Mahler (in/a) Cage | Casetta di Composizione – Sergio Armaroli & Alessandro Camnasio

Affects and aesthetic speculations | Nicola Di Croce

Catorce reflexiones sobre el fin | Angélica Castelló

 

“Sehen mit Ohren / Seeing with Ears” is a composition exploring the acoustic perception of architecture. Six blind people living in Vienna discuss their perception of the city, space & architecture. Additional sound materials are various soundscapes of Viennese architecture. Through the techniques of montage, overlay and alienation new acoustic spaces emerge while beginning to warp into dreamlike spaces.

More Information: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=11568 

Sehen mit Ohren | Ulrich Troyer

 As a composer and sound artist often working closely at the nexus of radiophonic art, environmental sound and electroacoustic music, one of my primary interests is in the exploration of relationships between people and the incredibly rich sonorous environments they populate. In particular, the sounds that exist all around us, however that are often out of earshot (or at least not listened to in any conscious manner), as with the sounds beneath us as we tend our daily lives.
terra subfónica is a radiophonic work reflecting aspects of sub sound through a series of dramaturgical, radiophonic miniatures. Sub sound in this instance is not a term indicating low frequency sound, as in bass material, but rather a radiophonic suite reflecting and meditating on aspects of that which is below us; ultimately mapping a sub sonic terrain lying just below, or on the periphery of our (typically) perceived threshold of hearing. The sounds and sonic fragments chosen to represent different aspects of sub sound have been used as a basis for generating the narrative/ dramaturgical structure in each of the miniatures. Shards of familiar, strange, overlooked and unheard sounds coalesce, as metaphor and sound arcanum guide the listener throughout each of the works in the suite.
Importantly, the content and presentation of terra subfónica gravitates around an eclectic array of soundart works exploring the medium of radio. In an attempt to explore my own perception of the medium of radio, I wanted to produce a diverse body of work, from field recordings and instrumental music to electronic music and beyond. This also meant creating 2 monophonic soundworks expressing my interest in sonic possibilities for monophonic sound diffusion environments, as well as employing various experimental sound reproduction techniques to compose, as well as preserve the actual spaces several of the works inhabit.
Although combining to create a suite of works with a common theme, each miniature functions as an abstracted narrative in shorter, self-contained parts, as with works in a suite. The works often include recordings of instrumental material, designed to assist the listener in mapping/ navigating the constructed works, and occasional vocal sounds that are employed to articulate human presence rather than to impart any specific narrative.

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Terra Subfónica | Daniel Blinkhorn


The sound/video installation-project ‘Eye Contact with the City’ (recipient of an Honorary Mention at PRIX Ars Electronica 2011) was the outcome of an artists’ residency in Bangalore in the autumn of 2010. The primary materials used in the installation were the field recordings made and video footage shot at various locations in Bangalore. Materials also included retrieved audio from old reel-to-reel tapes found at the city’s flea markets. The extensive repository of field recordings and other audio materials eventually took the form of this elegiac composition during a subsequent artists’ residency at the School of Music, Bangor University, in the summer-autumn of 2011.
The composition accommodates the passage of time that affects detachment, decay and departures in the perception of transfiguring acoustic geography of a city. Stemming out of intense phenomenological experience in an emerging Indian city and its complex sound world, the work represents a sonic construct that investigates the multi-layered listening processes at the city undergoing dynamic metamorphosis. Working on the assumption that passing of time over an once-inhabited but rapidly-emergent locale can be captured by employing a contemplative-poetic mood of elegiac pace in listening-methodology, this work explores indolence to facilitate meditative and in-depth observation involving a keen sense of temporality and spatial historicity that reshapes memory associations disconnected and erased during the course of time.
The primary material for the work was gathered in six months of extensive fieldwork. The audio composition took two more years to slowly take a final shape. The sounds that were gathered during the extensive field recording embody the imagery of amorphous urban development, exemplified by the enormous metro-rail constructions. The disruption occurs in an anticipation of idleness quite typical of Bangalore and similar to that of other Indian cities. Sounds retrieved and restored from found reel-to-reel tapes provide insights into this endangered idleness embedded within the essential urban nature. Apart from being mere sound information extracted from industrial environment of the construction sites, the field recordings are the impressions, reflections, and musings of a nomadic listener. They are inclusive of the phenomenological experience of expanded listening recontextualised in the composition that augments the imaginary outlines of the city by framing the impermanence of sounding urban growth. The strategy of composing has been digital-acoustic mediation of recognisable environmental sounds into auditory contexts; the aim is to evoke listener’s spatial association, cognition, and imagination of the city in the state of slow and gradual decomposition.

 More Infomation: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=9517

elegy for Bangalore | Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Befreit die Maschinen | Hannes Seidl

Μεσσήνη (Μαυρομμάτι) | BMB con.

Of Wolves and People | Melissa Pons & Nils Mosh

Organic Volatilisation Near Imperceivable | Simon Whetham

This is the soundtrack album to the film “Song from the Forest”, which tells the story of Louis Sarno, an American who has lived for thirty years among the Bayaka pygmies in the Central African Republic. No outsider has had such access to this beautiful and musical culture, and this selection of the best of his recordings presents the sounds of this amazing people and their environment with a depth and richness never heard before.

You want more information about the Soundtrack, Luis Sarno, the Bayaka Suppor Project and the movie SONG FROM THE FOREST or you want to see the trailer or a few pictures from the movie?
Please visit: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=12032
http://songfromtheforest.com/

You can order the soundtrack here: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/shop/


SONG FROM THE FOREST: THE SOUNDTRACK

Lopa

Lopa | Enrico Coniglio

Perifaerye | Jorn Ebner

I receive you | Bird & Renoult

Gold Lines | Bird & Renoult

Note from unwritten diary of David:
3:45 AM. Time to get up. The Bushveld is already awake.
Slávek and I are both dragging a bit, rushing to get out the door and deploy.
After almost two weeks of nonstop recording, we are both tired and a little homesick.
At this point in the residency we have already found a dependable dawn recording location in a dry creek bed just far enough away from Weederdooper homestead so that our microphones will not pick up breakfast activities and just close enough for us to make it back for a nap before the morning field session. In a strange way this location reminds me of another of Slávek’s favorite recording spots on a small tributary flowing into Lake Mamori in Brazil. Slávek and I share a room at Weederdooper, which makes these dawn sessions simple. Our equipment too tends to share space in locations we scout together during many of the field sessions. We each now have many recordings of the exact same events, but from slightly different perspectives. The dry river bed at Umzumbi, the hippos at Mmabolel Rock, the bridge to Botswana, the watering holes. Perhaps when we get back home we will make a CD together.

 Visit http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=12575 for some more information and for great pictures

MMABOLELA | David Michael & Slavek Kwi

The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’.
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception

 

The cistern at Fort Warden State Park is one of the worlds most unique acoustic sites. It is a circular (cylindrical) cement structure 14′ (4.2m) in height and 200′ (61m) in diameter. Located underground, it sits on top of a hill overlooking the Straight of Juan de Fuca on the Olympic Peninsula in North America. It was originally built to store water for the military installation housing the heavy artillery which was once installed nearby. Its an absolutely beautiful location and an entirely unparallelled acoustic experience.

 

The cistern possesses an almost 45 second decay, and since it also has rectangular concrete supports every 12′ (3.6m) there is a wide variety of diffraction, refraction, and reflection phenomena that influence the behavior of sound. Not only does sound generated in the space reverberate, but because of the small square entrance and a small pipe the cistern functions as a large resonator for the entire environment, allowing the voices of passing tourists and the sounds of airplanes overhead into the space.

 

Having done preliminary work during the summer of 2010 and also in the spring of 2011, I returned to the cistern in August of 2012 with material prepared for, and tailored to, the unique acoustics of this place. I learned some things about the space on these first visits and for this third visit I had made a rough calculation of the resonant frequency of the cistern (excluding the concrete posts from the equation) determining it to be about 0.91hz. Higher partials of this frequency were used as the basis for the pieces presented here.

 

Over the next year I used this material to compose a series of pieces focused on different, and specific, phenomena in the space. I wanted to explore, and compose with, the unique acoustic character of the cistern, but not end up with only site specific documents of this rare environment. I feel that the quality of reverberation, and the way in which the space responded in real time to the sounds I placed in it, could not be reproduced with any artificial means. On the contrary, the very circular nature of the cistern can be heard in these three pieces.

More Information: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=12642

from the cistern | Bryan Eubanks

“Sempervirent” is a stereo edit of a series of ‘sequence-shots’ where the quadraphonic microphone setup records all that passes by. Some are straight, untouched raw recordings, and others are slightly reworked, but there are no hydrophone, or parabolic recordings (except on track 05).

 

I spent two months in protected areas of Costa Rica making multichannel field recordings of the different forest ecosystems of Central America. Armed with a quadraphonic setup (IRT cross), a parabolic microphone, a hydrophone, and a scientist’s passport, I went to nine main sites to record: the coastal evergreen forest, the tropical dry and deciduous forest, the mangroves, the wooded riverbanks and floodplains, and the forests altered in cultivated areas. The recordings were made at the Santa Rosa National Park, Caño Negro National Wildlife Refuge, Tortuguero National Park, Sarapiqui (private reserve), Tapanti National Park, La Amistad International Park, Marino Ballenas National Park, Bahia Drake (private reserve) and the Corcovado National Park. An edited version of these recordings exists as a multichannel sound installation and as a live spatialised diffusion : Dry, Wet, Evergreen.

Located on the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, The Costa Rica is a biodiversity hotspot. Territory refuge for many neotropical species in danger of extinction, the country has moved in just 40 years, from a critical state of deforestation to a radical awareness of environmental issues.

More Information and amazing pictures are available on http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=7765

Sempervirent | Rodolphe ALEXIS

TransMongolian is a composition of unprocessed field recordings composed in soundscapes. I recorded these acoustic phenomena on my journey through Russia, along Lake Baikal, through Mongolia, China and South Korea to Japan. These countries do not only have very different landscapes and ways of life, they also differ in their sounds, a dimension which more often than not goes unnoticed. The 6 acoustic portraits reflect what I found to be representative of or very special about the countries.

More Information: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=8407

TransMongolian | Roland Etzin

“Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture.
It is both a represented and a presented space,
both a signifier and a signified,
both a frame and what a frame contains,
both a real place and its simulacrum,
both a package and the commodity inside the package.” (1)

A metal fence, about 6 metres high, in the background. A group of people sitting closely aligned on the upper edge, detained by the presence of the border police. A strip of bushy vegetation for sight protection in front of the fence, a bit farther aside some taller palm trees.
An ascending hill behind the fence, dry grass, rock, soil. The well cared for, wavy green of a golf course in the front, two people dressed predominantly in white standing on the lawn, one of them is about to swing the golf club, the other one regarding the events on the other side of the fence. (2)

If an image like this – at least temporarily – draws media attention to fundamental questions of humanity and territoriality in the EU refugee policy, then this photographic scene at the same time also illustrates situational, constitutive moments for localised attributions or links between places and experiences of fear and despair. The profane ordinariness of repeatedly superposed, yet radically diverging perceptions and adoptions of spaces by different social groups and individuals that is displayed in colliding situations, thus describes forms of cooperation, conflict and coexistence in a way that often appears grotesque or absurd, sometimes cynically cold. While such documentations of moments of contingent encounters are sometimes represented in an almost more than obvious way, these observable constellations of alleged exemplary antipodes still have concrete, realistic equivalents beyond medial production or political exploitation. Experience of place and position within locations becomes part of a confusing mixture of localisation and dislocation, which in turn are connected to aestheticised adventure landscapes. Those can be analogies of transitory arrival areas, save shores, touristic functional zones, territory fortified by border barriers, or military operation areas. Space reframed to become a landscape – in individual perception, this transformation hardly ever happens without emotional attachment. From a general perspective or becoming operative in a very subjective way, fear being one possible element of this process percolates both an inner experience and the spaces and places of events. Isn’t it ready to smell, to see, to hear, or to recognise in other ways everywhere “here”?
Knowledge about the spaces of fear, handling danger zones and threat scenarios, continuing vague or concrete alert feeling as an aspect of life, information about one’s self in a state of fear – aren’t there constant comparable appeals and demands in order for us to condition and optimise ourselves in a permanent mode of a “training camp”? Territorial conflict zones, no man’s land, local recreation areas, wellness resorts, safety corridors, wildlife reserves, restricted areas, death zones, no-go areas, gated communities, motion profiles, killing fields, shelter sites, reception camps, coach circuits and Segway tours through “dangerous territory”. In the face of such terms and events, and looking at both individual and social perspectives on addressing space and fear – what is it that forms present, contemporary Landscapes of Fear?


1 W.J.T. Mitchell: „Imperial Landscape“; in: W.J.T. Mitchell (Hg.): Landscape and Power. Chicago, 2002
2 2014 von der Agentur Reuters verbreitete Fotografie einer Situation am EU-Grenzzaun der spanischen Exklave Melilla in Marokko (Fotograf: Jose Palazon)
3 Yi Fu Tuan: „Landscapes of Fear“. Oxford, 1980


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Landscapes of Fear | Various Artists

Based in the Okinawa Prefecture and former part of the Yaeyama archipelago and Ryukyus islands, Iriomote-Jima is the most southern island in Japan and 90% of it ground is covered by jungle and mangrove.
Even during its short period of coal mining, the island was never inhabited by a large human population, mainly because of Malaria, as a result its natural environment and wildlife were preserved. Malaria- free, Iriomote was only returned to Japan by the US in 1972.

This land is home to many local species including insects, frogs and birds, but also flying foxes and the famous leopard cat named Yamaneko, which was only discovered in 1965.
A local legend says another mysterious big cat allegedly lived on the island and was much larger than the Yamaneko. At night, his eyes were said to be the glittering thing on the mountain or Yamapikaryā. Some people even claim this creature still exists.

In the spring of 2009, I found myself by chance just a few hours away, by boat, from this last frontier of Japan, but had no means to get there.
I promised myself to return there, even for short span, but with my recording equipment. This finally became possible in the summer of 2014 and I went there with a four-channel microphone setup.

This work was produced with the help of the Tropical Biosphere Research Center University of the Ryukyus. It was premiered in the auditorium of the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle, in Paris, and a special piece was derived from it for Touch Radio #104.

Acknowledgments :
DinhaBird, Yuko & Sam Bird, Yoko Fukushima, Mike Harding, Benoît Hické, Trevor Jones, Takafusa Morimoto, François Vaillant, Valérie Vivancos, Shin Watanabe

More information: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=14303

The glittering thing on the mountain | Rodolphe ALEXIS

The Ruhr Area lives from and with water. It needs drinking water, water for industrial facilities and water for transportation. Water veins pulse invisibly with groundwater, connecting rivers through subsurface tunnels that also force their way into disused mines. This mine water has to be drained continuously or pumped out from underground (one speaks of unending tasks) to prevent the collapse of old shafts, subsidence damage, and the contamination of drinking water. Without constant pumping of the groundwater the Ruhr Area would transform into a vast marshy landscape.

Interesting? 
Visit http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=14340 (German: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=14276) for more information

Unter Grund | Christina Kubisch & Eckehard Güther

The artist group Augenstern (Christiane Prehn and Wolfgang Meyer) have lived and worked on the ship Anuschka for many years. In July 2014 the MS Anuschka left Berlin in the direction of Paris before reaching their final destination in the south of France in November 2014. On the way, the crew examined numerous bridges, spanning rivers and canals. Using tentacles installed on board to scratch the bridges, the ship turned into a sensitive, perceiving and sounding laboratory interacting with the territory. Each of the bridges passed has its personal soundprofile, created by its shape, its practical use and its way of construction. During the journey KG Augenstern presented audiovisual performances that could be observed and heard along the banks. Exhibitions of “Tentacles”- installations where shown in contemporary art spaces at Arles and Valence. A complete documentation of the sound recordings can be heard on the SoundWays application.

Fin more information here: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=15256

Album

Tentacles | Kg Augenstern

Parvenu is a work about authoritarian structures and developments.
The narrative is abstract, all sounds are concrete. Every single sound on this recording is based on recordings from three bee hives.

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PARVENU | szmt

„Voll.Halb.Langsam.Halt“ is based on contact mic recordings, which I recorded on an old steamboat, an ice-breaker from the 1930. I had the chance to take a trip on the ship from Rostock to Rügen over the Baltic Sea in 2010. The body of the ship is completely built from metal, so it is a big resonant room which sounds very different on each spot which I put my contact mics on (I used two contact mics, so I could record in stereo). I walked around the ship, placing my mics on different areas of the ship and also directly on parts of the steam engine, which is still fired by coal. For the composition I only used the pure recordings without additional sound manipulations, only juxtapositions, transitions and cuts. 

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Voll.Halb.Langsam.Halt

Voll.Halb.Langsam.Halt | Gregory Büttner

The Aeolian Harp (also called Wind Harp) is a string instrument that is played by natural wind. It sounds like layered feedback or drones with rich harmonic textures that will change continuously according to the wind direction, strength and consistency. One day, I bought the materials at the local DIY store and built a small Aeolian Harp. I brought the harp outside on windy days, but it made no sound at all. Through trial and error, by altering the string materials, tension, and the angle against the wind, it finally produced a sound.

The harp resonates with the surrounding environment, changing from place to place. I put two lavalier microphones into each of its two holes to clearly record the tiny resonant sounds, without too much wind interference. What is intriguing to me is that the recording will inevitably include environmental sounds from near and far which are condensed and slightly modulated by the harp. In a way, I use the harp as a kind of transducer as well as sounding body to interact with the environment through the forces of the wind. The recordings themselves are ecological, meteorological and geomorphological observations at a certain time and place.


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Path of the Wind | Eisuke Yanagisawa

„Gasworks“ by sonic artist Gerald Fiebig collects his sound installations, radiophonic compositions, and live performances relating to the former gasworks in Augsburg-Oberhausen. They were created between 2010 and 2016, some in collaboration with colleagues EMERGE and Christian Z. Müller. Among the compositional materials of the album are processed recordings of the sounds of gas and industrial machinery, stories told by a former gasworks employee, and live improvisations in the echo chamber of the large gas tank.

Liner notes by Gerald Fiebig:

Cities phosphorescent
on the riverbank, industry’s
glowing piles waiting
beneath the smoke trails
W.G. Sebald, After Nature

The former gasworks in Augsburg-Oberhausen (not to be confused with the better-known Gasometer in the city of Oberhausen in the Ruhr area) have been a subject of my artistic practice for more than a decade. This album collects all the works related to the gasworks except a site-specific installation version of Echoes of Industry that did not lend itself to documentation as a recording.
Opened in 1915, the gasworks are a testimony to the spirit of what one could call the ‚heroic‘ age of industrialisation. The architecture of the ovens and machine halls features stylistic quotes from the façade of Augsburg’s renaissance city hall as well as from cathedrals. Technological progress is presented as both raison d’état and religion. This stands in stark contrast to the extremely hard, dangerous and – for a very long time – poorly paid working conditions described by long-time gasworks employee Johann Artner in Nach der Industrie / After Industry. From our contemporary viewpoint, informed by climate change and the impending end of fossil resources, the optimism expressed in the beautiful architecture of the gasworks also appears less than justified for ecological reasons: until 1968, the gasworks actually produced gas by burning coal in large ovens. They then continued to operate as a distributing station for fossil gas from transcontinental pipelines into the local network. Operations ceased in 2001.
After almost two decades of merely intermittent use for festivals and other events, 2019 saw the re-opening of the gasworks area as an arts centre featuring a theatre as well as artists‘ studios, rehearsal rooms, and office spaces for creative businesses. This seems to imply that it has now entered the ‚post-industrial‘ age where clean, almost immaterial computer screens have replaced the factory floors once so dirty and dangerous.
In fact, there is no such thing as a ‚post-industrial‘ age, just globalised capitalism increasingly outsourcing the dirty and dangerous work (manufacturing the microprocessors for the ‚post-industrial‘ devices, for example) to poorer countries. And of course industrial manufacturing still does form an important part of economies of the global North, even if the leading role in ideological narratives of growth and prosperity has been taken over by the ‚post-industrial‘ businesses.
Both post-industrial, which is partly based on processed sounds of a metal tool factory quite close to the gasworks, and Echoes of Industry can be heard as reminders of these ambivalences. Echoes of Industry brings the space of the gasworks into contact with the sounds of textile machines. This is a reference to the fact that the decline of the gasworks as an industrial site paralleled that of Augsburg’s once-thriving textile industry. It also alludes to the role of the textile industry as one of the most prominent examples for the exploitative use of cheap offshore labour.

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Gasworks | Gerald Fiebig feat. EMERGE & Christian Z. Müller

Five years in the making, David Rothenberg’s Nightingales in Berlin project includes a book, a film, many live concerts, and this double CD, including a 20 page color booklet of stills from the film and music not available in any form online. Here’s what Rothenberg says about the project:
“I used to make interspecies music largely on my own, seeing myself as some kind of individual explorer seeking out musical ideas with creatures we can’t even talk to. But in recent years I’ve decided that the point of musical contact with another species is to convince other people to join me. Over five years, from 2014 through 2019, I invited the best and most adventurous musicians I know to connect in musical collaboration—humans with nightingales, in Berlin and Helsinki.
The nightingales have helped me find the perfect sound. By assembling just the right group of kindred spirits, together we dream of a way that humans and nature might live closer together. Our species is warming the planet beyond recognition, and this could mean the end of our reign over this place. Yet there are still these moments during which humans can touch nature through sound happening all around us, as we make music along with the nightingales of Helsinki and Berlin. The paths to animal music sit right before us.
I love to listen to different musicians respond to the song of the nightingale for the very first time. I have played with these birds for several years now, and sometimes I wonder why I keep trying to make music with musicians with whom I cannot speak, who live as birds—such different lives than people who may join the band. Some human critics think it’s all delusion, that I intrude upon the birds’ ancient world of perfect sound and struggle, but whenever I bring a new musician along to play with nightingales, I realize why I began this process in the first place. We all feel such joy and hope when music can carry meaning from one species to another. The planet becomes a more harmonious place.”

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Nightingale Cities | David Rothenberg

Next City Sounds: Interfaces | Various Artists

Shizugawa | Andrew Littlejohn

Circles and cycles | Kg Augenstern

Resonant Dowland | Matthias Engelke

GRUENREKORDER

understands itself as an organisation with the aim of promoting soundworks and phonography. Phonography considers nature / the environment as an acoustic experience, loaden with musical sounds. It is as a form of art and culture, that Gruenrekorder promotes phonography. We therefore organise events, lectures, publications and exhibitions as well as artistic projects in the fields of phonography and soundwork. Please visit Field Notes our bi-lingual magazine and Tonangel our workshop or take some time to read or listen to Gruenrekorder.

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