Singing utgör en undersökning av olika skikt av talat språk, bortsett från dess intellektuella innebörd. Stycket utgår från fragment från inspelningar av tal på språk som jag inte behärskar, och min egen röst som försöker förstå dessa främmande ljud: lettiska, polska, finska, japanska och estniska, alla processade genom mitt eget svenska medvetande, min röst och dator.
Beställningsverk för Sveriges Radio/SRC 2008.

Singing is an investigation of different layers in spoken language, except for the actual mening of words. The piece is made of fragments from recordings of speech in languages that I do not understand, and my own voice, trying to understand the other’s sounds. You hear voices in Latvian, Polish, Finnish, Japanese and Estonian, all processed through my own Swedish mind, my voice and my computer. 
Commissioned by Sveriges Radio/SRC 2008.

Singing

These are sixteen birds that doesn’t exist anymore on this planet.
Or, they do exist as stories told by us, in pictures and in words.
But the birds themselves and their sounds are lost forever.

What you hear: I recorded myself saying their names, one at a time. Then I listened carefully to these recordings, I wanted to grasp the melody of the words, and write it down as scores. These I tried to follow, whistling: the sound of the birds' names.
A translation, if you like, from a bird – to a name – to a sound.

This is a sonic artwork that has had many forms over the years. The first one was an installation in 2013 at the The State Darwin Museum in Moscow (a natural history museum), as a part of the 5th Moscow Biennial for Contemporary art. Then it appeared as a multichannel sound piece at Fylkingen's 80th anniversary festival, when the birds got to meet each other in a landscape, an open field just as artificial as themselves. This is a stereomix of that version of the composition.

The Ex-Birds (Field studies l)

UTDRAG, Stereo Arkhangelsk Conversations S Skog

GLHB Visby 0925 30min

Info about the piece and its original context: http://embassyreconstructed.com/index.html
(www.embassyreconstructed.com)

Susanne Skog