sunset into evening: cicadas

late afternoon: children and thunder

work in the early afternoon

village street at noon

mid morning; river and flocks

early morning: crickets and goats

These are recordings of soundwalks conducted in and around the village of Magura in Teleorman County in southern Romania in the summer of 2010. It is now a marginal rural community on the edge of modern Europe, but copious archaeological remains  show the rhythms of human life here to have endured for at least eight thousand years. The village sprawls along a dead straight road on the edge of a hill. The river in the valley below meanders tightly. Same as it ever was, the floodplain that surrounds it is still common grazing. 

No-one lives on the far side of the valley. It is too far from the river. The empty banks were once terraced for vineyards in the time of Ceaucescu. Today, measured out by the sporadic buzzing of insects and passing aeroplanes, they are the feeding ground for goats.  The rhythm of the goatherds bringing their flocks to water has the regularity of clock time. The regularity of thunderstorms as they accumulate in the afternoon is a different meteorological time. The babble of the riverflow tells of the state of the weather that has already been. 

The main street draws a line between what is feral and what is domestic. Here the babble of human voices gains the upper hand. They subdue and contain the roaming flow of animals and birds. At the same time there is an interplay of speeds that creates a counterpoint between modes of transport. The Doppler shift of passing cars masks and obliterates the sound of anything else. By contrast, the sound of a horse drawn cart retains a certain transparency. You can still listen though it, even before it passes over the auditory horizon and into history.


magura