13amp [blisster]

Open Your Mind

Open Your Mind (ASMR Meditation)

Beige is the true color of melancholy is a multi-channel installation presented on Re.Sound a two day event in Huddersfield, UK on May 2018. The piece points out to the importance of the culinary culture in the establishment of immigrant cultures in Northern England over the past two centuries. The piece was produced with sounds recorded in the kitchen of Thai traditional cook Lag in Huddersfield, interviews made to second generation immigrants, and archive material that presents the role of cooking in the discrimination suffered by some immigrants that moved to West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester in the 1950s and 60s.

Special thanks to:
Kalim Siddiqui, Nat, Lang,
Ching-Fang Wu and Monty Adkins.

Beige is the true color of melancholy (fragment in stereo)

Le moniteur silencieux / Silent Monitor

Night in forest. Somebody is skulking in undergrowth and making eerie sounds. At times it feels like a possessed child or even Gollum is lurking in dark forest...

Boreal owl and waves of Peipsi lake in background.

23. May 2020, 1 AM. Peipsiveere, Estonia.

Edit: It is most likely a pine marten. I had another recording with visual contact and the sounds were pretty similar.

Creature of night

OCISLY

Headphones are highly recommended. The most appropriate and natural listening levels would be somewhere between 45% to 55% of your sound equipment's volume levels. The quiet beginning gradually grows louder, and then slightly reduces again to a 'status quo'. The recording, as presented here, runs from approximately 05:30 to 07:25: from just before first light to after sunrise.

The first and second dawns of 2021 were very windy, here. But the third dawn was quite calm. I was able to make this uninterrupted recording at one of my favourite local listening places. It's a place I love to go walking; and, just as much, love to sit, to listen, and to look. A place for peace, inspiration, and healing. And, of course, also to record.

The recording begins very quietly, but very gradually increases in volume. I've omitted the first part of the recording, which is even quieter, although it contains a few interesting obscure episodes; and one very vocal nearby koala. I felt that most listeners would be impatient with nine or ten minutes of mainly 'silence', before the birds begin to sing.

Given the quietness of this beginning, there is some general background 'white noise'. In part, this noise is just natural environmental sound; no space with an atmosphere is ever 'absolutely silent'. But it also probably includes some self-noise of the microphones, given that the preamp gain levels were relatively high. Although 'denoising' does mitigate such noise, I find that I am very rarely ever comfortable with the results of 'denoising', even when gently applied.

In all listening, there is always also, necessarily, the presence of the listener. There is no such thing as an act of 'listening' without a 'listener'. There is no such thing as 'sound' without a 'hearer of sound'. Yes, there is something that we may describe as 'purely physical vibration', which can exist, in some sense, quite independently of any particular being that is capable of 'hearing' such 'purely physical vibration' as 'sound'. But, very strictly speaking, such 'purely physical vibration' is absolutely not 'sound', as such, because 'sound', very strictly speaking, is a special kind of perceptual experience, a perceptual phenomenon, that can only be perceived and experienced by a perceiver, an experiencer, who is perceptually and experientially conscious, in an appropriate form and way.

John Cage once sat in a very sophisticated soundproofed anechoic chamber, attempting 'to hear pure silence'. He realised that there can be no such thing as 'hearing pure silence' because, even in 'pure silence', the listener will hear the sound of his or her own listening organism and listening organs. The presence of the listener cannot but be heard by the listener. The presence of the listener means that 'pure silence' is, in principle, impossible.

For me, this applies also to the presence of the microphones and the sound recorder. Like the organic listener, these also produce their own internal physical electromagnetic vibrations, which they cannot but also record, since recording such vibrations is precisely what they have been designed to do. Some are quieter than others; but, in principle, none can ever be 'absolutely silent'. To my mind, microphones and sound recorders are, to recollect Marshall McLuhan, 'extensions of our nervous systems'; and, like our nervous systems, they contribute 'noise' to every act of 'listening' and 'hearing'. Of course, it's preferable that the difference between inevitable intrinsic 'self-noise' and significant 'signal' is high, rather than low. But the fact of the matter remains, that, by fundamental principle, 'noise' and 'signal' cannot be absolutely separated. Analogically, to recall Wittgenstein, there is no such thing as 'a rod without length'. That's a logical contradiction, and a physical contradiction. The same applies here.

2021.01.03 A Quiet Dawn. Summer.

Looper VI (Bit Ripper mix)

Impulsive Habitat, 2014.

The material of this work is based on a static recording: I installed a microphone under the roof of my father's house in a small village in Alsace (France) for one year. Each day, I recorded one minute of sound on the hour at four different intervals: midnight, morning, noon and evening. I subsequently selected one recording per week for each of the intervals.
These (untreated) recordings were then sewn together in four different tracks, one for each time of day, spanning the course of a year. This results in a cyclical movement consisting of four different time-lapse sequences that trace the entirety of a year in one place.

A Year's Hours Behind my Father's House (Excerpt: Midnight, from May to September)

a rework from Mean Flow of a previous track by Henrik Meierkord and Marco Lucchi

febbraio 2021

Henrik Meierkord, Marco Lucchi & Mean Flow - Totentanz II

This piece comes from the third jam of our 2021 lockdown collaboration series, recorded 12/01/21, and features extensive use of our field recordings to create a dark ominous feel to the piece.

Neptune's Lair

The cultural, social, economical and environmental context in which I work is not only a big influence, but it is the main raw supply for my acoustic pieces and the main source of the questions that emerge on my research. Coming from a field recordings background I am very interested in the aesthetic action of listening to everyday sounds and even more when there is not mediation or decontextualisation.

Beige is the true color of melancholy (fragment in stereo)

DavidVelezRod