★Unfathomless
Nonante-neuf fragments harenois
Haren is a Brussels commune where deserted industries have supplanted the farmlands. Here, plenty of rail hubs bind and unbind while planes don’t take off anymore from its missing airport, but from nearby Zaventem.Despite it being unattractive though desirable, I felt immediately at ease over there, at the frontier of abandonment & forgetting ; I could listen to & gaze at desolate spots with a constantly renewed amazement of still being in Brussels.The Wanson factories where I have recorded in 2…
Prima del terzo
One of my favourite walk is in the harbour of my hometown, because of the sound brought by the wind. For long time I have day-dreamt about including that sound in my own music. I got to the point reading the poem Prologo al buio by Erri De Luca (from Opera sull’Acqua e altre poesie, Einaudi 2002). In the poem there is a Hebraic quote from Genesis, before the third verse (hence the title of my composition, the Italian for “before the third”): “vrúah Elohím merahèfet al penè hammàim”, that means, …
Characters at the water margin
These recordings were made at the edge of Washington state's Olympic Rainforest, where the Hoh River meets the Pacific Ocean. The point of entry to this landscape, named Oil City on the map, is no more than a place where the road widens before coming to an end at a trailhead. Just north of the road, through the trees, and on the homestead of the late Captain Hank who one day disappeared at sea, is the ghost of an oil rig and some comings and goings along a plank road. Early 20th century settlers…
Yoi
'In April 2011 David Vélez invited Simon Whetham to Bogota to run a field recording workshop at the Nacional University as part of the Masters in Fine Arts that Vélez was taking. They also planned to work together outside the workshop, a major part of this exchange being to visit the Colombian Amazonas to record, explore and collaborate - capturing sounds and sharing experiences.
During the trip, they were removed from their comfort zone and endured the rigors of the jungle in different situatio…
Strata
'Strata has been constructed from recording made in a series of vacant lots and their immediate surrounds in the north-west of Melbourne. These vacant lots are backed onto by various factories and warehouses on one side and a train line and Moonee Ponds creek (perhaps more aptly described as a concrete storm water drain) on the other. Running some 20 meters above all this is a large multi-lane highway overpass. This area has interested me for some time, the creeks and their walking paths act as …
Merua
"Merua is a magic place for the Garifunas, and also one of awe. Only those considered as initiated go through this sanctuary. It’s a refuge for the spirits of the Ancestors from the beliefs of this mixed culture that finds its roots both in Africa and South America. It’s a plot of dense jungle, a snakes’ nest, intact despite its small size and the fact that its perimeter is occupied by humans. A perimeter composed of two villages (Triunfo de la Cruz and La Ensenada), the mangrove and the lake at…
Garig Gunak Barlu (AustralOpus 1)
1. breakdawn (birds in the swamp, screeching parrots passing by from time to time and singing tree in the wind on abandoned red beach). 2. Coralreef (snubfin dolphins [orcaella heinsohni] echolocation, crackly decapods and mysterious fishsongs: wood-like-knocking and those difficult to describe and radioactive crackle of uranium). 3. Nocturnabyss (ultrasonic insects sliding across the time-grid meets hypnotic nocturnal chorus sprinkled by sonar of bats and barking geckos). Sheltering from the he…