"I Remember The Nights" (excerpt) from the album Soundprints: Sealed In Sweden by Colin Black. colinblack.bandcamp.com/album/soundpr…led-in-sweden

"I Remember The Nights" (excerpt)

“Intensification” premiered at the ‘60x60 Pacific Basin Regional concert’ held at the Los Angeles Harbour College, USA, on Saturday, November 20, 2004.

Intensification

A collaborative improvised work for concrete sounds and no input mixing performed live on 11 June 2014 by Colin Black and Miha Ciglar at the MCO Mladinski Center, Ormož, Slovenia.

Audio post by Colin Black
Photos courtesy CONA Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ljubljana.

Black Brick (extract) live in Ormož

Frank & Bradman

"Ukrainian Underworld" is a treated audio documentary of descending deeper and deeper into the earth on one of Kyiv’s high-speed subway escalators. Ripping across this sonority is a recording of the artist aggressively bowing a house brick with a wood saw. As the subways in Kyiv are decorated with soviet propaganda (that was aimed to instil hope, faith, and certainty) this work is are an artistic sonic echo of the Russian Revolution. A revolution that reshaped the building blocks of Russian society and led to the architectural design of the subway network in Kyiv (and by consequence, its acoustics) as a symbol of collectivism. 

"Ukrainian Underground" is not intended as a celebration of communism, but rather a reflective piece that asks you the ponder the larger ramifications of any type of political system, be it capitalism, socialism, communism ... etc.

Credits

Composer, Sound Engineer and Location Recordings: Colin Black 

Photography: © AMY / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Ukrainian Underworld

How To Build A House

"The Listening Room," Last Broadcast, Intro by Robyn Ravlich, 15th Dec 2003

A LULLABY FOR THE NEW LANDS
(duration 20:09) 

Please download transcript from
https://www.dropbox.com/s/m3jybt5tmd0mpo7/A%20Lullaby%20For%20A%20New%20Lands%20-%20Program%20Notes%20%26%20CV.pdf?dl=0

NB You can also download this work from Colin Black's Bandcamp site https://colinblack.bandcamp.com

Lullabies serve many functions, the most commonly known is that of a soothing piece of music or cradle song that is played or sung to children as a sleep aid. However, in some societies they are used to pass down cultural knowledge or tradition from one generation to the next.

As an Australian with Irish heritage I travelled to Ireland for the first time in 2017 in search of some kind of link with my ancestors. During my travels I recorded a traditional lullaby from the west coast of Ireland that was sung to me in Irish. When I asked for an English translation they offered the following:

"A little drop, a little drop, a little drop for the old person
A little drop with its own taste for the old person
Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, old person
Go to sleep and be asleep, you old person"

What bothered me for a long time - while making this work - was why would the Irish sing “Go to sleep and be asleep, you old person” to a baby? This intergenerational paradox in this lullaby is used as a metaphor to illustrate how cultural heritage can be put to sleep or woken up, especially for descendants who only have fragments (e.g., stories, song and lullabies) from their ancestry to hold on to after having lived for generations overseas, many never visiting the land of their ancestors. Some may find this work Oirish, but that is the whole poignant point of this work as the diaspora, will always be a source of amusement for the Irish natives, as they fumble their way back to through their ancestral homeland. Nevertheless, all the stories, songs and lullabies in this work where gathered in Ireland and told to me by Irish natives.

It also follows, that because this work is inspired by the aforementioned lullaby, the work is structured to reflect the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep, and vice versa (the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states of consciousness). A kaleidoscope of stories, songs and soundscapes from Ireland drift in and out of earshot as cultural knowledge is diffused into the subconsciousness of the listener. The aim is to awaken the ancestral spirits that laid asleep in our genetic memories. 


CREDITS

Produced, Composed, Recorded and Mixed by Colin Black 

Interviewees (in order of appearance): Ceara Conway, Katie Verling, Timothy Casey, James Lawlor, Emma Fisher, Sean Taylor, John Greenwood, Áine McCoy, Áine Curtin and Tom Prendergast. 

Location recordings edited, compiled and mixed at the Elektronisches Studio, Technische Universität Berlin and Frequency Oz (Australia) by Colin Black 

Original Script by Colin Black 

Script Readings by Bernard Clarke 

"Róisín Dubh" performed by Ceara Conway 

Traditional lullaby, "Bog braon don Seanduine" performed by Katie Verling 

The opening and closing of farm gates on location performed by Robin Palmer 

Arrangements of traditional music by Colin Black 

Michael Hartnett poem extract, "English a necessary sin, the perfect language to sell pigs in," from 'A Farewell to English' from Collected Poems (2001) by kind permission of the Estate of Michael Hartnett and The Gallery Press, www.gallerypress.com 

Premièred on New Waves podcast, ABC Classic FM, 1 March 2018 

Album cover photograph of Colin Black at Grange Stone Circle, Lough Gur by Robin Palmer 

Special thanks to: Yanna Black, Bernard Clarke, Stephen Adams, Mikael Fernström, Robin Palmer, Australia Council for the Arts, University of Limerick, Limerick Arts Office, Elektronisches Studio, Technische Universität Berlin, and Narrative 4 - Limerick. 

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, it's arts funding and advisory bod

A Lullaby For The New Lands

By juxtaposing recordings of dawn from my childhood farm in Australia with the sounds of my local street in Ljubljana (where I currently live), this new work is intended as a pluralistic form of geospatial autoethnography and geography. This new work explores how, through my increased mobility, one place (with its history, stories, culture and even elements of its soundscape) can be virtually superimposed onto another place and how that can deconstruct notions of a fixed place and time. With the further augmentation of musical composition, this works aims to encompass issues relating to memory, place, migration, dislocation and even ownership. Moreover, the work is intended to raise questions, that includes how this type of reconceptualisation of place can also impact on notions of identity, both personal and national.

Dreaming Backwards Through Morning

Link to English translation 

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/075JZSVltuf9agoruk0sIsecQ#RESIDUE_-_Program_Notes

---------

“Truly awesome work … Amazing mix of soundscape and instrumental music, and a way of telling a story without words that I only find matched in the late great Luc Ferrari …” - Gerald Fiebig, Poet, Academic and Sound Artist (Germany)

“… fantastic, emotional and very inspiring … sent me into reverie and deep pools of emotion.” Pamela Lee Brenner, Artist and Media Art Teacher (Australia)


ABOUT THE WORK: RESIDUE

The future seems so far away ... but suddenly you are there as if a place is time. However, the cartography of this type of place is malleable and pliable: what happens in an instance doesn't happen in a lifetime, but when it happens to you, nothing will ever be the same again. The landscape around you dissolves and erupts, and just like Hansel's bread crumbs (in the famous German fairy tale), the pathway home to your past life vanishes. Shell shocked, you observe yourself as if you are someone else in this surreal world, and ever so slowly you find the strength to build a new life and identity on this emotional quicksand and barren topography of trauma.

With this work, Colin Black explores and abstracts the theme residue, from which he creates a multi-faceted sound world from field recordings and musical composition. While its narrative structure (or form) loosely follows that of the hero’s journey (where its call for adventure is initiated by some unwelcome traumatic event), in a post structuralist sense, the work doesn’t tell one story, it alludes to many stories and affords the listener a level of agency where they are invited to bring their stories and past experiences with them along this musical and sonic enriched journey. Notably also, this work contains almost no spoken words as listeners are invited to explore this sonic terrain of trauma with their imaginations wide open.


NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER

Unlike some of my previous works, I think of “Residue" as a musical work inspired by what Luc Ferrari has termed “anecdotal music,” where I use a source/context-driven handling of recorded sounds as an element of the overall musical composition. I think of these concrete sounds (that are carefully selected for this musical composition), just like one would choose musical notes for a traditional score that creates deftly constructed cadences, counterpoint, motivic and rhythmic development, textures and colours … after all, music is sound and all sound is music (Cage, Shafer et al.).


CREDITS

Produced by Colin Black
All Original Musical Compositions by Colin Black
Audio Engineer: Colin Black

Live Musicians:
Igor Ustavshchikov (Violin I)
Victoriya Shkit (Violin II)
Yaroslav Venger (Viola)
Dmytro Glushchenko (Cello)
Nataliya Kyrychevs’ka (Piano)
Dmytro Synenko (Marimba)
Myckola Tomasyshyn (Vibraphone)

Live musicians recorded and mixed at Lemma Recording Studio, Kyiv, Ukraine.
Sound Producer: Oleg Stuka
Audio Engineer: Oleg Tatavchuk
Musical Co-ordinator and Translator: Olga Ligus

Première broadcast: Österreich 1 (Ö1) - ÖRF, Kunstradio – Radiokunst, 15 November 2020

Special thank you to Elisabeth Zimmerman and Kunstradio

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, it's arts funding and advisory body.

Residue

Composer, Sound Artist, Radio Artist, Curator, Lecturer and Researcher: Sonic, Media and Art

Colin Black

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