From a Central European perspective, the potato is actually an exotic plant: originally it was only found in South America. In »Life of a Potato«, sound artist Matilde Meireles considers the migratory movements of food as well as its cultural coding. Field recordings from a garden in the south-west of England serve as the source material for a two-part work divided into a concrete and an abstract side. It discreetly questions the alleged banality of domestic activities related to food.
Shortly after his release as Skrika on Cryo Chamber, Monty Adkins treats us with a surprise release on Cronica that musically represents almost the opposite of Skrika’s ‘dark ambient’. 46 Minutes of field recordings, enhanced (I wanted to write ‘enlovelied’, but I guess that isn’t a word) by Adkins’s soundscapes that turn it into an otherworldly experience.
The invader referred to here is the rhododendron tree which “was introduced to the UK by colonial botanists in the late 19th century as an ornamental plant, it is now seen as a highly invasive species by ecologists.”
The rhododendron originally comes from China, the motherland of Yan Wang Preston, who in March 2020 decided “to photograph a single rhododendron tree every other day at half an hour before sunset, for a year”. The (environmental) sounds included were recorded on the same location each month.
“Living as an immigrant in a country going through Brexit and COVID, Yan felt a strong personal connection with such invasive plants. They remind her of her homeland as well as the complex perceptions around nature, national identities, landscapes and migration.”
Like the seasons changing throughout the year, the 46-minute composition has a natural, uninterrupted flow. But in fact, it is highly dynamic: it is as changeable as the weather itself.
Comparing the Skrika album to his work on With Love, From An Invader shows the versatility of Monty Adkins as artist and sound designer. This can be no real surprise for those familiar with his previous releases.
I have found no links to the visual result of Yan Wang Preston‘s project, so we’ll have to do with the cover image. And with the images that Monty Adkins‘ soundscape evokes.
Oh, and by the way: this is a Name Your Price release!
We’re proud to present Matilde Meireles’s new release in Crónica, “Life of a Potato”, now available as a limited release tape, as a download, or stream.
The potato has travelled a long way from its native lands in South America. The starchy tuber, brought to Europe by the Spanish in the late 1600s, slowly settled to become a key ingredient in most European countries’ traditional diet. As with many other vegetables, plants, and spices from elsewhere, we forgot the origins of the potato. We made them our own because food is an inherent expression of social identity. It tells stories, and evokes nostalgia, belonging, and wellbeing. Yet, the food system of the current times is desperately unsustainable. Like the potato, many other fruits, vegetables, plants, and animals travel far and wide daily, blurring territories, and playing an accidental part in the immeasurable impact of the politics of food production. The potato is an incredibly resilient element whose history traverses time and location, and its historical traces have very different socio-political nuances in the places I call home: Portugal, Ireland, and now England. It also grows seasonally in our garden and is a tasty tuber part of a rich sonic ecosystem. This seemed like a good starting point for a new project.
Life of a Potato uses a series of field recordings to unveil varied sonic perspectives of a garden near Pewsey in the Southwest of England. Here potatoes grow seasonally alongside other vegetables, plants, bushes, and flowers. The field recordings include vibrations of the soil underground, potato stems as well as the stems of other vegetables, reeds, vibrations picked up through the rake, the garden in the sun and rain. The recordings were made between April and August 2021 as the tubers grew into potatoes and then were shared at the table. Side A explores the various sounds around the garden and sounds of the repetitive, yet enjoyable, task of roasting the potatoes: cutting them in small pieces, massaging them with olive oil, salt, pepper, thyme and paprika. Side B is slightly more abstract. It explores various sounds of energy used to cook the potatoes, the potatoes’ crackling sounds as they come out of the oven and sounds of the garden in an early evening, in October, when the potato season is finished.
Matilde Meireles is a recordist, sound artist, and researcher who makes use of field recordings to compose site-oriented projects. Her projects often have a multi-sensorial approach to ‘site’ which draws from her studies and experience in areas such as field-recording, site-specific visual arts and design.
Matilde often highlights collaboration and participation as catalysts for a shared understanding of place, developing project-based or long-term collaborations. She holds a PhD in Sonic Arts from the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Oxford in the project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (SONCITIES).
Brighton musician Dan Powell may be known to you as an improviser who performs as one half of The Static Memories and also occasionally with Paul Khimasia Morgan, but he’s here today with a slightly unusual field recording / musique concrète assemblage called Four Walks At Old Chapel (CRONICA 170-2021). He gathered field recordings at this Welsh location, as well as collecting objects from around the countryside to use as instruments in impromptu performances. Back in Brighton, he treated and collaged his tapes into these new arrangements, producing engaging and unexpected results. There are two added dimensions that give this cassette extra resonance; one of them is a personal / family connection, as he’s been taking his family on holiday to Old Chapel for a number of years, and indeed family members assisted with the gathering and playing of objects “brushing, scraping and rubbing them to produce a wide range of intimate sounds”, which they did in a straw hut. They even found, and incorporated, an old piano which had been left outside to moulder away. The second dimension is to do with Old Chapel Farm itself; it’s a collective experiment in social living, offering a new take on those self-sufficiency theories that were so popular among West Coast hippies around 1969, and shows the value of “living close to the land” and developing a sustainable way of life. Dan Powell aimed to create a personal audio statement reflecting and embodying all this, and has succeeded; it’s also gorgeous to listen to, and is much more intimate and teeming with life than many formal / academic experiments in the field of electro-acoustic composition.
Matilde Meireles celebrates the surprisingly long journey of one of the world’s most beloved vegetables with “Life of a Potato”. For a field recording it is a rather stellar mixture of low-end and high-end sounds. Rather tactile every single element of the journey is magnified. No melody, no rhythm, this is a narrative that comes through with various sounds that reverberate throughout the entirety of the collection. Both songs have a sprawling, soothing aspect about them.
On the first track “Roughly 53 Steps” there is a bit of Matmos’ wry sense of humor brought in. The mixture of the domestic alongside the wild helps to give it that extra push to a degree. Starting off quiet the piece eventually comes to incorporate an entire ecosystem. Hints of the bird song in the background further give it a sense of place, one that feels ever so soothing to fully embrace. All of it works wonders in creating this peacefulness, one that focuses on reflection, on the gentle rhythms that make up a person’s day. Much more composed “or 38 Metres” features a stronger hand at play. Rather than let the sounds be, her approach is direct. While this is no dance track, no endearing melody, it does have a less abstract approach than the opener. Here the pulsing bass almost alludes to a great beyond.
“Life of a Potato” features an uncanny approach to storytelling proving Matilde Meireles to be a rather skilled sculptor of sound.
Il Novecento musicale è stato il secolo che ha dato dignità ai rumori, integrandoli a fianco dei suoni. Più ci si è avvicinati al ventunesimo secolo, più il rumore ha rivelato le sue potenzialità, affrancate dall’artificio dell’intonazione, e concentrando i compositori sulla gestione di ritmi e poliritmie, nonché sull’elaborazione timbrica, i colori dei rumori.
Oggi facciamo un salto in Portogallo, dove quattro musicisti, ognuno di essi già rodato da esperienze soliste o in altri progetti, si riuniscono per dare vita a una “macchina magnetica” che unisca le loro capacità. Ne esce per l’appunto il disco “Máquina Magnética” (uscito per Crónica Records), che dà anche il nome alla formazione. I nomi: Gustavo Costa, batterista, percussionista e uno dei fondatori del collettivo Sonoscopia che ha prodotto il lavoro. Qui, Costa utilizza percussioni acustiche e percussioni elettromeccaniche. Pedro Tudela e Miguel Carvalhais sono impegnati ai computer, dunque alla sintesi. Infine Rodrigo Carvalho, che non sentiamo, ma in sede live è intento a generare visuals e luci interattive, creando musica visuale.
Ciò che ascoltiamo sono un incrocio tra improvvisazione e composizione, tra due live set – uno a Lisbona, uno a Braga, in terra portoghese – e tra lavori in studio. Non hanno titoli, le 6 tracce: “A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, “AA” e “BB”. E sono da ascoltare come un flusso unico, non si percepiscono stacchi in mezzo. I rumori sono di varia natura: organici, meccanici, sintetici. Il risultato è una costante tensione materica, che attinge a piene mani dall’arte acusmatica, e ricorda la musica concreta di Pierre Schaeffer, guru per questo tipo di creazioni musicali.
Difficile parlare di emozioni. Si può provare tutt’al più del fascino, senso della tensione, restare intrigati dal sentirsi immerso in mezzo a tanti ingranaggi, che comunicano col linguaggio di programmazione. E però, a riscaldare la situazione qua e là, torna costante il tambureggiare di Gustavo Costa su tom e timpani, i fusti della batteria, e su qualche piatto. Abolendo il rullante, o perlomeno la sua cordiera, l’approccio ritmico è costantemente tribale, in un certo senso. Ma non si perde mai l’intenzione di base, che a quanto sembra è parecchio scientifica e sperimentale. (Gilberto Ongaro)
Die portugiesische Soundkünstlerin und Field Recording-Spezialistin Matilde Meireles bringt Ende des Monats ein Tape heraus, das ganz dem Lebenszyklus der Kartoffel gewidmet ist. Einige der verwendeten Sounds dokumentieren das Heranwachsen der Knollen im Boden eines englischen Gartens, präsentieren die Vibration des Bodens, den Klang der Pflanzen bei Berührung, zahlreiche Umgebungsgeräusche bei Tag und Nacht und die akustischen Spuren, die verschiedene Witterungsphänomene an dem Ort hinterlassen. Zahlreiche, meist deutlicher erkennbare Sounds wurden bei der Ernte und verschiedenen Stadien der Zubereitung der Kartoffeln aufgenommen. Das Resultat ist ein meist realistisches und in Passagen akstraktes, hörspielartiges Album mit viel Kolorit. Das Tape erscheint hundertmal bei Crónica, eine digitale Version ist ebenfalls erhältlich.
Crónica’s first release for 2022 continues @c’s Installations series. “LMY-7-10” was created after the installation of the same title commissioned by the Serralves Foundation for the festival Serralves em Festa and curated by Pedro Rocha.
In two spaces contiguous to the Chapel in Serralves — the stairs of its tower and the room adjacent to the choir — the objects designed for this installation explored the space’s architecture and enticed its exploration by visitors, creating an immersive infrastructure for the diffusion of sound. The piece was structured along the two perpendicular axes of the space: the vertical tower and the horizontal room. The tower was kept dark, with the only lights attached to the speakers along the staircase. The room had a big circular window that allowed daylight in and created a continuous variation of illumination. The two spaces bled onto each other. They were two parts that balanced the listening experience and were unified by timbre, with the entire piece created from recordings of harp performed by Angelica Salvi.
This work was inspired by two of LaMonte Young’s pieces from 1960: Composition 1960 #7 and Composition 1960 #10 (“to Bob Morris”), two works that can be read more like instructions than scores, as essays on stasis and on its impossibility in a permanently changing world.
The Installations series was started with “Seis Elementos” in 2021, and will document Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais’s installations, a series of works that is also the focus of the upcoming book “Installations / Instalações”, to be released in February and already available to preorder.
“LMY-7-10” is now available to stream or download from the usual platforms and from Crónica’s bandcamp.
Lo statunitense David Lee Myers, da metà anni ottanta armeggia con le sue feedback machines. Prima come Arcane Device e negli ultimi anni, sempre più spesso con il suo nome. Si è accompagnato in produzioni con artisti storici come Tod Dockstader o prossimi alla storicizzazione come Asmus Tietchens. Suono e immagini in montaggio nei live, per un’espressione di intransigente bellezza (quando + e quando -), comunque, quasi sempre in assenza di un input generante (tuttalpiù, utilizzato come evento/start per sovrapposizioni di suono elettronico). L’azione, è osservazione e controllo dei flussi autogenerati, quasi null’altro. Quest’ultimo lavoro, registrato a New York fra il 2020 e il 2021 ed edito dalla portoghese Crónica, si piazza dalle parti di una stasi dronante, fissa e imperturbabile, che par quasi, una prova di superamento in libera fluttuazione dell’esosfera. Un qui e un’ora, senza propulsione in avanti ne indietro, un microscopico punto ed il non concepibile dell’infinito.
