ARCHIVE

Being neither something real inside, nor something ideal outside the world, each sound announces and expresses itself while splitting into "the hearing" and "the heard". I selected those sound works that especially investigate the emergence of this in-between stasis, where appears a threshold of sound affection - in the literal sense - of the time-space continuum of the Self.

When we gather a sound we are literally transported into another place. Furthermore, this specific attention to the sound matter reveals its lively autonomy: In the listening experience, each sound becomes the turning point between what is ours and the alien, where a certain dispossession takes place and interrupts our usual train of thought. Sound is in fact extraordinary: It is a medium pregnant with responsiveness, bodily experience between selfhood and otherness.

ULTRA DISCO is the title of the final selection for “Radio Arts Space”, broadcast ready, tracing a journey into what I call "acusmatic ethics". It starts with the "gravity" of suspense of the silent self-portraits of Matthias Meyer and Ingo Gerken, which transform the body into a living statement of resistance that finally surrenders to the world. Bodily resistance which returns in Máquina como se fosse, a concrete sound piece by Marcelo Sahea, inspired by the poem by Edgard Braga, “stitched” into the silence, and counterpointed by the sound of pen on paper, air balloons and electronic beats. Concretion 2.0 is introduced by the cinematic soundtrack of Mathieu Werchowski, where the act of listening becomes a sensual dance. Sound affections of its environment, and the memory of its encounters are explored by Lee Fraser’s Narrows, where a shifting spectral form absorbs and recasts itself into unique configurations; the work is a forging in the intermedia dimension, supported by the music of Joana Esteva made with sounds from a contact microphone. Scott Danek's soundscapes are crafted by sampling and manipulating randomly dialed cellular phones, so that they bring the digital space into a live environment, and rise the awareness of a wide material of flows and activities which we are constantly hearing. Jeff Gburek's Astral Weeds is a merging between the action of field recording and the environment of radio transmissions. It reveals the density of the radiophonic atmosphere and the matter of the time-space continuum. James Andean's Mahtava is built from a single phrase repeated and increasingly layered, while the rest of the spectrum begins to fade away, leaving only pulsing drones. Then, it goes in reverse, eventually returning to the original phrase. Irad Lee's Arsenal Brain plays with social mechanisms of control which attempt to shape and regulate one’s natural and individual skill of sensing while Sturqen explores a vast amount of sonic rhythm, combining the techno-trance universe with a constant noise attitude. Tom Bogaerte's Black Noise resounds with the 1994 mass slaughter in Rwanda; it examines how radio frequency and pop aesthetics can become a channel for crystallized hatred. ULTRA DISCO concludes with David Fyans's The Persistence of Decay: a recorded textural sound work on two cassettes which were treated with hot and cold water, then dismantled, dried in the sun, put back together and then slowed down to around a quarter of the regular speed allowing every pop and click, each modulating texture, the space and time to unfold under their own weight.

Listen & Enjoy

- Ilari Valbonesi