sound track to installation 'Einmal ist Keinmal' (2019) @ Zwitschermaschine, Berlin 07.11.19

sound track to installation 'Black Cube' (2023)

the space between here and there, no-place in no-seconds, a wreck safe-crashing into a new beginning where time stares itself into a comforting void...for God so loved the earth that he chose not to save the world.

Feral-ambient soundscapes by Ani Samperi + Jaike Bon Jovi.
Field-recordings by Ani Samperi.
Body-material contact sounds by Julian Meding.
Mixed + mastered by Jaike Bon Jovi.

Scary Building

[from project description of installation]

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings -- always darker, emptier, and simpler.”
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Cycles. Repetition. Desire. Duality. Emotion fascinates and liberates as much as it frightens us, creates uncertainty. It connects us through memory -- to ancient mechanisms of emotional recognition, and to our own animal instincts. The song of the Siren, framed as an evil tool, would cause men to fall to their deaths just to be with them. Playing in the sun by the shore, the women sang floating melodies, drawing in every man whose ship passed by. Loss of control creates uncertainty; uncertainty implies the threat of castration. Yet just to be near that which arouses feeling -- human or otherwise -- we would risk it all.

Lost in a forest, we tend not to surrender to presence but to fear. The benign indifference of the wilderness does not show us our own reflection, so we destroy it -- we build houses, cities, artificial wastelands. For the sake of growth, we praise linear progress over cycles. We have compartmentalized ourselves into various interfaces, defying our own complexity and entropy. Yet we wonder, why we still look up at the stars at night. Perhaps we are not the only animal that sings for pleasure -- purely to arouse emotion: if the ruling ideology of evolutionary theory is functionality, then why do whales sing such long and complex songs when something much simpler may suffice?

Technological processing enables us to create mere shadows of human emotional responses, in this case reduced to an impulse response applied over and over until the semblance of song is destroyed. Paradoxically, each cycle implies progress as it evolves in time, although in reality it devolves: each time it is revisited, the details of the original vocal melody gradually dissolve while the most dominant parts are amplified, resulting in simplification of the frequency response. In each cycle, in order to destroy itself, it must first be remembered -- an eternal return where self-renewal = self-destruction. Our own conception of each following cycle is based on our memory of the ones preceding. However, the emotional memory instigated from the first movement -- that of an enchanting, ancient Swedish call to animals (cows) in a mountain landscape -- becomes lost: what we remember after the first cycle is simply the structure of the previous recordings, as the emotional content fades. The feeling of being entranced by hypnotic beauty and melancholy, of a profound and ancient connection to the natural world, slowly drowns in a sea of sine waves. What is left is an alien soundscape, robbed of complexity and coloured with a different emotional palette. Gradually, it becomes a different kind of beauty -- darker, emptier, simpler.

sound track to 'Einmal ist Keinmal' (2019), sound installation @ Zwitschermaschine 07.11.2019

part of a collection of various works by other artists entitled 'water~sound~city' under the curation of Francisco Petrucci, at Zwitschermaschine gallery, Potsdamer Straße 161, Berlin, 29.11-01.12.2019.

Scary Building

glitterandash

Related tracks