CLAUDIO CURCIOTTI . Nepalese: Sounds from Nepal

“Field abuse” is a project from Italian sound artist Claudio Curciotti and photographer Eleonora Trani where they document visually and sonically the loudness of the contemporary world in relation with religion, ethnic music and traditional cultures. ‘Nepalese: Sounds from Nepal’ is a selection from the many many recordings Claudio captured during his trip to Nepal that greatly display the beautiful sonorities of this young country with an ancient cultural legacy and spiritual and religious tradition.

The recordings are complemented with a series of photographs by Claudio and Eleonora that provide visual cues to the beautiful sounds captured here.

Phonographic works like ‘Nepalese: Sounds from Nepal’ are always an amazing experience that literally recreates a journey through many places with different sonorities as it establishes a relation in real time between the listener and a passed moment in time that will never repeat itself.

This is the first publication of this kind by IH, where sound acquires a meaning beyond a mere imaginary, as it serves a window between our lives and the lives of other people and the sounds that define their everyday life.

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Jan Kees Helms . Comfort

Once every two weeks Jan Kees Helms works as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital during the night while most of the people are sleeping. It is quiet but there is no complete silence: Every night he hears the same sounds from the heating, a chair, the door, walking at the stairs and an old computer. He recorded these sounds during one night. The next night he mixed them as two layers without any additional processing, to keep the sound of the building as original as possible. The meaning was to make a pure composition with only the sounds of the night during that short period of two nights.

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Christopher McFallL . Lost at sea and seldom found

When I started working on the Impulsive Habitat release, I first composed the track ‘A Black Nightingale Ascension’ which reflects some of my newest workings done with treated tape, vocal, field recordings, piano recordings and sampled material. There’s a lot of twists and turns with this particular track and the routing of the composition seemed to imply an innate sense of journey. Some of the field recordings were composed from source material of birds here in the city, a favorite recording source for me for some time now. With all of this in mind, the title came into being. There are some engaging melodies that emerge out of the murky static and to me, the recordings convey a sense of broken nostalgia, of loss and recovery.

With the concept of broken nostalgia and of loss and recovery in mind, the idea of going back to the archives and work with lost and unfinished material seemed like an interesting way to give to “Lost at sea and seldom found” a substantial turn.

The track ‘As Red As Snow Could Be’ is an alternate version of a release I did for ‘Self-Preservation Intact With Teeth.’ Effectively, this work was reworked and remastered for the final composition. I rather enjoyed this version in particular and wanted to share it with everyone. It reflects a certain subtle interplay of sounds; a slow swoon into the abyss.

‘Hallowedweenie’ has remained unreleased to date and was composed from sounds from the local train yard as well as random field recordings. A funny story accompanies this piece, as
I originally composed it for play in a haunted house at a Halloween party that this girl Beth had organized. The whole affair turned out to be a bust because when the party came around I was sick with the flu. I had this infatuation with Beth at the time and she was interested in my work, so there were a few other possibilities at play there, I suppose. On the day of the party she called asking that I bring the work to the haunted house but I was too sick to drive it there. She refused to send someone by to pick it up, so it just stayed on my computer until now. My friend Robert stopped by to check in on me that day and I was sort of down about how things had worked out with this one, as I had put some serious time and effort into composing this track.
I was also a bit upset about Beth. Robert listened to the work and really enjoyed it. He also sympathized a bit with me about blowing things with Beth. As he left he said “Well, it is what it is. You should just call the track ‘Hallowedweenie!’ Hahaha! You win some and loose some.” and so that’s what it became. So, everyone please do me a favor and give it a play on Halloween, if you think of it.

‘The Persistence of Breakable Memory’ is a rework of some of the material I did for ‘Grayscale Is Failing’ and the result came out really well.

‘Track III’ is a variant of the release ‘Friend of 12.’ This version is shorter but the remastering really brought out certain aspects of the work that seemed to be missed in the original version of the release. After listening to the original version a few more times, I felt that some of the parts came off a bit ‘murky’ and there were parts that I wanted to rework, so this is the resulting track.

-Christopher McFall

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Andy Graydon & Kenneth Kirschner . Frame, fault, fold

Andy Graydon’s Untitled (fault) was the first project presented at Marian Spore, a 16,000 square foot art space that opened in Brooklyn in September 2009. Marian Spore is an exhibition that grows over time. For the duration of its existence, new artworks are periodically added,
but none are taken away.

For a number of weeks, Untitled (fault) was the only work on view in this cavernous industrial space. Its mass was minimal – two powered speakers, mixer, turntable and acetate record – but its presence filled the whole volume of the space.

Untitled (fault) is an acetate record that contains field recordings taken by Andy at an exhibition of 19th century photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One side of the disc consists of a single durational recording; the other side comprises a series of locked grooves – short audio clips that repeat over and over as the record turns.

The first thing that drew me to Untitled (fault) was its relationship to museum spaces. The piece takes audio from one space and overlays it on top of another. When Andy and I first tested the piece at Marian Spore, it was surprisingly transformative. Ghosts of detached voices wafted through the space, and the hum of ventilation created an institutional atmosphere.

Museum exhibitions are typically documented only through installation photographs, which circulate widely and are a primary avenue for most audiences’ encounters with artwork.
These images erase both audio and audience, presenting the exhibition experience as both disembodied and purely visual. With its focus on the forgotten audio of these spaces,
Untitled (fault) reminds us that the reception of artwork is situated, embodied and contingent.

As I sat with Untitled (fault) each week during Marian Spore’s open hours, my relationship with it began to change. I liked the way its waves described the hard flat perimeter of the space. One visitor drew my attention to how the audio continued to reverberate in the space for several moments after shutting off the speakers. The sound began to seem like something felt more than listened to, a physical presence rather than a signal.

The physicality of the record is also important to the work. Acetate is a malleable material normally used only for test pressings in the production of a vinyl record. After a few listens, they begin to wear out. But it is this very temporariness that Graydon prizes.

Each day at Marian Spore, I choose a locked groove to play. Its repetition is the rhythm of my day. I believe I can hear its steady disintegration as the needle scratches across the record’s surface. The change is gradual and mysterious. During our preparation for this project, Andy said to me that sound is a “slippery medium.” I didn’t exactly know what he meant, but now I think I do. It is nearly impossible to hold the sound in your head from one moment to the next,
to remember what it once sounded like so that you may chart its evolution.

Now, Marian Spore has been open for nearly seven months. Four other works are installed alongside Untitled (fault). Continuous use each Sunday has nearly worn away all of the locked grooves, which are filled with a fine blue acetate dust. The durational recording, which has seen less use, is also steadily deteriorating. Perhaps the object is nearing the end of its useful life. Still, even in its most obliterated parts, I still imagine that I can detect the contours of the original recording.

Michael Connor

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Hiroki Sasajima . Into the nothings

All field recordings were collected around some lakes at the foot of Mt. Fuji when the sacred mountain is enveloped by night and quietness comes in. A sort of faint sound appears and disappears cyclically and in addition the flow of cold air exudes another identical quietness…

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JAMES McDOUGALL . Mountain upon a phosphorescent sky

“For every 100 meters of ascension there is a gain of one less degree in temperature. But it is still hot here and this is typically where the storms break before heading east over that heat sink of a city. There is a state of palpable imminence: ineffectual ceiling fans churn against the stifling heat, a built up charge runs from the western coal fire plants, coursing through the mammoth power lines that cut right through the mountain; ear piercing cicadas phase in chorus, the approaching, increasing portend ,…” -James McDougall-

Specs: Stereo mic, contact and hydro pezo mics; all recordings sourced from key locations across The D’Aguilar Mountain Range, north west of Brisbane, Australia.

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Juan Antonio Nieto . Indoor

Indoor originates from recordings done by the artist in his own house in Madrid where he performed percussive exercises with objects such as glasses, wood, paper, lamps, furniture and pretty much whatever he got his hands on; those objects were hit, rubbed, blowed, teared, scratched, stretched and through all kind of percussive processes. Those exercises are clearly influenced by Juan Antonio’s background as a drummer/percussionist.

Juan Antonio recorded a total of five sessions and selected two and overlap them in layers giving them a brand new emotional sense. Finally he created a background based on field recordings of pouring rain over glass that he later manipulated creating an inmutable wall of sound.

We feel quite enthusiast and privileged to publish this release in a point where Juan Antonio’s career is taking such an interesting turn.

Cover art by David Vélez

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DALLAS SIMPSON : The alarming blend of three arches

«This is one of an occasional series of works exploring the sonic potentialities of bridges.

Bridges have many connotations. As physical structures they span spaces and may support movement over or under. The ‘bridge’ of a musical instrument facilitates the transmission of sound to the body of the instrument. While conceptually, ‘bridging’ occurs metaphorically and in many abstract ways through time and space, and both linguistically and musically.

Taking the environmental exploration of physical bridges as the starting point for creative exploration in sound we can explore the resonant cavity under the bridge, the physical structure of the bridge itself or the movement of elements below or above. Using physical disturbance to incarnate unexpressed sonic potentialities, elements of structure and resonance may be elicited which allude to its inherent physicality, including metaphorical and abstract aspects of its locality, history and purpose.

‘The Alarming Blend of Three Arches’ was created live in a single take, under a railway bridge near Glaisdale, North Yorkshire, UK, and recorded using custom in-ear binaural techniques. All sounds wre created live at the location and at one point a house alarm or car alarm spontaneously activated, which was incorporated into the improvisation. The original recording has been edited and mixed from the original without any additional processing in order to improve the intensity and enhance the spatial choreography of the work.»
- Dallas Simpson, November 2009

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Joaquín Gutierrez Hadid : Vending machine

The ‘Vending machine’ is the first of a series of works regarding industrial design objects. These machines offer drinks, snacks and hot food. It is to remark that there’s no human intervention in this process besides the buyer’s. For that reason, a track was included with the manteinance services of one of the vending machines to make the whole process visible; the voices of the workers (responsible for the reloading of items inside the machine) including in this conversation the learning of one of them’s work.

The composition attempts to show not only the interaction space generated by a daily moment, but also an analisis of the object itself.
The material was recorded during the first months of 2009 when I started to attend the Urbanism Degree Course. Every morning, in between classes, I used to buy from these vending machines located at the third floor of the building, not crowded, silent and with imponent resonance and visual presence of the machines. This way, I started to bond with this machine on a daily basis.
Field recordings taken at College of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, Universidad de Buenos Aires.

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