Disquiet Junto Project 0563: Digital Magical Realism
The Assignment: What does this imaginary genre sound like?

Step 1: Think about what a genre means, where it begins, where it ends, what makes a genre a genre.

Step 2: Familiarize yourself with the concept of magical realism, most often associated with the fiction of such authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alice Hoffman, and Haruki Murakami, among others.

Step 3: Imagine what “digital magical realism” would sound like, were it the name of a genre.

Step 4: Record a piece of music that sounds like what you think “digital magical realism” sounds like.

Track notes:

Along with the writers mentioned under the broad umbrella of magical realism, I would also count two of my favourite writers (Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco) as falling - if not squarely into - frequently against the margins of the genre.

Immediately works by Calvino came to mind. After all, I named my home studio after one of the cities from Invisible Cities(Maurilia), so parts of my creative world takes a fair chunk of inspiration from his wonderful mind.

Aside from Invisible Cities, I was reminded of my favourite book of his, the meta-novel, If On A Winter's Night.. (1979) where the reader and the story itself progressively becomes a slippery boundary, before both worlds collapse into each other. With this is mind and this week's prompt I thought about sound collages, musique concrete and field recordings, with material sourced from digital technologies.

I pulled up a personal archive of field recordings made with several different technologies, ranging from lo-fi to hi-fi sources (old phones, digital cameras, minidisc players, handheld digital recorders, nice mic rig.) 

I selected recordings which evoked aspects of If On A Winter's Night.., mostly restricted to ambiences and sounds which possess double-meanings or are general indistinct as to their source. There's also literal references to some of the objects/events/phenomena that feature throughout the book, such as: the sound of trains, streetscapes, the ocean, wind, etc. In some instances the sounds have been manipulated a rendered in more tonal/sonorous forms along with discrete synth textures.

I wanted to create a dense collage of these sounds, much like a hectic dream, where time is compressed and where one skips, zooms and pulls in and out of several environments, seemingly in quick succession. Some transitions appear to blend together, whilst others are more abrupt.

I took the title of this piece from one of the chapters of this book, the beautiful and very poetically named "Without fear of wind or vertigo".

[Disquiet_Junto_0563] Without fear of wind or vertigo

Tristan Louth-Robins is a South Australian artist working principally in the medium of sound art and field recording. Ideas of sound and its signification are key elements in Louth-Robins' practice, traversing the space between the visual and aural his work is realised through the mediums of recordings, installation, visual art and performance. He is interested in sound and its associative implications - including its relationship to objects, technology, urban space, memory and the natural world. 


Since 2005, Louth-Robins has presented work in Australia and internationally as a solo artist, whilst also collaborating with artists, writers, researchers, musicians and performers. 

Working across a vast array of activities encompassing composition, sound design, installation art, field recording and workshops, his work has been featured in events such as the Adelaide Festival of Arts (2006), The National Regional Arts Festival (2012), Mildura-Wentworth Arts Festival (2013), Fairfax Festival (2013) and Adelaide Fringe Festival (2014); and selected works exhibited at galleries including The Australian Experimental Art Foundation (2009), SASA Gallery (2012, 2015), Light Square Gallery (2012) and FELT Space (2015). His audio works have been broadcast on radio including Radio National, Classic FM, The BBC (UK), Acoustic Frontiers (USA) and RBB (Germany).