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

 

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.

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

mobility_programme_horizontal-1 kopi.jpg

 

HYS (Gnesta, Sweden, 2017)

 

A word written on a wall in an old brewery, in a small town in Sweden. A long re-sampled soundscape reaching for the 10 bpm un-lifelike rhythm offered to bodies of abandon. Vocal intimacy as undertow, the slowing down of the “impact of lighted bodies” in Mina Loy’s words. Slow but not tame, percussive but not uplifting. Maybe.

(Photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes, Berlin 2017)

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

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 2.0Os 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)

SISTER BROTHER AGATHA DARKNESS (Stockholm, Sweden, 2016)

photo by Eduardo Abrantes - Kärrtorp, Stockholm, 2015

Sister Brother Agatha Darkness – 4# in “Some Days Series” – a series of short situated sound experiments. Stockholm, March 2016.

Faux-goth sensibilities fractured by 4am introspection. Sister Brother Agatha Darkness moves between dense social atmospheres and the off-beat suspenseful instinct for interruption. As a sound body it lurks, ritually gasping in tangible shyness and awkward self-awareness, while basking in cinematic associations. It is about subtle exhibitionism and wearing proudly one’s garland of imperfections.

(photo credit: Eduardo Abrantes)