Enrico Ascoli's Field Recordings: Recent Episodes
Enrico Ascoli
Enrico Ascoli is a sound artist, experimental composer and sound designer. His work has an organic and natural texture that often born from his love for field recordings. This podcast channel could be considered as a travel journal of interesting sound recorded working for documentaries around the world.
Myanmar: Train Mandaly to Yangoon - 16 hours travel at medium speed of 30km per hour. Wagons are crowded with people sitting everywhere. Burmese travelers smile a lot but don't talk so much, may be because trains are so old and rusty to be so noisy that it's quite impossible to listen someone voice.
At each station peddlers tribe invade the carriages singing and shouting their beautiful repetitive cries to sell many different qualities of food.
The Shwedagon is the most sacred Buddhist pagoda in the Thuwanabumi, Southpart of Myanmar, as it is believed to contain relics of the four previous Buddhas of the present kalpa. These relics include the staff of Kakusandha, the water filter of Koṇāgamana, a piece of the robe of Kassapa, and eight strands of hair from the head of Gautama. Most the Mon people are Theravada Buddhists, and many also follow practices which originated in Hindu astrology. It is important for Burmese Buddhists to know on which day of the week they were born, as this determines their planetary post. There are eight planetary posts, as Wednesday is split in two (a.m. and p.m.). They are marked by animals that represent the day — garuda for Sunday, tiger for Monday, lion for Tuesday, tusked elephant for Wednesday morning, tuskless elephant for Wednesday afternoon, mouse for Thursday, guinea pig for Friday and nāga for Saturday. Each planetary post has a Buddha image and devotees offer flowers and prayer flags and pour water on the image with a prayer and a wish called a Blessing Ritual. hundreds of bells of every sizes are distributed all around. they are used in Buddhist ceremonies for countless reasons, from emphasising the emptiness of the physical world to calling for a sense of mindfulness.
The track "la cuna del sol" is a quick time-lapse on the typical morning of an antimony miner in the Cartoce area (San Luis Potosi, Mexico): the wake up at 5 am, announced by the passage of the first freight train down in the valley, in one of the few little and rural villages at the base of the mountains, the 4 hours of mule track riding a donkey to rich the mine, the breakfast all together around a stove, cooking quesadilla, the march in the long entrance tunnel of the mine, the hard and dangerous job, all hand made, did of explosions, hammering, shoveling rocks and transporting them with heavy carts. I recorded all these materials during the shooting of the documentary Gods of Mexico by Helmut Dosantos in 2016. We spent 10 days leaving together with miners and exploring the 9 level of tunnels. The most impressive sound was the unreal silence of the deepest parts.