In Four Tales, sound and architecture unite in a conversation that expands senses and entangles our rhythms with all other pulses that surround us. A city aware of itself.
In the album, floating between documentation and imagined drifts, urban infrastructures and bodies of water are explored as entangled entities to be carefully tended to. Rooted in listening as an act of care, the album takes four distinct approaches to water-based sound journeys: three solo tracks and a collaborative one.
In Four Tales Matilde Meireles expands on the work she composed as part of DRIFT, a collaborative project centred on a modular, site-specific floating pavilion and public space in Belfast. DRIFT was commissioned by Belfast City Council as part of the Belfast 2024 cultural programme. It brought together two local architecture studios (OGU and MMAS) with sound artist Matilde Meireles.
The project was conceived as a “floating instrument”, an open-ended public space that fosters new perspectives on city-river connections. By creating opportunities for stillness and attentive listening, it opened dialogues between people and place. Its surface, draped in cotton ropes of varying blue shades, gently demarcated the boundary between interior and exterior. The structure, built from reusable aluminium scaffolding, floated at two sites, Stranmillis Weir and Belfast City Centre, throughout August and September 2024.
While the floating pavilion was inherently community-driven — creating spaces for new connections and shared plural experiences — Four Tales translates this communal ethos into sonic form, maintaining a fluidity that extends beyond human narratives. It suggests sound and extended forms of listening as ways of forming community not only among people, but within the broader ecological network of which we are part. Four Tales is also a personal project, entailing eight years of living in Belfast and spending a vast amount of time with the River Lagan.
Four Tales is now available as a limited-release CD (including a poster designed by Rachel O’Grady) or as a download from Crónica’s bandcamp page.