hitting me hard - much of this came to light when I was growing up under American occupation ... sensationalized for very low military propaganda ... and then there were the revisionists ... possibly as a direct response to the propaganda ghouls? Nova activity ...

I cannot praise this enough. A truly deft touch. Difficult to listen and heart-wrenching but utterly compelling.

Reminiscent of Delia Derbyshire's Dreams radio programs

Superb sound work as well as nuanced & tactful presentation text. I will certainly explore your other SoundCloud tracks in the following days.

Tracing A-7063 is a radiophonic impression of a new documentary film in progress (working title A-7063) by the young Polish director Maciek Klich. It grew out of a conversation with Maciek: in Auschwitz last year he met survivor Eva Mozes Tor and interviewed her concerning her experiences at the hands of the infamous Doctor Joseph Mengele. 
Maciek has set out to tell Eva Mozes Tors’ story in documentary film and animation for the memory sequences of her experience in the Holocaust.

I was intrigued and inspired by what he told me and set out to render such a dual style of narrating a story in sound. I divided my sources into old and new, black and white. I dipped into archive interview audio of concentration camp survivors Roman Halter, Ruth Foster and Maria Ossowski (for me bleached out memory pieces) and also used some of Maciek’s present day interview with Eva Mozes Tor (for me this is black, a stereo present, but also black haunted memory). 

I did the same with the music: the opening of Mozart’s Requiem (in a recording as approved by the Nazi regime made in 1941, with all references to Christianity’s Jewish roots excised: “Te decet hymnus, Deus in Sion” was replaced by “Deus in coelis”; whilst “in Jerusalem” was replaced by “hic in terra”) with its whish and crackles and pops-I used these very surface noises to generate (through additive and granular synthesis) a lot of the sounds that follow.
I also transformed the shouts of Sieg Heil Sieg Heil and then used the results to generate the soundscaping of the various music (s) that “frame” the voices.

The greatest challenge I faced was the risk of sensationalizing the material: alas, there is what is now called a “Holocaust Industry” particularly in print, so what was uppermost in my mind was respecting the voices, keeping them as the primary sonic material and letting them tell their tales. That said I also wanted these voices and sounds to work sometimes in opposition and sometimes in complimenting each other.

To do this I turned some of my new soundscapes to traces of themselves (blacks to grey’s): for instance the sound beneath Eva Mozes Tor’s tale of her being tattooed is a stereo rendering bleached out and scratched up to suggest vinyl and also the burning of the pen and ink that will mark her forever: A-7063.  

The first version of this won Best Audio (Yamaha Música award) at this years Black & White International Festival in Porto, Portugal

Credits
 
Voices

Eva Mozes Tor, interview with Maciek Klich, Auschwitz, 2013.

Roman Halter, Ruth Foster, Maria Ossowski 
-Imperial War Museum, London, 
Random House Audio
RC 918

“Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil”
Entartete Musik A Documentation in Sound
EINE Pool Musikproduktion, Berlin
65023 AV

Music

Mozart Requiem
Bruno Kittel Chor/Berlin Philharmonic/Bruno Kittel 
Deutsche Grammophon 
459 004-2


Comments

continuo

pytchblend

Dead Zoner

Lunacybot

Cork City Gamelan

IRIDE PROJECT