Red Rooms in Subterranean Dwellings is a one­-off radio art presentation lasting 31’30”. It explores myriad nagging uncertainties, as they are revealed to be mundane, yet ripe currency for exchange with ever present fear­mongers. Or alternatively, a place to burn a light, indulging introspection and surreal dreaming as a wellspring for imagination.

This piece is a response to H.G. Wells’ “The Red Room” short story from 1874. Taken simply, it’s a brief gothic test of credulity: to cause a shiver, as a fireside read. But typical of Wells, there is another effort there — interpreting and projecting a rapidly shifting social climate. Wells delivers Fear as a commodity, packaged and constrained by the four walls of his Red Room; promoted by an indentured peerage of brokers. This Fear is materially real,
yet allows for conscientious refusal — by sustained efforts to keep light burning in it's shadow.

The passing century has seen rapid shifts to the present day, where we face a far diminished risk and tangible cause for fear. Conscious endeavour has emphatically explored the unknown, and forcefully pursued uncertainty; ultimately fueling discovery, creativity and progress. Regrettably, those misfortunes which do catastrophically disrupt safety and security are too often tractable to evident, deliberate machinations. Our sense of fear is organic and innate, but our attachment to it, often misdirected.

The narrative and sound design are developed by methods of process and constraint. This facilitates the artists working simultaneously, in physical isolation, to produce convergent expression: a structure of narrative voices braided through spatial timbral and rhythmic layers. There is the impression is of a ‘musical’ piece physically mobile in an extensive unfamiliar world.
The language and instrumental devices can seem familiar, but there is ambiguity and strangeness, reflecting the individually dissociative influence of the generative compositional processes. Shifting dynamics and textures let the listener infer their own fears to the strangeness, or find empathic resolve in the leading, dreamlike narrative.

A rich rhythmic and harmonic palette that references and extends the stylings of contemporary electronic music, exploiting a range of software and hardware tools along with field­-sourced recordings, samples and voice processing. The sound artists responsible frequently work with radical applications of acousmatic and concrete techniques, here moderated, to serve an impression of musical norms, gradually revealing little that concedes to convention.

Pangaean Permafaction - Red Rooms In Subterranean Dwellings

Cast in sediments of the last great flood, Pangaean Permafaction stands as a collective of experimental sound artists who may never physically meet.  

Current projects are traversing four points of the globe, between participants in Australia and England:


*A Patch Of Nettles* — a solo sound project from small town New South Wales, Australia, keeping busy adapting field recordings to acousmatic arrangements, constructing electronic instruments and collaborating with strangers. Nettles is regular contributor to the avant garde Disquiet Junto project and is published on Bandcamp and Soundcloud. 


*Pytchblend* —  an English sound artist whose work studies the half-awake moments before the onset of sleep using  AMSR and frisson-inducing spectral manipulation into audio dreamlets. Pytchblend is a regular on RTÉ’s Nova in Ireland, Berlin Community Radio and is published on Bandcamp and Soundcloud and youtube.

*TheNumbersInTheDream* — an English multi-instrumental itinerant sorcerer, wearing a hat of eternal paradox.  At times, he is not real. Other times he creates warmly received echoing melodies shrouded by inscrutable ghost voices. Nick can be found on the Fag Ash Records net label, Soundcloud , youtube and spinning sound on Mixcloud where he inexorably winds new genres in song.

*KeithysDunimselfaMischief* —  an Australian sound artist who poses the question, "does the silence create the sound or does the sound create the silence?"  He finds that the answer is unreservedly, “yes it does”.  He has received regular Australian airplay on RN's Sound Quality , and Bay FM in northern NSW. He enjoys sleeping and is published on Soundcloud. 

Comments

Tony+Morris

Tony+Morris

Siggi We (Linde Wegener)

pytchblend

mouth_in_foot

Tony+Morris

TheNumbersInTheDream