Nagrywanie, słuchanie, ruch, rytm. Istnieje wiele śladów, które tworzą nieskończone możliwości łączenia w nowe jakości. Ślady, nagrywanie, czas, częstotliwość. Powtarzanie i pamięć. Alan Burdick pisze, że „Złota era ucha nigdy się nie skończyła (…) Trwa, zasłonięta hegemonią wizualności”, ale „Historia ucha” rozbrzmiewa w zapomnieniu.
Marcin Dymiter– muzyk (gra w projektach emiter, niski szum, ZEMITER oraz innych, efemerycznych formacjach; wcześniej związany z zespołami Ewa Braun, Mapa, Mordy), autor nagrań terenowych, instalacji dźwiękowych i słuchowisk, muzyki do filmów, wystaw i spektakli teatralnych. Prowadzi autorskie warsztaty dźwiękowe oraz działania przybliżające ideę field recordingu. Autor cyklu nagrań Field Notes. Niezależny kurator związany z festiwalami Wydźwięki/Resonances (Galeria El, Elbląg) i Control Room (Gdańsk). Wspólnie z Marcinem Barskim był pomysłodawcą i kuratorem „Polish Soundscapes”, pierwszej polskiej wystawy prezentującej zjawisko field recordingu. W 2020 roku został zaproszony do udziału w światowej wystawie sound artu Audiosphere. Sound Experimentation 1980-2020, która odbyła się w Madrycie, w Museo Reina Sofia.
Producent muzyczny. Słuchacz i uczestnik warsztatów muzycznych i warsztatów improwizacji w kraju i za granicą, między innymi prowadzonych przez Le Quan Ninha, Andrew Sharpleya, Johna Butchera, Robina Minarda i Wolfganga Fuchsa. Stypendysta Uniwersytetu Sztuki w Berlinie, finalista konkursu Netmage International Multimedia Festival w Bolonii. Stypendysta Marszałka Województwa Pomorskiego oraz Ministra Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego (2011), Fundacji Wyszehradzkiej (2012, 2023). Członek Polskiego Stowarzyszenia Muzyki Elektroakustycznej.
Simon Whetham’s “Successive Actions” is not so much an album as it is a murmuring labyrinth of discarded whispers, a requiem for obsolete machines played on their own brittle bones. In this latest iteration of his “Channelling” project, Whetham transforms the detritus of consumer technology – motors, mechanisms, and malfunctions – into an orchestra of decay, reanimated by sound and amplified into mesmerizing disarray.
The concept itself reads like a speculative fiction plotline: sounds once captured from mundane phenomena – wind rattling through cracks, doors groaning their final goodnight, traffic sighing in perpetual migration – are funneled into defunct devices. These technological ghosts, startled into sputtering life, produce new sounds, their rhythms simultaneously organic and mechanical, random yet precise. It’s the sonic equivalent of sending dead stars into resonance, their echoes colliding in the void.
From the beginning, “Successive Actions” immerses listeners in a sequence that feels both procedural and chaotic. Opening track “Action” unfolds like the flick of a circuit breaker, a quiet initiation to a process whose repercussions ripple outward. Tracks like “Reaction” and “Overreaction” hum and stutter, their soundscapes alternately serene and volatile. “Redaction” seems to erase itself as it plays, its fragmented tones suggesting memory dissolving into static, while “Compaction” compresses dense textures into bursts of claustrophobic intensity.
The interplay of texture and structure reaches its peak in “Contraction,” a six-minute epic of mechanical tension that breathes like a collapsing lung, and “Distraction,” whose jittery rhythms evoke a machine unraveling its purpose. The closing track, “Protraction,” leaves a faint sonic residue, as if the machines are slipping back into silence, their revolt unfinished but indelible.
Whetham’s artistry lies in his ability to coax emotional resonance from ostensibly lifeless materials. His works are sound sculptures, tracing the hidden vitality of malfunction, the poetics of disintegration. There is a grim irony in the process: technology, once destined for precision and utility, now repurposed as a chaotic muse. It is a reflection of the modern cycle – creation, obsolescence, reinvention – told through reverberations.
The album’s title, drawn from Dirk Raaijmakers’ “The Art of Reading Machines”, frames this interplay of cause and effect, where the discarded becomes an agent of further disruption. “Successive Actions” is not only a meditation on sound but on the very nature of systems, entropy, and the human tendency to repurpose what we abandon.
Simon Whetham, a veteran of environmental sound art, brings his signature approach to this project, combining field recordings, improvised techniques, and an alchemist’s touch for revealing the secret lives of sound. Having performed internationally and curated sonic explorations such as “Corollaries”, Whetham remains one of the most innovative artists in his field, continually bridging the gap between the ephemeral and the tangible.
Listening to “Successive Actions” feels like eavesdropping on the afterlife of machines, their language strange yet familiar. It is music for a world we are both leaving behind and constantly re-encountering – a symphony of friction, failure, and fleeting renewal.
Essential for: fans of experimental sound art, those curious about the intersection of technology and decay, and anyone looking to experience music as an act of poetic transformation. Vito Camarretta
Coming close to the end of 2024 but not winding down in any way, we’re thrilled to present a new release by Miguel A. García and Coeval, their second collaboration in Crónica after last year’s Huncill.
Laliguras is a wonder of “nuances, progressions, regressions and contradictions” in the words of Ulzion in his text about García’s and Coeval’s music.
The eight tracks of Laliguras are now available to stream or download from Crónica.
Credete ai fantasmi? Se sì, questo disco può spaventarvi. Altrimenti, può affascinarvi. L’artista francese Bruno Duplant è un compositore e polistrumentista che si è fatto conoscere nel campo della musique concrète. Tradotto: la musica concreta non utilizza né note né ritmi. Elabora suoni e rumori per restituire una parvenza di realtà oggettiva, per l’appunto concreta.
Fin qui possiamo pensare di creare simulacri di oggetti, tramite l’elettronica. Può sembrare di ascoltare bottiglie, vasi, macchinari industriali eccetera. E se invece decidessimo di far sentire qualcosa di incorporeo, come i fantasmi? Ecco che “Écouter les fantômes”, uscito per l’etichetta portoghese Crónica Releases, fa questo. In due tracce, entrambe di venti minuti, Duplant ci porta tra sinistri suoni umanoidi, voci distorte e deformate, rumori legnosi, note di fisarmonica… Ogni strumento sappia suonare, ogni risorsa sappia utilizzare, Duplant la piega all’obiettivo di dar l’impressione d’esplorare il paranormale.
Segnali di radar, sibili, voci che cantano provenienti da altre epoche su nastri traballanti, graffi e scricchiolii, il fruscio del vento: tutto ci pervade, e ad un certo punto ti dimentichi di chiederti come ha fatto questo suono qui, e come ha ottenuto quel rumore lì. Vorresti razionalizzare per difesa, ma alla fine ti lasci andare al fascino della fantasia del compositore. Del resto, lo dichiara Duplant stesso nel comunicato: la realtà, il realismo non gli interessa, e preferisce creare una fiction sonica.
Grazie a questo espediente narrativo dei fantasmi, possiamo avvicinarci alla musique concrète, da sempre considerata tra le più difficili da ascoltare, per i non iniziati. Non è neppure un discorso di avanguardia: se mettiamo da parte le teorie, basta solo ascoltare, praticando un ascolto attivo. Non importa se credete o non credete agli spettri: tramite questo spunto narrativo, li ascolterete! (Gilberto Ongaro)
Researcher and sound artist Matilde Meireles focuses on using field recordings to compose about various ecosystems such as complex aquatic ecologies, the resonances of everyday objects, local neighbourhoods and the architecture of radio signals. Her work is presented in concerts, installations, record releases, community projects and academic publications. She holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from SARC (Sound and Music Interdisciplinary Research Centre) at Queen’s University Belfast.
‘Loop. And Again’ – her fourth album on Chrónica – is part of X Marks the Spot, a wider project that used sound to map specific telecommunications boxes – only those emitting an audible drone – in the city of Belfast between 2013 and 2019. The field recordings captured from these boxes reveal the circuits and pathways that are woven in Belfast by drones and how the contacts and encounters of the people who inhabit it are articulated in this way.
These high-frequency drones are accompanied by urban noises such as car horns, water flowing through the streets, or voices wandering through the city. This ambience is subtly processed by Meireles through his electronic devices.
‘Cross Parade‘ with Fingal, Bronagh, Paul and Tullis’, which closes this album, includes some recordings that our protagonist made during her stay at Fingal, Bronagh and Paul’s house, near Cross Parade, in Belfast, as well as several trombone improvisations by Tullis Rennie that are coupled with the background drone that acts as a tapestry across the album.
Matilde Meireles shows the sounds that go unnoticed in the city, but through her sound recordings, she relays the interactions of how we inhabit the city. Guillermo Escudero
Crónica bringen eine neue CD des britischen “Environmental Sound Artist” Simon Whetham heraus. “Successive Actions” ist eine Wiederholung einer größeren kinetischen Soundperformance-Projektreihe, in der laut Label “verschiedene aus veralteter und weggeworfener Verbrauchertechnologie geborgene Motorgeräte durch das Abspielen von Tonaufnahmen aktiviert werden.
Dadurch entstehen wiederum neue Klänge aus den Geräten, die mit verschiedenen Mikrofonen und Techniken verstärkt werden”. Der Titel stammt aus Dirk Raaijmakers The Art of Reading Machines als Begriff für Massenproduktionsprozesse. Ferner heißt es: “Die über die Geräte abgespielten Aufnahmen sind daher Aufnahmen anderer Geräte, die in früheren Versionen von Channelling verwendet wurden, in denen die verwendeten Klänge scheinbar banale Klangphänomene waren, die im Alltag unvorhersehbar und unregelmäßig auftreten, wie vorbeifahrender Verkehr, Wind, schließende Türen. Jetzt verursachen die Geräusche von Geräten, die nicht richtig funktionieren und ihre Programmierung abbrechen, weitere Aktionen und Störungen”. Das Material wurde bereits bei zahlreichen internationalen Festivals und Veranstaltungen präsentiert. Das Album ist auch zum Download erhältlich.
We’re proud to present Emiter’s first release in Crónica, his EP “Repetition and Memory”.
Recording, listening, movement, rhythm. There are many traces that create infinite possibilities to combine into new qualities. Traces, recording, time, frequency. Repetition and memory. Alan Burdick writes that “The golden age of the ear never ended (…) It continues, veiled by the hegemony of the visual” but “The history of the ear” resounds in obscurity.
Marcin Dymiter works in the field of electronic music, field recording and improvised music. He creates sound installations, radio plays, film music, theater performances, exhibitions and public spaces. He is the author of the Field Notes project’s sound maps and conducts sound workshops and an action that approximates the idea of field recording. He plays in the projects emiter, niski szum, ZEMITER, PICA_PICA and other, ephemeral formations. He is a music producer, a listener and participant of music and improvisation workshops led by, among others, Le Quan Ninh, Andrew Sharpley, John Butcher, Robin Minard or Wolfgang Fuchs. He was a scholarship holder of the University of Art in Berlin, finalist of the Netmage International Multimedia Festival in Bologna. He is a member of the Polish Association of Electroacoustic Music.
Simon Whetham’s latest work is a fascinating hybrid which incorporates found sounds and elements of layering in order to create a whole other world, a different dimension. The album itself is part of a larger project, which is more readily explained through quotation than a stumbling stab at paraphrase:
Successive Actions is an iteration of the larger kinetic sound performance project series Channelling in which various motor devices, salvaged from obsolete and discarded consumer technology, are activated by playing sound recordings through them. In turn, this produces new sounds from the devices, which are amplified using various microphones and techniques. The title comes from Dirk Raaijmakers’s “The Art of Reading Machines” as a term for mass production processes. As such, the recordings played through the devices are recordings of other devices used in previous versions of Channelling, in which the sounds used were seemingly mundane sound phenomena that occur unpredictably and irregularly in everyday life, as passing traffic, wind, doors closing. So now the sounds of devices malfunctioning and breaking from their programming are causing further action and disruption.
Successive Actions contains sixteen pieces, although only four extend beyond four minutes in duration, with the majority sitting only a short way over the two-minute mark, giving the album a fragmentary feel. But there’s a strong sense of cohesion, too: the title of each of the pieces ends in ‘action’, from ‘Action’ to ‘Protraction’, via ‘Inaction’, ‘Impaction’, and ‘Abstraction’.
While much of the album takes the form of abstract ambience and general murk, there are moments which stand out with levels of heightened discomfort: ‘Reaction’ conjures the bleak whistling wind of a nuclear winter. ‘Inaction’ scrapes and buzzes; it’s unsettling, but it’s not uncomfortable to the point that it’s unbearable: it just makes you feel tense, awkward. You want to seem a less stressful environment. But there s no less stressful environment, and life is stress: to escape that is to deny the reality of the everyday, for the majority. Under capitalism, we are all stressed, and on Successive Actions,Simon Whetham gives us a soundtrack to that stress and anxiety.
Mass production is, arguably, a fundamental source of our woes in the modern age. The Industrial Revolution brought so much promise, but as capitalism has accelerated and expanded at a pace which exceeds our capacity to assimilate, so it has become an ever-greater source of alienation. And here we are, overwhelmed by the road of the big machine as it continually whirrs and grinds. Sometimes its but a crunch and a gurgle, a hum and a thump. A buzz of electricity, a mains hum, as dominates both ‘Retroaction’ and ‘Counteraction’. It’s a cranial buzz and pushes frequencies which are uncomfortable, and as the album progresses it plaiters, and turns dark.
For myself, I feel a certain sense of release while immersing myself in the textures and layers of Successive Actions. There are moments when the album really achieves a heightened sense of – and in panic, of anxiety, of intensified reality. Other moments are altogether more sparse, steering the listener inside themselves into a the depths of an interior world.
Successive Actions is deep, dark, difficult. And so is life. On Successive Actions, Simon Whethamcaptures it, all elements of life that is. It crackles and fizzes with tension, and tension is high. Christopher Nosnibor
In “Loop. And Again.”, Matilde Meireles invites listeners on a journey through Belfast’s hidden electromagnetic undercurrents, each track a sonic impression of the city’s humming, droning core. The album emerges from her research project “X Marks the Spot”, where Meireles mapped telecommunications boxes whose ambient emissions formed unexpected symphonies across Belfast. Through three immersive tracks – “Introducing Variables”, “Magnetic Fields”, and “Cross Parade” – the album captures the interplay between urban infrastructure and the sounds of Belfast’s post-industrial terrain.
This isn’t just a passive listening experience; Meireles composes with recordings from contact microphones, an electromagnetic sensor, and ambisonic and hydrophone recordings of the River Lagan, crafting an experience that feels less like a piece of music and more like a meditation on modern cities’ hidden life. The looping drones seem to tug at time itself, where the static hum of communication boxes reveals subtle tonal shifts – an echo of urban life’s heartbeat that most of us tune out.
“Cross Parade”, featuring Tullis Rennie’s soulful trombone improvisations and snippets of everyday moments at a Belfast home, is a nod to the album’s social roots, grounding this conceptual work in tangible community. It’s as if Meireles is saying: yes, there’s art in the infrastructure, but it’s inseparable from the people who dwell among it.
If you’re one to wander, “Loop. And Again.” may lead you to see (or rather, hear) your own city differently. A work of quiet intensity, it’s as intricate as it is unassuming – a sonic exploration into the resonance of ordinary objects that often go unnoticed but, here, remind us of the quiet interconnections we share with the built environment. The album spins like the reel of an unseen film, one that takes place just beneath our daily awareness, pulling the listener into a rhythmic sway between art, research, and urban life. Vito Camarretta
