“Dream-Land” (1844) is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most consistently misread and misunderstood poems. It tells the story of a journey, moving through landscapes of oceans, valleys, caves, and forests, beyond the borders of space and time. Although it’s never quite clear where that trip starts or where it ends. Nothing looks or moves the way it does in everyday life. Mountains tumble, the sky is on fire, the ocean leaps up, and the snow sits on the ground forever. This radio art piece explores the fragile line between the real and the illusion.  Representing acoustically what is said in the poem, read in diverse languages by women from different places of the world such as Greenland, Brazil, México, France, Germany, Iran, Romania, etc. Adding “images” and information with soundscapes from where this voices come from. Moving through real places and imaginary sound ambiences. Shapes, shadows and bodies get interlaced in an “almost “eventful and musical way. Recreating the actions, places and situations mentioned at the poem. Mixing field recordings with electronically modified sounds and noises, bases of many sources, panned, worked in layers to create movement of the microphone through textures and intimate spaces of this oneiric context. Also travelling in time: from past to future, from abstraction to concrete in a kind of apparently random session. Giving freedom to the listener to create each own tale, suggesting tracks to their imagination using words as a reference.

During dreaming the brain moves through different states represented by vibrations. our brainwave frequencies can descend from Alpha through Theta state (4-7 Hz). This “movement “is expressed , in this piece, by this kind of vibrations , linking different stories as interlaced memories.


Dreamland

Los Gritos de Mexico, soundscape of Mexico City is a 30min sound piece by Félix Blume. 
http://www.felixblume.com/losgritosdemexico
A shorter version is available on Arte Radio. 
https://soundcloud.com/arte-radio-1/los-gritos-de-mexico
Download in Wave 48kHz 24bit on Freesound 
https://freesound.org/people/felix.blume/sounds/260680/

This piece receive a special mention during the "Bienal of Radio from Mexico" and has been broadcasted on more than 30 radio, web-radio and on the Radia Network.

RESUME:
Mexico City: more than 20 millions people gathered making noise!
A noisy city for most; I would like to transform it in a sonorous city.

The street sellers make the voices of the polyphonic choir, the small bell from the ice cream seller substitutes the triangle from the orchestra, and the hammering of the protesters on the metallic wall are the percussions.

In Mexico City, people shout to be heard, they shout their rage against the cops, they shout at the ‘lucha libre’ fights, they shout together ¡ Viva Mexico ! to feel united, and during a demonstration they also shout ¡Viva Mexico ! People shout in church, they pray together or alone, whispering in the silent night.

The thunder booms: nobody can shout at the storm, and the rain cleans the silent city.  A solo voice after the rain, and the choir resumes gradually. 

People sing to forget and the shouting starts again, louder, so that the others don´t forget.

The water flows under the city, the forgotten lake is mourning; it remembers when the city was an Island… On the top, it is too noisy, underneath, the water keeps in silence the secrets of the past.

INTENTION
Most of the people in the world live in cities. The daily soundscape is in most of the case a continuous sound of traffic, close or distant. Mexico City has a series of sounds added to the background which make the specificity of the city: the cries and sounds of the street sellers are in most part responsible.
In the past, most cities had their own cries (as some classical music can testify, like ‘Les cris de Paris’ from Janequin). In Mexico City, this tradition has persisted until today,  but the government and general opinion is not in favour of them: street sellers are each time further away from the touristic center, advertising campaigns are done to make them disappear from the subway, and police operations block their access to the streets.

I would like to pay tribute to these Criers through a soundscape of Mexico City, that will become a sonorous memory of a time that sooner than later will disappear.

Los gritos de Mexico

Electric Storm on the top of the mountain Chacaltaya in Bolivia. 
The "static electricity" is going up (and doing interferences in the microphones)until the thunderclap(very close).

Sound recorded by a MS setup Schoeps CCM41+CCM8
Sound Devices 788T recorder with CL8
MS is encoded in STEREO Left-Right
recorded in october 2014 in Bolivia, on the Chacaltaya Mountain,
Sound Reference: @SAM141022-29
Wave, 48khz, 24bit

more sounds on http://www.felixblume.com

Electric storm on the top of the mountain

Zima - Зима train station, Siberia. October 2014.
Crédit Photo : Virginie Bueno.

Zima train station - Зима вокзал - Siberia

Maladie de la Jeunesse

Ferdinand Bruckner – Cie Les Échappés Vifs
Mise en scène Philippe Baronnet
Janvier 2016

Crédit photo : Olivier Allard

Maladie de la Jeunesse

Sound designer and composer based in Paris, working for theatre and audio installations.

Maladie de la Jeunesse

jlafos

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