, a way to access the ambiguous emotional content latent in the natural world. There is a subjectivity to Gailey’s work, and in that sense it has more in common with the sensual musique concrète of Luc Ferrari, or even the Fluxus tape works of Henning Christiansen, than with the WSP. Despite having roots in this well of thought, Polysensuality is undeniably modern, finding kinship with contemporary works by Sugai Ken, Visible Cloaks, and Meitei, while also dipping a toe in the sound pool created by Haruomi Hosono and Hiroshi Yoshimura. Gailey has previously explored this palette in his duo You’re Me with Yu Su, but here there is more space, more silence, greater extremes, and in this way it is more personal, like a soliloquy rather than a conversation.