In a time where human contact is restricted for safety reasons, contact in this work takes place by — literally — listening closely to the sounds of objects which are very much part of my domestic daily life. During April 2020, I collected a series of sounds around my house on Sunnyside Street (Belfast, NI) including a wide variety of textures captured with different types of contact microphones, and multiple layers of electromagnetic interference caused by the growing use of electronic devices and the internet. These recordings form the basis of an exploration of the micro and extra-human sounds produced by the physical and virtual objects such as the radiator, the kettle, the shower, or the internet. Sunnyside intertwines these elements to reinforce repetition, discovery, detail and loss of perception of time that characterises the experience of many during our current life in confinement.
Matilde Meireles is a recordist, sound artist, and researcher who makes use of field recordings to compose site-oriented projects focused on sound. 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.
She completed a PhD in Sonic Arts at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. She was also appointed as a Research Fellow on several projects at Queen’s examining the role that immersive technologies can play in the development of new digital narratives.
Her work often highlights collaboration and participation as catalysts for a shared understanding of place, developing project-based or long-term collaborations. Matilde is also part of OSSO Colectivo, an interdisciplinary collective based in Portugal.
Even in Kruger National Park (South Africa), a huge subtropical area, crossed by many rivers and by the Tropic of Capricorn, hosting the provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, it is possible to identify a sharp division between natural and constructed landscapes. The latter are definitely smaller and made almost exclusively to allow the tourists to visit these locations and enjoy a unique landscape. In contrast to the European landscape, where this difference is softer and the countryside is largely the result of an anthropic adaptation, here indigenous nature, inhospitable for human beings, is preserved as it actually is. Tourists are confined within some highly delimited areas, often with high fences and high-tension electric enclosures. As it also usual in any park, there are souvenir shops, restaurants and shelters for the tourists, and several rest areas. Philip Samartzis and Eric La Casa recorded the sounds of Captured Space over ten days. Because of the strict regulations of the park, which the two artists initially ignored, every audio recording concerning the open spaces was made on a vehicle, or inside the environments they lodged in during the night. Most of the time the sound was “far†from the field recorders, but eventually for the project this turned out to be a great creative possibility, rather than a limitation. The duo could physically report the reality of an uncontaminated yet claustrophobic space, where human beings are just passing by, while animals paradoxically are more free than the exotic mix of people who are constrained by their environment. The work by Sarartzis and La Casa might look controversial, due to the way it was made, but it depicts a “non-ordinary realityâ€, by showing a quite regulated context. The final result is some brilliant and rich recordings, cleverly spatialized and full of unconventional sounds. Aurelio Cianciotta
Composed with materials generated by Miguel A. GarcÃa and Oscar Martin in a meeting in the town of Apodaka, in Alava, Basque country, in the year 2015, this electroacoustic piece was originally released by the label Rhizome.s. Never completely satisfied with the result, during this confinement, Miguel A. GarcÃa decided to revise it, reworking the mix, giving another dimension to the sounds and being more precise in the dynamics. Kularrate is constructed from purely electronic sounds, a mix of the usual no-input mixer by Miguel and the digital sounds of Oscar Martin (a.k.a. Noish), which were later manipulated and composed by Miguel. The result is an electro-acoustic piece, with rough sounds, like rust, that paradoxically was created in a completely rural environment, with the only distraction of some children that all the time were curious about the process. The atmosphere of the piece is a little dark and dense, with slight tints of threat… maybe a warning for those children to let us work quietly in our sound laboratory.
Miguel A. GarcÃa, also known as Xedh, is an artist resident in Bilbao who works on the field of experimental music and sound art. Trained in Fine Arts, he works on electroacoustic composition and improvisation, using sources obtained from the manipulation of electrical devices, sometimes mixing these with sounds of acoustic instruments and field recordings.
Oscar Martin is a sound artist, independent researcher and programmer. His practice could be understood as a knowledge device where art, science and technology hybridize and converge from an unorthodox and experimental approach. From the sound dimension, his pieces propose to encourage active listening and expand our perception through the psychoacoustic experience of the phenomenon of the emergence of structures and patterns at the limits of chaos and order.
Tracklist:
Kularrate (25:38)
Composed by Miguel A. GarcÃa
Original sound materials by Miguel A. GarcÃa & Oscar Martin
It’s a funny need to want to introduce an artist in every blog-post but by now I can safely assume that Rutger ‘Machinefabriek‘ Zuydervelt needs no further introduction. And, with over 60 albums released since 2009, Bruno Duplantshould need no introduction either – although I must confess his name is not very familiar to me. Shame on me, it seems!
Their first collaboration album, created from ‘field recordings, instruments and processing’ is released on the Crónica label. The two (+- 22 minute) tracks ‘of pure sound exploration’ were created without ‘long discussions or conceptual heavy-handedness’ – so they may be viewed as ‘improvised’ somehow, even though they were created by swapping sound files.
The fact that each artist’s contribution is indistinguishable shows that they are well-matched. This is not a ‘first you – then me’ mix: both tracks feel like a complete composition.
The French titles reflect the current times, even though the sounds were recorded in 2019: L’Incertitude means Uncertainty. The first track Le Doute (doubt) is full of haunting suspense; the second is called L’espoir (hope) and is indeed more peaceful even though some incertitude remains lurking underneath.Â
SÃria ist das Projekt der portugisischen Elektronik / Perkussionsmusikerin und Sängerin Diana Combo.
Boa-Lingua ist Ihr zweites Album nach dem 2016 erschienenen Debüt und ist eher zufällig entstanden, denn die Aufnahmen stammen von Übungen und Sessions, die nicht zwingend zu einem Album führen sollten. Die Musik der Portugiesin ist ein dunkler elektronischer Soundscape. Drones drehen sich um sich selbst, wabernde Soundteppiche ziehen auf und eine melancholische Stimmung umkreist den Hörer. Allerdings arbeitet sie sehr akzentuiert. Hier ist nichts überladen, nein die Geräusche, Perkussionen und Sounds sind eher wie ein elektronischer Post Rock arrangiert. Die Stücke atmen alle sehr viel Luft, obwohl trotzdem am Ende ein dichter, den Hörer umspannender Sound entsteht.
Das liegt vermutlich an den ausgefeilten Arrangements der Stücke, die dem Hörer sehr viele Feinheiten zum Entdecken anbietet.
Gekrönt wird dieser spannende Sound durch den Gesang der Künstlerin. Dieser klingt sehr fremdartig, wird oft elektronisch verzerrt und unterliegt viel Hall und wirkt auf mich, der die Worte nicht verstehen kann, mehr wie ein zusätzliches Instrument. Das Timbre erinnert durchaus ein wenig an die große Lisa Gerrad die ebenso wie die fremdartigen Vocals durchaus auch an deren Band Dead Can Dance erinnert.Â
Allerdings bewegen sich alle 9 Stücke im eher sakralen und düsteren Bereich, euphorische Klänge kommen hier nicht wirklich auf.
In Gesamtheit ist Boa-LÃngua eine sehr gelungene Kombination aus spannender (Post)Elektronik und fesselnder Gesangsarbeit. Musik wie Gesang zieht den Hörer, der sich auf diese Atmosphäre einlassen kann, tief in seinen Bann.
Eine solch ausgefallene Produktion erfordert natürlich auch eine ausgefallene Veröffentlichungsform. Entgegen dem Vinylboom hat man sich hier jedoch nicht für dieses Medium, sondern für das eigentlich längst vergessene Medium „Musikkassette“ entschieden. Das wird natürlich nicht zu einem Verkaufshit führen, aber dafür ist diese sensible und emotionale Musik sowieso nicht gemacht. Daher ist die wunderschön gemachte MC auf nur 100 Stück limitiert, für alle anderen Interessenten gibt es das Album als Download bei Bandcamp. Wolfgang Kabsch
Crónica veröffentlicht das erste gemeinsame Tape der Musiker und Komponisten Bruno Duplant und Rutger Zuydervelt (Machinefabriek). Das Album besteht aus zwei längeren Tracks, deren auf meist akustischen Instrumenten, zahlreichen Field Recordings und mehrfacher Bearbeitung basierende Sounds von einer trügerischen Scheinharmonie sind.Â
“L’incertitude, is Bruno Duplant and Rutger Zuydervelt’s first album as a duo. It came together very naturally, as if they played together for years already. There were no long discussions or conceptual heavy-handedness, these two tracks of pure sound exploration in the most intuitive sense, just flowed from the remote collaboration and the back-and-forth swapping of materials and compositions. The core of the collaboration rested upon trusting each other’s capabilities and on the mutual appreciation for each others’ work. These two collage-like trips are loaded with suggestions of (otherworldly) spaces and places, but it’s the listener’s imagination that has to fill in the blanks.†(Crónica)
L’incertitude, is Bruno Duplant and Rutger Zuydervelt’s first album as a duo. It came together very naturally, as if they played together for years already. There were no long discussions or conceptual heavy-handedness, these two tracks of pure sound exploration in the most intuitive sense, just flowed from the remote collaboration and the back-and-forth swapping of materials and compositions. The core of the collaboration rested upon trusting each other’s capabilities and on the mutual appreciation for each others’ work. These two collage-like trips are loaded with suggestions of (otherworldly) spaces and places, but it’s the listener’s imagination that has to fill in the blanks.
For Duplant, composing and playing music is similar to imagining, creating, and sometimes decomposing new spaces/realities, and new entities. But it is also a reflection on memory, not the historic one, but memories of things, spaces, and moments. His music, strongly inspired by the writing of Francis Ponge, Gaston Bachelard, Antoine Volodine, among others, and some artists and musicians as John Cage, Luc Ferrari, Eliane Radigue, or Rolf Julius, is imbued with a sweet melancholy.
Rutger Zuydervelt (also known as Machinefabriek) combines elements of ambient, noise, minimalism, drone, field recordings and electro-acoustic experiments. The music can be heard as an attempt to create sonic environments for the listener to dwell in. Finding tension in texture, tone and timing, the result can be very minimalistic at first glance, but reveals its depth upon closer listening. The devil is in the details.
Zuydervelt was born in 1978 in Apeldoorn (The Netherlands) and now resides in Rotterdam. He started recording as Machinefabriek in 2004. Since then, Zuydervelt released a steady stream of music on labels such as Western Vinyl, Type, Important, 12K, Entr’acte, Miasmah, Consouling Sounds, Western Vinyl Eilean and Edition Wandelweiser. He also composed for dance performances and films, and collaborated with various artists, like Michel Banabila, Gareth Davis, Steven Hess, Sylvain Chauveau, Aaron Martin, Dirk Serries, Dead Neanderthals, and many more.
Collaborations are another thing that is on Zuydervelt’s plate for many years; with Gareth Davies, Tim Catlin, Subterreanact, Anne Bakker, Chris Dooks and loads more (I thought for once not to mention the more famous ones). This was mostly as ‘Machinefabriek & …’ but maybe it’s wiser, if the other also doesn’t use a project name, to use the name Rutger Zuydervelt &, well Bruno Duplant in this case. After all the music I heard from Duplant, I still have very little idea what he does; that’s what I also noted when I reviewed his ‘Feu Danse’ release (Vital Weekly 1212′). Let’s say he is, just as Zuydervelt, a man who loves field recordings, electronics, instruments and processing. I assume this was done through an exchange of sound files for x-number of times, before arriving at the two twenty-some minute pieces here. Both pieces shamelessly show us, two men, who love their sounds, and whatever you can do to sculpt it into whatever you want. They elegantly move back and forth between high and low sounds, quiet and loud parts and clear field recordings and heavily obscured ones. The ego of either musician has disappeared from this and we have no longer an idea who does what here. And perhaps we don’t want to know either; it is not of great importance to see that Rutger did this, and Bruno was responsible for that, as what counts is the overall results, the interaction of them working together, and I am still assuming this was all done via long-distance exchange of files. I have no idea if there was a plan to follow a score, an idea, or if it was all just let’s toss a whole of sounds in the air and see what happens. I am hoping for the latter, as that’s how it sounds, free from concepts and let the flow go as it goes. That works very well here and it is almost enjoyable release. Seeing Zuydervelt have return visits with some of his previous collaborators, I hope that Duplant is among them. (FdW)
