NEITAR AÐ FORÐAST / REFUSE TO REFRAIN (Ísafjörður, Iceland, 2017)

December 15, 2017April 11, 2022 | Eduardo Abrantes

There are two things about working artistically with sound that are particularly inspiring to me. One is that your materials are found anywhere. Another is that they usually gain by becoming displaced.

When you record sounds outside in nature, and then later listen to them, join them, and manipulate them in some kind of indoors-domestic environment, you are effectively dabbling in alchemy. You are making connections, you are separating what is together, you are unfolding vibrating immateriality into physical presence. You are also allowed to do all of this without using words.

During November 2017, staying in Ísafjörður at ArtsIceland Residency, I have created a series of short sound pieces. All of them include sounds recorded on location, most often transformed beyond recognition. Some are pulsing, quick and noisy, others slow, repetitive and quiet – most of them are both because I enjoy contrast. Listener, you are welcome to be curious, you are welcome to be bored, you are welcome.

This series of dual channel compositions was first performed before a live audience, at Edinborgarhúsið on November 28. Three of the thirteen compositions – Foom Foom Bloom, Krílið and Vegna Næturinnar – can be heard below.

Photo: Eduardo Abrantes, Ísafjörður, Iceland 2017

Photo: Eduardo Abrantes, Þingeyri, Iceland 2017

Photo: Eduardo Abrantes, Ísafjörður, Iceland 2017

This residency was made possible by financial support from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture.

BACK TO WORK / CITIES AND MEMORY (Copenhagen, Denmark – London, UK, 2017)

August 7, 2017August 7, 2017 | Eduardo Abrantes

A sound collage dealing with mysticism, utopian desire, and resistance, both for and against change. It includes manipulated samples of composer and Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s (1098-1179) choral piece Canticles of Ecstasy, fragments of an original field recording in London at the G20 rallies, and a sample and slightly pitched detail of a voice of dissent, ironically protesting against protest. Back To Work is about raising one’s voice, about the utopian mindset that often runs parallel to activism as its mystical counterpart, it is about a gathering of voices as a sonic ritual and the joy, melancholy, and weirdness of it all.

It was created as part of the call for field-recording re-apropriation and reconfiguration Protest & Politics, a global sound map of protest that is part of Cities and Memory, a collaborative “global field recording & sound art work that presents both the present reality of a place, but also its imagined, alternative counterpart – remixing the world, one sound at at time”.

Back To Work, among others, was programmed and broadcasted for the first time on August 7th 2017 by London-based Resonance FM.

HORN ERU BEYGJUR / CORNERS ARE CURVES (that is why we walk into them) (Ísafjörður, Iceland, 2017)

March 13, 2017April 11, 2022 | Eduardo Abrantes

My month-long residency at ArtsIceland in Ísafjörður, during February 2017, manifested as a series of inspiring sonic encounters. Between the surrounding landscape – both monumental and fluid – and its people, I was allowed to weave my own life rhythms, being guided, welcomed, playfully challenged, and above all, engaged and engaging with full curiosity.

HORN ERU BEYGJUR / CORNERS ARE CURVES is a surround installation/sound composition that knits together some of these sonic encounters. It is composed of manipulated field recordings taken in different environments in Ísafjörður, both private and public spaces, including that strangely simultaneously public and intensely private space, the acoustic of the fjord landscape itself.

The sound collecting and composition process was guided by the awareness of the site-specific acoustic properties of the area, together with intense dialogue and shared experiences with some of the local inhabitants. It was presented as a live mixed quadraphonic (4 channel surround) sound installation at Edinborgarhúsið Cultural Centre, followed by a group walk and an improvised choral encounter at Gallery Outvert.

The title refers to the geography of the fjords, its corners turning into curves, its play of seemingly both challenging and inviting navigation – hard on the body and freeing in the soul. It refers also to my own shared internal landscape as a human, how past and present struggles strengthen conviction, how life and wonder shun straight lines.

This residency was made possible by financial support from the following institutions:

OS TRÊS INIMIGOS DA ALMA (Viseu, Portugal – Stockholm, Sweden, 2016)

November 18, 2016November 18, 2016 | Eduardo Abrantes

In one of the verses of a religious hymn from her childhood, Maria de Adelaide de Oliveira Rouxinol cautions against “the three enemies of the soul”, without explicitly naming them. According to christian tradition these would be the world, the flesh and the devil (mundus, caro, et diabolus).
If the soul is indeed intangible yet omnipresent, the same can be said of the listening experience. If there is a sonorous soul, what would its three enemies be? Distraction, unawareness, lack of empathy with the vibration of a place? I do not know.
Departing from the field-recording archive Viseu Rural 2.0, Os Três Inimigos da Alma (The Three Enemies of the Soul)” is an exploration of the rhythmic dissonance implicit in fragments of the soundscape of the rural area of Viseu, Portugal. Attentive to where and when boredom gives way to beauty and vice-versa, this piece is composed in relation to distance and absence – my listening point – and the ways in which imagination tries to access a non-visited site.

(photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes)

TRAVESSIAS E ENCONTROS – SUSANA ESCUTA EDUARDO DEPOIS EDUARDO ESCUTA SUSANA (Lisboa, Portugal – Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016)

November 18, 2016November 18, 2016 | Eduardo Abrantes

A collaborative exploration on distance, audio correspondence and psycho-geographic mapping, together with artist and researcher Susana Mouzinho (PT). In Travessias e Encontros (Crossings & Encounters) – a sound piece commissioned by the interdisciplinary online platform ESC:ALA, the full curated piece being accessible here – Susana listens to a Copenhagen that Eduardo has cycled through, then Eduardo listens to Lisbon as it has been walked by Susana. A hybrid sound map results from this mutual curiosity, every now and then intersected by short voiced introspections. A dialogue with distance.

(photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes)

binaural bike path through Copenhagen, graphic editing: Eduardo Abrantes

Hornstull, Stockholm – photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

HEAVEN : HAVEN : HAVN (Læsø, Denmark, 2016)

August 2, 2016November 29, 2020 | Eduardo Abrantes

1. heaven : haven : havn – introduction as afterthought

In Læsø, a small island of less than 2000 inhabitants off the northeast coast of the Jutland Peninsula, in Denmark, I was told that some stones have their own names. As an afterthought, that detail sparked the play between body, perspective and landscape in heaven : haven : havn.

heaven : haven : havn (previously known by the working title “salt of the earth / salt of the sea”) was the result from an invitation to do a collaborative artistic residency aiming towards a site specific intervention. The invitation came initially from Jon Eirik Lundberg, director of the Læsø Kunsthal (established in 2012), via Eja Rhea Due and Camilla Calundann, respectively director/performer and scenographer/visual artist of the Copenhagen-based collective Teater Bæst.

After a previous shorter trip in February, for two weeks in May 2016, me, Eja, and Camilla, stayed in Læsø and researched the different strands of inspiration that the island afforded, while exploring how best to bring our individual practices and strategies to combine into a coherent artistic intervention.

Our collective process developed across three intermingling levels. These three levels followed three main elements of site specificity as immersive practice: the local landscape, the life rhythms and the social fabric of the inhabitants, the awareness of the implications of our own presence as short-term nomadic visitors with an aesthetic agenda.

2. Site specificity as an exercise in self-awareness, and heaven : haven : havn as an outcome

A short note about these three levels of site specificity.

Læsø’s landscape is dominated by flatness and by the slow shifting texture of the ground below the horizon. From the thick forest areas, to the hybrid farm lands, from the pelt like smoothness of the low coastal vegetation, to the sandy beaches sprinkled with white sun-bleached shells and bird bone fragments, to the low pulse of the tide changing green to blue according to the depth – it is a landscape to be experienced underfoot and above eye level, an horizontal reach with a panoramic sensibility.

With so much space and such a sparse population, people tend either to be very close together, or far apart. The life rhythms of the fishing folk, for example those we shortly met at the “Universitet”, a fishermen’s shack converted into a temporary hangout for storytelling and drinking, are marked by a deliberate slowness at land. Carlsens Hotel, at Vesterø, close to where the ferry docks, is another hub of slow burning conversation and raspy voices surrounded by a halo of boredom. Freedom and boredom, the prize and the sacrifice, seem to deeply mark Læsø’s life rhythms.

Also the scope of individuals and their dreams, like those of “Amerikaner Pete”, a well established farmer dreaming of building a Læsø mythology theme park in his land, an island within the island. Or the calm assurance and reticent perspective of the single policeman of the island, navigating a discreet mental map of neighbours and their natural frictions, or of outsiders and their occasionally dubious intentions.

One of the most inspiring elements: the ferry between Fredrikshavn and Læsø, part geographical extension of the island’s territory, part social network – with its shuttle pulse mimicking almost something like the inhaling/exhaling flow of life into and off the island.

The third level, us, our own engagement with the island by walking, running, gathering materials, recording sounds and taking photos, building up our own mind-maps, our own temporary territories. Trying to participate as active listeners in the storytelling rituals of the island’s inhabitants. Also, struggling with the specific languages of our practices, sometimes their incommunicability, sometimes their apparent consonance, even more surprising. The friction between our own expectations and ambitions, between the kinds of access we projected into our stay in the island, and the access we actually had to built, or sometimes to find, by sheer accident.

Out of this complex dynamics of artistic research, heaven : haven : havn manifested – as a temporary audio-visual installation at the Læsø Kunsthal, in a room where a model/texture map of the island’s materials was also crafted.

As a video art piece, heaven : haven : havn connected different levels of reality. The subtle exploration of the landscape by the presence of the body; the reference to the mythologically charged identity of the island, where ancient stones appear as worthy of having a name; and the focus on a manipulated horizon inspired by the radical flatness of the island, where the underfoot is brought closer to eye level.

The soundscape of heaven : haven : havn was composed mostly of binaural recordings taken during the ferry trip between Fredrikshavn and Læsø. In a exercise in acoustic embodiment, I walked deliberately on the empty upper deck, drawn by the lull of the sea, its contrast with the intense volume of the pitched frequencies of the exhaust grids, and together with the low rumbling of the ferry’s motors a few levels below. Also part of the soundscape was a discreet electronic improvised composition, produced exactly in the context of the long hours of freedom and boredom provided by Læsø’s sparse and meditative environment. (Some of the other sound compositions done while at the island were brought together in a piece called Spiritual Soliciting, which can be found here as 7# in the “Some Days Series” or listened to individually here.)

3. Læsø : view into a process

A home for a time, Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Læsø Kunsthal, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Exploring the west coast, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Læsø Saltsyderi, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Exploring the landscape through the body, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Fredrikshavn-Læsø ferry, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Home textures, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Inside Carlsens Hotel, Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Flatness and highlights at Bouet Bugt, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

A home for a time, Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Inside Carlsens Hotel, Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Exploring the landscape through the body, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Looking back at Fredrikshavn from the ferry deck, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Læsø Saltsyderi, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Havets Dag at Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Fredrikshavn-Læsø ferry, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Landscape local textures, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Home textures, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Læsø Kunsthal, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Fredrikshavn-Læsø ferry, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Private dry dock, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Crossing into Hornfiskrøn, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

A home for a time, Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Inside Carlsens Hotel, Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Exploring the landscape through the body, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Traces of human presence along the west coast, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Havets Dag at Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Exploring the landscape through the body, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Dusk settling, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Læsø Kunsthal, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Landscape local textures, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Exploring the landscape through the body, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Harbor dwellers at Vesterø Havn, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Vesterø, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

From left to right: Eja, Jon, Camilla, and Eduardo, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

Exploring the west coast, photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes

This project and artistic residency were made possible by a grant from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture attributed by the Nordic Culture Point / Nordic Council of Ministers.

SUPERNATURAL SOLICITING (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016)

August 2, 2016 | Eduardo Abrantes

Supernatural Soliciting – 7# in “Some Days Series” – a series of short situated sound experiments. Copenhagen, June 2016.

A gathering of sonic digressions through the flat landscape of the remote island of Læsø, in the northeast coast of Jutland peninsula, Denmark. Supernatural Soliciting borrows its title from a line in Macbeth, where friction between omens and expectations leads to crisis. It exudes longing, instants of playfulness and a sense of mystery manifest in improvised synchronicity.

(photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes)

HOLLY ROLLERS (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016)

August 2, 2016 | Eduardo Abrantes

Holly Rollers – 6# in “Some Days Series” – a series of short situated sound experiments. Copenhagen, April 2016.

A series of every day actions and sound impressions gathered from the place called neighbourhood. Holly Rollers brings almost-melodies into contact with a deep-layered awareness of the surrounding rhythms, and the strange closeness of anonymity between those inhabiting them. It explores eavesdropping as a creative strategy.

(photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes)

UNPAIRED GLOVES (Stockholm, Sweden, 2016)

August 2, 2016 | Eduardo Abrantes

Unpaired Gloves – 5# in “Some Days Series” – a series of short situated sound experiments. Stockholm, March 2016. (headphones required for full binaural experience)

Gloves unpaired at the edge of the woods. Left behind by someone. Picked up by someone else and propped on low tree branches, waiting in plain sight. Like second skins, from metamorphosed distracted wanderers. Also, a song from a memory of a song heard – Portishead’s “It’s A Fire” – layering vocal rituals with the deep binaural situation of body becoming surface and friction.

(photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes)