Robert Schwarz

Through solitary chirps and roaring synchrony, insects and arthropods communicate through “stridulations”, diverse calls created by rasping friction between two chitinous body parts. On ‘Stridulations 1-14’, Vienna-based sound artist Robert Schwarz presents a speculative resynthesis of such calls in simultaneity with ethological field recordings of real-world insect life. A continuation of themes introduced with Schwarz’s previous release, ‘Clear Cues’ (ETAT, 2022), and partly based on a 2023 composition commissioned by ORF’s Musikprotokoll, ‘Stridulations 1-14’ explores the audible characteristics of entomological communication, paying special attention to the spatio-temporal sonic patterns resulting from swarm behaviour and synchrony. With 20 years of field recording as foundational bedrock, Schwarz guides listeners through richly textured abstract sound entities that invariably request a dissociative listening state of its audience. Constantly rearranging the boundaries of the natural and the synthetic, ‘Stridulations 1-14’ follows a proprietary internal logic informed by intraspecies acoustic communication, crafting a stirring and disorienting sound environment inviting fresh perspectives on the relationships between humans, animals, machines. - Freddie Hudson