Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin (Fourteen Reflections On The End) originated from an installation exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2019. Fourteen magnetic bodies of tape that dialogued with the fourteen pieces of electroacoustic music now contained in this album composed from the sound anthology of Angélica Castelló. Thus, Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin is a complex piece consisting of multiple parts that, although articulated with each other, hold a life of their own.
Like every body, these have a unique history made up of mixed fragments spun by Angélica, ranging from field recordings, references, and self-references to previous pieces, experiences, and voice recordings made specifically for these compositions re-recorded in various formats, from lo to high fidelity, analog and digital, composed, decomposed and recomposed (Castelló, A., 2019). Likewise, as any body, they also reflect on their end, whether absolute or temporal, of the many ways of being finite and of saying goodbye.
During the Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin, Castelló takes you on a journey that is difficult to locate. An ethereal space between shattered glass, stridulation of cicadas, war drums, murmurs in French, Italian maledictions, and soft recitations in Spanish. From uproar to solace, all wrapped in a soft abstraction that only allows access to the subtle whisper of these expressions. A gesture between invitation and sharing because who does not recognize oneself in this emotional storm?
These recordings, made in 2016 and 2017, document the shifting sonic texture of the cinema projection box, as it changes from 35mm to digital projection. By 2014, the majority of UK cinemas had already converted to digital, making many projectionists redundant, and quietly altering the way that cinema works, as both an industry and an experience. Very few cinemas maintain the ability to project 35mm film alongside digital, and it was in some of the remaining, tenacious boxes that I sought the persistent sounds of analogue projection.
The unique space that this album investigates is simultaneously a workshop, an engine room, and an artist’s studio. The projection box is a small room at the back of the cinema auditorium that conceals both the apparatus of the moving image, and the labour of the projectionist, ensuring that both remain invisible, and inaudible, to the cinema-goer.
This album was developed as part of The Projection Project, a research project based in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Warwick, which seeks to record and investigate the history of cinema projection in Britain. A special issue of the Journal of British Cinema And Television Studies (Vol 15, No 1, 2018), edited by members of The Projection Project, features a number of articles about the history of British cinema projection and the work of the projectionist in Britain, through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It includes an article entitled, Sounds of the Projection Box: Liner Notes for a Phonographic Method’, which augments this album, and elaborates upon the theoretical and methodological rationale for the use of sonic field recording as a mode of enquiry.
All of the images that accompany this record were made by Richard Nicholson. Some of them form part of a series of portraits entitled The Projectionists.
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From Eisuke Yanagisawa : “The Aeolian Harp (also called Wind Harp) is a string instrument that is played by natural wind. It sounds like layered feedback or drones with rich harmonic textures that will change continuously according to the wind direction, strength and consistency. One day, I bought the materials at the local DIY store and built a small Aeolian Harp. I brought the harp outside on windy days, but it made no sound at all. Through trial and error, by altering the string materials, tension, and the angle against the wind, it finally produced a sound.
The harp resonates with the surrounding environment, changing from place to place. I put two lavalier microphones into each of its two holes to clearly record the tiny resonant sounds, without too much wind interference. What is intriguing to me is that the recording will inevitably include environmental sounds from near and far which are condensed and slightly modulated by the harp. In a way, I use the harp as a kind of transducer as well as sounding body to interact with the environment through the forces of the wind. The recordings themselves are ecological, meteorological and geomorphological observations at a certain time and place.”
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From Gregory Büttner, “Voll.Halb.Langsam.Halt” is based on contact mic recordings, which I recorded on an old steamboat, an ice-breaker from the 1930. I had the chance to take a trip on the ship from Rostock to Rügen over the Baltic Sea in 2010. The body of the ship is completely built from metal, so it is a big resonant room which sounds very different on each spot which I put my contact mics on (I used two contact mics, so I could record in stereo). I walked around the ship, placing my mics on different areas of the ship and also directly on parts of the steam engine, which is still fired by coal. For the composition I only used the pure recordings without additional sound manipulations, only juxtapositions, transitions and cuts.
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The field recordings of « F.Guyana » have been realized in the forests and the costal regions of French Guiana between the dry season and the « little rainy season » (November/December 2014, 2015 and 2016).
Marc Namblard was born in Paris in October 1973. He grew up mostly in Loiret, (Central France) but spent most of his holidays with his family in the Cévennes, south eastern France. It is certainly in these rugged yet generous mountains that his sensitivity to nature asserted itself little by little. After his baccalaureate in literature, visual arts and art history, he studied at l’École de l’Image d’Épinal, a visual arts school. During his 21-month non-military national service in an outdoor education centre, he discovered the job of environmental educator. After his national service, Marc completed his studies at the Fine Art School of Épinal and gained a National diploma in visual arts in June 2000. Sound then began to take an increasingly bigger place in his own work.
In the following years, Marc moved away from Fine arts to work as an environmental educator for popular education organisations. At the same time, he met many people interested in sound art and wildlife recording. Since then, his work has been characterised by a dual approach, naturalist and musical, rational yet intuitive. Depending on projects, one approach prevails but never takes over the other completely.
Since 2000, Marc has been living and working as a nature guide, wildlife sound recordist and sound artist in Lorraine (Eastern France).
The Ruhr Area lives from and with water. It needs drinking water, water for industrial facilities and water for transportation. Water veins pulse invisibly with groundwater, connecting rivers through subsurface tunnels that also force their way into disused mines. This mine water has to be drained continuously or pumped out from underground (one speaks of unending tasks) to prevent the collapse of old shafts, subsidence damage, and the contamination of drinking water. Without constant pumping of the groundwater the Ruhr Area would transform into a vast marshy landscape.
Fabian Lasarzik, “The discomfort from the underground”. Christina Kubisch’s site-specific sound installations are based on retrieving parallel worlds. She often responds to structures and atmospheres of places and their unheralded vibrancy which she turns into concrete perception and imagination by the recipient. For the 26-channel installation “under ground” carried out on Zeche Zollverein Christina Kubisch examined above ground and subterranean streams which are little noticed, but play a decisive role: water which has to be developed from abandoned and not backfilled shafts and mounted into a complex canal and river system.
“Unter Grund“ was presented 2014 in the context of the festival NOW/ Parallele Welten as a 26-channel sound installation at the Zollverein world heritage site. The composition on the CD under the same name consists of recordings that were made in the Ruhr Area in machine rooms above and under ground, pumping stations, waterworks, ponds, shaft sumps, cages, spillways et cetera. Some of the recordings were taken directly from Shaft XII of the former Zollverein Coal Mine. The sound recordings were mainly made with hydrophones and contact microphones.
CD 1, Annea Lockwood. “Wild Energy” (2016) with Bob Bielecki. “Streaming, swirking, converging” (2017).
CD 2, Christina Kubisch. “Nine magnetic places” (2017). “Below Behind Above” (2017).
“Annea and I first met in New York in 1975. I was writing an article about the experimental music scene in New York for an Italian magazine. We soon found out that we had a lot of common interests and ideas. In 1979 she came to Italy and together we performed her piece “World Rhythms” at a festival in Como. I was deeply impressed by how Annea combined technical skills with intuitive performance.
Sound for her always has been more than just material to bring into a compositional form. It was more than raw material, it had a complex structure of its own and was transporting energy. Annea translated and communicated this energy to the listener and she does this with unusual intensity until today.
Over the years we followed each other’s works but unfortunately did not meet as often as we would have liked. During her stay in Berlin earlier this year we had another chance to discuss our works, materials, researches, concepts, doubts and future projects. The idea of a collaboration was a natural consequence of this exchange. We both investigate soundworlds which normally are not audible. Annea questions how the forces of nature influence us, I question how manmade electromagnetic fields have an impact on our lives. And we both love field recording, especially exploring underwater sounds with hydrophones.
We decided to exchange sound materials and left it open to the other what to choose and how to mix it into a new composition. The two new pieces which were created by this exchange are different but at the same time seem to belong together somehow. Annea sent me extracts from recordings of VLF chorus waves, solar oscillations, earthquakes, gas vents etc. while I transmitted to her a collection of recordings of electromagnetic waves which I had made audible and recorded with special custom designed induction headphones. Annea’s sound material was coming from sonic ultra and infra ranges and was speeded up or shifted down in order to become audible, my recordings are analog and were made directly on site in different cities. The sounds we use are all strange and powerful and they go together as if they were especially made for this collaboration. Until now what kind of influence the sources of these normally hidden waves have on us is not much explored. It is up to the listener to find out more about it.
Thanks to Gruenrekorder who supported our project from the beginning.” Christina Kubisch, November 2017