This is the second live version of “Bizalom”, part of a performance for the Space and Sometimes Movement show at MPavilion, February 2019, working with a Yamaha wave-field synthesis sound system. 

“Bizalom” was initially conceptualised with the 4DSOUND system at the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest (2018), during a period of early experimentation. I was playing with field recordings I’d made of the sea in Greece some time before, exploring the capability of the Budapest studio to create a moving, sounding ocean beneath my feet. I began to incorporate other field recordings from Greece and other travels, creating different weather states and environments to see if the omnidirectional 4DSOUND studio could fully re-immerse me in those memories (it could). 

The work became a sound meditation that I used as a practice of deep listening for myself and whomever came into the studio to listen. The work on this inspired me to think and write about how sound triggers memory of place, which then triggers more emotionally charged memories. 

I added a recording of the artists in the residency playing in a rainstorm that happened during this time. A train journey in Athens with a yappy dog. Street sounds in a Berlin suburb. Someone playing an old piano in a neighbour’s apartment in Paris. All real, fuzzy, moments in time, just moments when I’d thought to press record. I experimented with electronic pulses and suggestions of melody, exploring the emotional and narrative effects of introducing low and high frequencies and synthetic weather effects.

I’ve long been intrigued by the Seikilos epitaph, the oldest surviving complete musical notation; a timeless poetic message of living life. I had a MIDI file of the tune, that inspired another dimension to this work. 

I began to include my own poetic story prompts, inspired by meditations on the word “trust”, which I had ‘received’ as an answer to a question I took to the Delphi oracle years before. I enlisted the voices of other artists in residence, including Petko Ognyanov, Ana Amorós, Kate de Lorme, and Vladimir Razhev, to speak the word for trust in Greek, English, and Hungarian (“bizalom”). Petko also read the inscriptions from the Seikilos epitaph.

Bizalom

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LAPKAT is Lisa Greenaway - sound artist, sound designer, spoken word and storytelling producer, DJ, broadcaster, based in Melbourne Australia.

New tracks tagged #Seikilos Epitaph