This sound installation recreates in a poetic manner the ancient myth of the Suspended Gardens of Mesopotamia by linking the concret space of the Museu Berardo garden (Jardim de Ãgua) with a sound walk of variable geometry. Inviting the listener to wonder around the garden experiencing sounds and relating those to the visual aspect of the space and surrounding soundscape. Composed out of natural sounds side-by-side with digital sound manipulation, it emphasizes the space aspect and creates a web of meanings that evolves through time in a immersive manner.
I dream of dead poets and supermodels, fancy software and scenic drives, Paris or Los Angeles on a late night flight, maybe a PowerBook in a Louis Vuitton bag with a picture of you on the seventeen inches wide screen, I dream of glossy drones and dark eyeliners, long legs and bright sounds, fake breasts and uptight asses, I feel like the speed of your heart when you’re so full of grace, I feel like the light in your smile, the slip of the tongue, I float an inch from the sky to the point of you, I’m out of my eyes with a ballad, washing with kindly tears, I cherish the acoustics of your invisible caress, I undress you in poetry, I read your body, soul of doll, I taste your body of sound with the acoustic memory of love, your flesh in stereo, drunken with loud cells on the rocks, resonance of an old soul with metasynth delay, oh you’re so cute when you loop my heart, you are a beautiful loop in my heart, a phantom voice in high heels, you you so you, baby blue eyes drinking champagne underwater, kissing my heart shaped ears, you look beautiful when you dream, you are all the night gave me in return, you whisper in sweetness the distant melody of the stars, suggesting but truth to my divining, I’m just this superficial guy though, plain and superficial, like your skin when you striptease me, when you fuck me like a virgin, I’m a dirty romantic, too sexy for myself, more a loner than a wolf, more a bleeder than a bruiser, night cruiser with a faded touch of love, chasing in dreams the heart of it all, in dreams, in dreams, like when we walk together, hand in hand, like two strangers, and then your pony tail, pink pony, the ten thousand ponies of your pyjama running every night after me, and then the sound, the almighty sound, the greatest sound of all, the sound of you kissing the snow with dark blue lips.
I dream you are a song. Love Forevermore.
All tracks composed by Jorge Mantas, except track 6 by The Refractors (J. Martinez) and track 9 by Sleeping Me and Jorge Mantas. Special guests: Christina Vantzou (voice on 2, 3 & 4, rhodes on 2), Yui Onodera (piano on 8), Sleeping Me (guitar on 9), The Refractors (piano on 6). Track 8 contains a sample of a 1860 recording of Au Clair de la Lune, possibly the first recording ever of a human voice.
Designed by P. Tudela and M. Carvalhais. Postcards courtesy of Paulo Silva. Mastered by M. Carvalhais.
In “Berlin backyards†sono raccolte otto composizioni di musica concreta che riprocessano una ricca serie di field recordings catturati dal sound-designer svizzero Gilles Aubry nell’inverno del 2006 a Berlino. Ci viene così restituito un volto inedito della capitale tedesca, quello rappresentato da cortili e giardini interni, dove si è soliti parcheggiare le biciclette, dove risiedono centraline elettriche, impianti di ventilazione, bidoni della spazzatura e cassonetti del materiale riciclabile, dove il cinguettio degli uccelli rimbalza tra prato e cemento, tra alberi e asfalto…
Come se osservassimo la città attraverso una calotta insonorizzata non sigillata perfettamente – dalla quale filtra un pulviscolo astratto di sibili, lievi spostamenti d’aria, rumori meccanici, scalpiccii – quello che veramente importa non è ciò che accade, ma ciò che potrebbe accadere: le architetture evocano presenze umane, lo spazio si colma di attesa ed ogni micro-evento è l’epifania di un mondo sconosciuto da accogliere con stupore. Guido Gambacorta
Skug was founded in Freiburg/Germany by Ephraim Wegner and Florian Huth in 2003. Though meanwhile both musicians live in different towns of Germany, they still meet regularly to compose new pieces of music, to program music software or just in order to make music. The field recordings heard on Variations (1, 2, 3) were recorded between 2007 and 2008 in the Black Forest and reinterpreted with bass, guitar, electronics and brass instruments. On variations 2 and 3 Wolfgang Zumpe plays trumpet and flugelhorn. Skug’s music creates a very visual aspect which gives enough space to the listener to realise his own imagination and to unfold his own fantasy. Like in fine arts, a picture emerges successively by applying one layer of colour after another, Skug create their work bit by bit. Spaces are interchangeable – topoi that exist and can be experienced anytime and everywhere.
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So if you’re in the vicinity, pass around for some great music, to get our releases for special special prices or just to say hi! (MC and Pal will be the DJs for the afternoon, playing tracks from Crónica’s catalogue.) We start around 3.30PM.
Concert event «Sonic Objects #4»: Marc Behrens, Radu Malfatti + Lucio Capece vs. Luigi Nono. Introduction by Dr. Ioannis Papachristopoulos (Institute of Musicology, University of Cologne). At Kulturbunker Mülheim, Berliner Straße 20, 51063 Köln, Germany.
Pure’s Ification is an oft-unsettling stylistic travelogue whose range extends far beyond the backyard. Uncompromising experimental electronic workouts sit side-by-side with modern classical and cinematic soundscaping in the Berlin-based artist’s collection. Since 1992, Peter Votava has issued more than thirty CDs and vinyl releases of solo and collaborative works under different aliases, with Ification arriving six years after his previous studio release Noonbugs (Mego). Pure begins with “Fire,†an ear-piercing, molten overture of stabbing guitar playing (courtesy of Digital Hardcore artist Christoph de Babalon) that ensures the listener will be fully alert at the start of the trip. Slightly easier on the ears is “After the Bomb,†a long-form funereal meditation that blends shuddering haze, organ flurries, and percussive accents by Radian drummer Martin Brandlmayr into a cinematic set-piece of dramatic portent. “Approximation†combines the low, foghorn-like bellow of horns, the scrape of strings, and percussive flourishes into a six-minute setting similar in style to a contemporary classical composition. At this stage, the album moves into Mego-like territory with “Night Flight,†an epic, rippling mass of deep string swells and firestorms of electronic spatter; “Sonomatopeia,†dotted with electronic blisters of bass swells and Alexandra von Bolzn’s demonic vocal effects; and “End,†which immerses the listener within a sixteen-minute cauldron of lethal bass swells and stabs (courtesy of Anke Eckardt). A final surprise comes at disc’s end when the deathly post-rock of “Metal Sky†places the percussive inventions of Brandlmayr at the forefront. Pure presents a not always pretty but nevertheless remarkable sound world where the listener never knows what direction the next piece will take.
Obviously Aubry’s idea of a typical Berlin backyard isn’t a quiet and peaceful haven one retreats to as a respite from the noise of the city but instead a place where loud, industrial machinery churns relentlessly. Such equipment—air conditioners, trash compactors, recycling containers, electric power stations, all of which keep the city running—exhales convulsively like a living organism throughout the recording’s forty-nine minutes. Aubry spent the winter of 2006 recording the city’s backyards, and in the process became more sensitive to the setting as an interzone between the public and private sphere. The eight-part musique concrète composition the Berlin-based sound artist fashioned from his source material implicitly argues that the city’s backyards operate according to rhythms very much like a human being’s. The opening sections are aggressive, even violent in their indomitable churn and throb, and the sound is so intense it feels as if one is positioned within the machinery (as an indication of track one’s character, imagine a microphone positioned close to the tracks of a subway car in order to best capture its screech). Though the intensity level subsides somewhat during the recording’s middle section, allowing quieter noises such as water, footsteps, and voices to be heard, the activity level never flags, and soon we’re thrust once again into the belly of the industrial beast. Traffic sounds of cars racing past appear alongside machine rumble and workers’ clatter in the final section. It bears mentioning that, here and elsewhere, Aubry doesn’t merely juxtapose field recordings or sequence them but instead arranges the materials into a large-scale conceptual whole that, in its way, becomes almost musical.
