After the recent release of Aiear, we’re now immensely happy to present the second and final part of the Clould cycle, in a limited-release CD with a 16-page booklet.
The title Clould convolutes the words cloud, hinting at humankind’s fascination of supposed supernatural beings that lived in clouds or created them, and could, a potentiality. Historical mythologies are placed in the context of 21st century airborne mass transport that propels large groups of human beings — passive by force — through a space that once belonged to mythological beings and energies. And to the clouds, of course. The Clould cycle of electroacoustic music pieces and its preamble Aiear together consist of 95 minutes of music, five microstories, the libretto for its fifth movement, a number of aerial photographs and text charts, and a performance concept including the first three movements. This CD features the complete five movements of Clould, composed between 2011 and 2023.
Clould is composed with sounds from inside airplanes and airports recorded in various ways: from the check-in luggage, with electromagnetic sensors, from the onboard entertainment system, or just straight with normal mics. Voice recordings from in-flight announcements have been processed until machinic chimeras appear — the ultimate disembodied voice. By fragmenting such recordings down into individual syllables and recompiling them into new, sometimes unintelligible fantasy sequences of various interconnected and orchestrated voices, phantom words and sentences can be heard. As the Clould cycle is based on an English language understanding, a libretto-style transcription of the final 5th Movement reveals English words and onomatopoetic exclamations. This dedicated system very loosely refers to the concept of bījamantra (or bījākṣara: seed syllable) used in Tantric Hinduism and Buddhist Mysticism, in which certain syllables, like “oṃ” for example, contain sonic essences that make manifestations of a certain element, entity, or deity.
Clould is now available as a CD, download or stream.