The Belgian / English project 48 Cameras once wrote a gorgeous track entitled ‘May the circle remain unbroken’, and somehow, I was thinking and philosophizing about this title. All things start, and all things end, except the almighty circle. But we don’t always want things to end. And then again, not everything that has ended has really ended; it might also be the start of something new. And having said that, some things do end forever, and what is left is “What Remains”.
Shifts was a project by Frans de Waard (no introduction, read the interwebz), and it was based on experiments with a guitar and a motorized object that – with an elastic band – had some crude eBow-like function. But as it was an actual motor, it also had some beautiful electromagnetic disturbances when used on an electric guitar. Next to that, there was the eagerness to do something with guitar-based ambient, so these three ingredients formed Shifts. Also, Discogs will tell you about most of the releases there were, and I’ll focus on this one. Because this will be the final Shift. This is all “What Remains”.
During the inventory of some older recordings stashed away on DATs, these tracks turned up, and a total of one hour of beautiful sounds and music is the result. Yes, I wrote sounds and music, not only ‘music’. It’s a collection of pieces where some are more crystalized towards a real composition, and some pieces are audible experiments. But VW being a magazine for experiments, you could expect that. So, are these experiments also music? They definitely are! But as not everybody can handle the crudeness of experiments, I wanted to emphasize it.
Nine pieces with a total playing time of just under an hour. Mostly they were recorded live in the studio (thank heavens for Frans’ thorough documentation drift), a few were heavily manipulated afterwards on either tape or in the computer, and one is an unused extract for the first full album ‘Pangea’ (Elsie & Jack, 1998) and there is one piece that is based on sounds borrowed from Stars of the Lid, who were of big influence/inspiration to Frans when it came to his Shifts project. With the sad passing of Brian McBride earlier this week, the whole thought of circles being unbroken got extra meaning. For Shifts, “What Remains” is what remains …
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