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
Successive Actions to iteracja szerszej serii kinetycznych performansów dźwiękowych, w których różne urządzenia silnikowe, odzyskane z przestarzałych i wyrzuconych technologii konsumenckich, są aktywowane za pomocą odtwarzanych przez nie nagrań dźwiękowych. To z kolei generuje nowe dźwięki z urządzeń, które są wzmacniane za pomocą różnych mikrofonów i technik. Tytuł pochodzi z książki Dirka Raaijmakersa The Art of Reading Machines jako określenie procesów produkcji masowej. Jako takie, nagrania odtwarzane przez urządzenia są nagraniami innych urządzeń używanych w poprzednich wersjach channelingu, w których dźwięki były pozornie przyziemnymi zjawiskami dźwiękowymi, które występują nieprzewidywalnie i nieregularnie w życiu codziennym, jak ruch uliczny, wiatr, zamykanie drzwi. Successive Actions był prezentowany na wielu międzynarodowych festiwalach i wydarzeniach, ostatnio na Sofia Underground w Bułgarii, WeSA Festival w Korei Południowej, New Adits w Austrii i Sonica Festival w Słowenii, gdzie był również prezentowany jako instalacja.
Od 2005 roku Simon Whetham zajmuje się działalnością dźwiękową. Często wykorzystuje dźwięk otoczenia, stosując różnorodne metody i techniki w celu uzyskania niezauważalnych i ukrytych zjawisk dźwiękowych. Bada również sposoby tworzenia fizycznych śladów dźwięku i przekształcania form energii. Whetham występuje i wystawia na arenie międzynarodowej, otrzymał wiele zleceń i nagród, opublikował wiele skomponowanych utworów i regularnie współpracuje z innymi artystami. Ponadto jego praktyka obejmuje prowadzenie warsztatów aktywnego słuchania, nagrywania w terenie i zmiany technologii. Whetham ma na swoim koncie cztery wcześniejsze wydawnictwa w Crónica: Contact, 107~2016; Against Nature, 103~2016; Never So Alone, 73~2013; oraz Mic.Madeira, (z Hugo Olim) 63~2011. Był także kuratorem Crossovers (65-2012) i serii Corollaries (2016).
Residents of Belfast may have noticed strange signs pasted onto telecommunication boxes around their neighborhoods in the past decade. One such sign, on Balfour Avenue, read: “Producing a continuous sound composed of: 92Hz, 120Hz, 178Hz, 235Hz, 408Hz, 580Hz, 1184Hz, 1327Hz, 3282Hz.” These were the work of Matilde Meireles, a sound artist and researcher whose X Marks the Spot project invited participants to alert her to any utility boxes emitting an audible hum. Meireles would then visit the box, record its drone, analyze it, and return with a poster advertising its frequencies. It was urban art meant to get people listening to their city. With Loop. And Again., Meireles takes the results of this research and loops and layers it with further electromagnetic, ambisonic, and hydrophonic recordings. The album is part social experiment, part sonic ecology, part environmental sound and part buzzing, drifting ambience. It should get the rest of the world listening to Belfast, too. Matthew Blackwell
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 has been presented in a number of international festivals and events, most recently Sofia Underground, Bulgaria; WeSA Festival, South Korea; New Adits, Austria; and Sonica Festival, Slovenia, where it was also exhibited as an installation.
Successive Actions is now available as a limited-release CD, download, or str
Shifting attention to hearing, and creating the spatial and temporal conditions aimed at encouraging this practice, placing a certain amount of care in defining an adequate social context, supporting ecological sensitivity, giving life to significant sound experiences, and in iconic spaces, designing routes that guide visitors through them, while at the same time encouraging reflection on the public’s involvement with the environment and the city. This is what Lisboa Soa, a festival of sound art, ecology, and auditory culture, has been trying to achieve since 2016 when the first edition was held at Tapada das Necessidades, a huge ten-hectare garden located between Alcântara and Estrela. In 2021, during the pandemic and the resulting restrictions, the festival commissioned four compositions from four Portuguese artists who dug into the sound archive of previous editions to create new audio scores. From these compositions was born Lisboa Soa, Sounds Within Sounds, a work on memory with an ear turned to the future. We start listening with ‘Efflux’ by João Castro Pinto, a composition lasting almost ten minutes that initially flows with delicate harmonies testing our perception before evolving into more full-bodied drones. ‘Do que Ressoa’ by Sara Pinheiro starts with various buzzing sounds, almost like insects with metallic resonances – added to them are the recordings of arrivals and departures from before and after the concerts and installations. ‘No Earlids’ from Mestre André offers an interesting journey through various material accumulated over the years, not only recordings but also ‘behind the scenes’ moments, edited and packaged in adventurous, multifaceted, and vivid overlays. ‘Splicing_archives’ by Ana Guedes concludes the selection and is the most intimate and mysterious score of this collection, even though it too makes significant use of the festival archives, filtering and processing for a total of 25 minutes making it the longest offering on the album. Lisboa Soa has now fully resumed its activities and the latest edition was dedicated to the theme Multipli.Cities, once again underlining the importance of welcoming differences and promoting coexistence between communities within urban spaces. These values are intrinsically linked to ecological processes while challenging other systemic inequalities that we all face. Aurelio Cianciotta
