environmental_studies is a collection of three pieces around the electronic simulation of three landscapes: a European forest (digital_forest), an Arctic coastline (digital_ocean) and a Levantine desert (digital_desert). It is one concept, applied to three different kinds of material. I want to create a sonic environment for the listener; a textural soundscape in which the landscapes seem to move and shift around them. I’m interested in how an authentic experience of space can be created, shifted, bent, disturbed, disrupted, torn, and destroyed.

Each piece is filled with two different kinds of material: field recordings and electronically generated sounds. Through morphing field recordings into electronic noise and electronic noise into organic, natural-sounding sound, I try to blur the boundary between the natural and the artificial. Through aleatoric and algorithmic processes, these soundscapes should function somewhat autonomously, making decisions in the moment without my involvement. The tracks are the product of these decisions.

digital_desert

digital_ocean

digital_forest

/ˈsi.biˌbu.si/:

(n.) cloudburst
compound of sibi (“to sweep, the sweeping”) and busi (“forest, jungle”), said because the heavy rain is thought to sweep the forest clean like a broom

_sibibusi_

this piece is a study of ableton's warp function, using a 27-second sample of the opening chords of debussy's prelude canope. by stretching the sample at different levels, strange and unpredictable glitches are made audible, pulling us into a microcosm inside the instrument, opening up the wood and swallowing us whole. in this soundworld, time becomes a texture; texture becomes a rhythm. a piano dies and is reborn.

debussy_rework_iii

sense_you_went;___away. is a piece for voices and electronics. it is an effort at recomposing/resampling the poem and the song sence you went away. 

it's a piece about missing; about what it means to be alone after having been part of a deeply connected, larger whole. i want to take the song and its text and make it fade into forgetfulness and noise; make it lose its memory and turn to sonic dust. i basically want to lay bare the social function of this tune, namely grieving and finding solace, by applying this concept to the structure of the piece. to do this, i degraded the meaning of the material, shifting from text, to vocal music, to instrumental music, to noise. i framed this inside the existing structure of the poem, amplifying it to a larger scale.

sense_you_went;___away. consists  of 3 materials: 
1. field recordings of people reciting the text, from different people, with different voices, reading from different places, with different recording technologies. i made heavy use of both the audio of them speaking, and the silences, breaths and pauses in between.
2. a field recording of the performance of the song sence you went away, recorded at the cultural centre of sebes de sus in rural romania.
3. morse code reciting the poem sense you went away, playing in 4 voices, each pitched to a respective voice in the music, so each voice has a morse code part ‘singing’ along.

lots of love to all my wonderful reciters: anton, cas, maya, duco, isadora, june, lucie, robin, adéla and hebe! and to doortje for shooting the cover photo!!🌻

Christian Johannes

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