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61253 a rain of light ~.
A new CD and digital download available only on the Staalplaat Bandcamp page.
The recordings in this collection represent the piecemeal output of some eighteen months of sporadic and undirectional labor; sitting with the material at hand, selecting and shaping fragments that seemed to have possibilities, and gradually forming the compositions.
In reviewing them it was readily observed that there were certain preoccupations: dilations of time, evocations of light and water, vaprous and ringing voices somewhat obscured or misted over by other accompaniments. I gravitate toward such themes, as if reluctant to accept the solidity of things, wishing to emphasize their impermanence and evanescence as defining qualities.
I N V ER T S QU A R E Try listening on a forlorn or other wise unwanted journey; your mood will balloon considerably.
61115 market street.
In this recording, we happen upon a busy market street in Serdar (in the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan), where the sidewalk vendors, weary of the chore of calling out to passersby, have by and large relegated the tedious and tiring task of enticing buyers to electronic boxes with tinny loudspeakers.
61130 from a book of silent stories ~.
Axiomata
Silence is never absolute. Silence is not silent in the literal sense.
Silence is symbolic of an active psycho-perceptual space.
There exist stories not told in words.
From far away, a signal arrives. We study its every detail. It pulseswith life and at length we hear it speak, voices leaking in from beyondthe unseen curtain.
61062 pyramids.
The famous pyramid complex at Giza lies on a limestone plateau, pressed up tight next to the noisy modern city. This is how we saw it, shrouded in a dense urban smog that lent a 19th-century paper print quality to these digital captures.
61164 mountain rain.
Let us listen for a brief while to the sound of a spring rainstorm arriving, and then receding, in the city of Mestia, the regional capital of Georgia’s Svaneti.
61165 tsqaltubo.
We visit the old Medea sanatorium in the once-thriving Georgian spa town of Ts’q’alt’ubo (წყალტუბო), whose healing radon waters have been known for hundreds of years. During Soviet times, workers’ spas were established, then left to decay after 1989. With its delapidated surfaces and an insurge of plant life, within its empty corridors and gaping window frames, these ruins evoke a kind of dreamlike state.
61174 zorats karer.
While some claim that Zorats Karer (perhaps ‘stone army’), a site lying in the southern Syunik province of Armenia, is an ancient astronomical observatory along the lines of the UK’s Stonehenge, recent research suggests that it is a cemetery and fortification of the 1st millennium BCE. Also known as Qarahunj (possibly ‘speaking stones’), precisely made holes in many of them were made either to aid in hauling them by rope, or to manifest a chorus of eerie moaning sounds went the wind blows strongly over the steppe.
60901 memory leak.
I ask you, how many tellings, after a pause, begin again with:‘…and then I remembered…’ ? Now tell me, how many tellings by people simply sharingwith each other their everyday happenings, re-begin with:‘…and now I remember having remembered…’ ?Darosvali Rorosuret
60950 emitted omissions ~.
The present collection forms an anthology of six works, a selection of filecasts taken from our ongoing web presence. Each work here reaches its ultimate form as a 24-bit 48k remaster or remix, and also finds its place within a new sequence of thematically connected works. Using everything from whispering radio static and gently lapping waves to undulating feedback and spiraling harmonic pulsations, these works fit into a sequence that for some might express the desolation of our digitally isolated lives, for others a sonic journey soaked in the characterizing ambiences of our times.
60825 whence rivers are born.
We sit on the shoulder of Ushba, the twin-peaked mountain of Svaneti, where cows graze the alpine meadows, and the July sun melts the last of the winter snows into the lakelets known as Koruldi. Across the valley, separated from us by the river Mukhra and city of Mestia, shines the mountain range over which lies Racha; and above us reigns Mount Ushba with her white shawl of glaciers, whence rivers are born.
60854 indirection.
The thought pierces your awareness: The destination you seek is nigh as your path sidles the edge of a dark glade, into which it veers a bit ahead. Your eardrums tickle with the intuition that something goes on within, but concretely what you could not say. It strikes you, too, that you are being observed, by someone who may — or may not — be your adversary.
60890 echoes of light.
In the whisper of a passing moment, almost unnoticed, you detect the exhaustion of a certain energy, a kind of deflation, as a heavy cloudpasses between the sun and the small window of your room. For an instant, there is an almost negligible sinking feeling. But the cloud passes, and themoment arights itself.
60897 fulgent ascent.
There are many ambiguities that we struggle with, seeming as keys to various everyday mysteries. Living thus in confoundment, we probe incessantly, an often futile task that nonetheless sometimes at random and unexpectedly affords us the occasional instant, wherein the dark mists clear, and there takes place a permanent change in understanding.
60943 phase invert.
Birds are flying overhead.Here they have always flown overhead.If time is a straight line then it is also a spiral. Events that abut one another, either along or across this coil, may up and knock upon the doors of our attention and beg to be compared. This resonance may explain why some memories, and present impressions, are more solid and real than others.
60766 scattered places in broken time ~.
This collection of works is scattered all over the map. The choice to use any of its recordings depends only on the inherent qualities of the sounds recorded, with no regard given to the where and when.
They are not only severed from their natural time, but broken up internally, dealing with the recorded material as a wholly plastic form.
They are torn from the circumstances of their making, and then further cut, shaped, multiplied, reversed and combined with other signals. …
Digital download includes a pdf booklet with detailed notes.
60800 from Guilin to Emeishan.
When a new sun, having risen over an unfamiliar horizon, strikes your face, something more of you than usual awakens. To be blinded by this fresh light propels a bounty of pure perceptions to accept. As the glare recedes, the eyes may open to something lovely and satisfying and fully rounded, but also fully outside one’s ken.
To put oneself on a trail, and to wander from wonder to wonder, is a practice that reaches inside and stirs things up. It puts places before you, and you before places, of which echoes may have sounded already from afar. You are there become an outsider, and in so becoming may taste the elusive bliss of seeing a thing new, as if with the eyes of a child.
This is a collection of images made during a January 2025 journey in the southeastern China provinces of Guǎngxī 广西, Guìzhōu 贵州, Chongqing 重庆 and Sìchuān 四川. This area comprises the most ethnically diverse part of China, with an untold number of isolated towns and hamlets testifying to a rich cultural and historical diversity.
60638 reversal (crows).
Find any city that has winter and, just at that part of year when the analēmma rounds its lower arc, wait until the sun begins to go down; thence hie you to the outskirts of the settled quarters to seek a more vacant, derelict area, and there find a lonely cluster of trees. You will bear witness to the restive sounds of assembling crows, gathering thither to discuss the matters of the day.
60646 procession.
On a late summer morning, we leave the heat of the Chéngdū streets behind, and wander into the cool garden of the Wénshū Yuàn Temple and Monastery, one of the most important Zen Buddhist centers in China. We observe as a procession of chanting adherents passes through.
60669 ever not ever.
You see a town from afar. From here, only little can be discerned: rooftops, chimneys, towers, absences for marketplaces and squares. As you move closer, different perspectives slowly emerge. The roofs describe themselves in wooden shingles or clay tiles; the road splits into streets; the walls of buildings become barriers that constrain and guide you on. Towers hover over solid enclosures, which can now be entered and wondered at. The small surfaces of the distant view are dissolved and reblended to form the details of the individual structures, while in the voids above the streets and between the buildings, small birds play in the wind.
60677 éblouisse.
When the wind is sharpand the light flutters over the icethe fine hairs bristleantennætuned to where the sun’s beamhaving crossed a hundred million milescomes to restand alights like a sparrowon the tip of my finger.
60720 as yet untitled.
„On a day when the wind is blowing, be certain to listen for the surfaces it touches and the things it carries away.If you listen well, a kind of certainty will appear within you, unbidden, like the arrival of the first birds.It will pull you out of slumber. It will dress you in warm clothing.It will open the time of summer and you will carry it with you for many days.“ Darosvali Rorosuret
60784 an atmosphere.
A recordist’s dilemma: Together with the (sometimes) at-odds goal of picturing for you the ambiences of weather and changing light as a more than simply visual description of the site, I am at the same time trying to include also the “feeling” (for lack of a better word) of the place; its atmosphere, if you will.
60584 the poison cup.
„It seems not that I was dreaming of something, but rather that I was dreaming of remembering something that had happened previously in the dream, and in the dream time, rather than in waking life. And so, I thought, each dream brings along with it its own complete world.“ Darosvali Rorosuret
60615 tell it to the water.
“Water has listened to many dreams. It is a custom in [our] culture: If you have a bad dream, you tell it to the water so that the current takes it away and the nightmare doesn't come true. I imagine how my dream flows into the river and is taken somewhere far away. And then the dream will return again as rain, showering down in front of my house. Or in winter, it will fall as snow and cover the yard and the stairs.”
From the documentary film: No Body and the Blue Sky (Gvelesiani and Peirce, 2021).
60593 tashkent bazaar.
In the twenty years since my first visit to Tashkent, the city has succeeded in becoming a car-choked busy modern hub. But the slower tradition of the central bazaar as a general-goods shopping place is still a living presence the the post-soviet sphere. And so we occupy our morning by looking around the Eski Juva Bozori, and, as you will hear in the recording, buying some tea.
60561 road to samarkand.
Once upon a time, together with friends, I took a shared taxi across the semi-arid landscape of Uzbekistan, on our way west from Tashkent to Samarkand. I revisit this old history now, because soon I will repeat this journey in the other direction, after a lapse of twenty years and a month.
In looking at these photographs again, I can recall the taste the road dust in the air, hear the roar of passing Soviet-era heavy trucks, and feel the hot wind in my face from the open car window. I can vividly remember the bright colors of the women’s clothing at the road stops, and their shining faces, curious about these strangers in their midst.
As a simultaneous prefiguration, as well as a commemoration of the route, I offer these meagre images.
60511 mortal coil.
In which we devise a circumstance wherein the tortional energy stored in a long rusty helical doorspring (among alia) becomes a physical,as well as aural, metaphor for the tumult and turmoil referred to in the erstwhile, more classical, sense of the word, ‘coil.’
60500 every forever is written in rust ~.
The abstraction of distance — the elemental dimension of length — defines the narrow mold into which the experience of time is poured. As we are pulled through this channel, the charge of ourselves passes over the landscape like tinned ghosts, touching nothing, while the land unscrolls beneath us. Yet the overwhelming sensation is that we are motionless, spectators within an enveloping projection.
The rush, the white noise of a moving vehicle is like the sound of a crash smeared across time; a slow-moving tragedy. It is as if the moment actually lived is foreshortened from a point of view that is shackled to neurology. Watch the passing lights; in the patterns that they cast, they reflect only the prescribed geometries of space and time.
Once all of the parts were in place, the present collection took shape quickly. But getting to that point was the effort of years of journeying, collecting, auditing and editing. The conclusions that I have drawn at the end of this often circuitous process are placed before you only in the experience of listening itself. Each of these works puts its own final point on the process from which they arose.
60484 highway.
A highway is but a single thread in the open fabric of the landscape; its path and form constrained by the contours of the earth. The present work is a composed drone that has been cast and worked from material that was selectively mined from recordings of highways and other forms of travel. It withholds any impression of where and when, emphasizing the featurelessness of the source material as a way of probing its power and uncovering its mesmeric potential.
60477 bar bard.
Our guide takes us to a bar in the evening; already from the street it sounds like a good time. We go in, I take the only unoccupied chair, which is at the back of the room. Smiling people are all around listening to a local minstrel bowing a one-string instrument and happily singing. We listen as the clever worder strums his instrument and improvises bons mots, causing much mirth, (I am later told) on a wide variety of topics, such as local gossip, as well as more serious subjects like politics. He makes the rounds, collecting the encouragement of small banknotes. He comes around to me and sings several pointed strophes, but I do not understand his tongue. What am I to do? I smile and clap along with the rest. I am later told that he sang this to me: ‘I would be happy if the foreigner gave me a dollar.’
Image and video by Tamás Sajó, recorded 7 February 2019 in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.
60231 painted over.
Here and there, as we wander the streets of Kashan, we observe patches of yellow paint appearing at random on the walls; their distinctive shade suggests that all originate from the same supply of paint. I am told that this is to cover up the graffiti that sometimes appears. (Since other graffiti are left unpainted-over, we can only speculate about what offence was committed by the writings so effaced.)
60410 desert stop.
We find a fierce and subtle place along a highway leading out from the city; not really far, but ever so distant in character. At the edge of a fragmented plain, tawny sand laced with salt crystals and dotted with brine pools, we stop to take in the effects of the place: a dead lake, a jagged horizon, a date farm. After a scrambling climb, from my perch atop a shifting dune, my face to the gritty wind and dazzling sunset, I taste eternity.
60366 it is almost what it seems to be.
I do not wish to go out on a limb and tell you what I think this means. In the first place, I do not really know. I feel myself merely the conduit, the source is somewhere beyond me, untraceable. Secondly, such explanations are superfluous, and anyway, prone to frequent and futile revisions. Why speak? Why, indeed.
60359 mirror.
We wander the forest of a dead volcano, whose peak still exhales a warm breath from the insides of the earth. As the mountain sighs above us, the woodpeckers hammer and the crows caw. We come across this limpid pool, and gaze as if “… through a glass darkly.”
60353 at nightfall.
This out-of-the-way place attracts gapers and gazers from many lands, who have come to see its various natural and cultural wonders, only to find that an eerie wind has swept them up like so many leaves and brought them to rest at a lonely mountain hotel.
60349 at daybreak.
All cities have their edge places, areas of indifference, where life goes on outside the fovea of modernity. Daylight also has an edge, and when its sun comes to play across these fractured surfaces, it outlines contrasts and deepens shadows, the hiding places of the quotidian. By chance, strangers may end up here, and sometimes they bring fresh eyes with which to see.
60330 the nth iteration.
Having been over it many times, I cannot think of what to say about it. That is to say, to say what is final and honest and true about it. And in so saying, to use only those words that are clear and right and just. And at the same time, to say about it whatby any means must be said, and then no more, leaving only a sparkling and pure essence. And then put an end on it. I must therefore leave it here, broken off, the question unanswered.
60324 road to ahlat.
As we set out on a road that takes us from the old citadel of Van along the northern shore of the great lake that shares its name, we can see in the distance that towering thunderheads are acccumulating in the west. The storm passes over us and subsides just as we approach Ahlat and its medieval Seljuk cemetery.
60322 tibetan lunch.
After our visit to the monastery of Tagong, we go into a restaurant run by a Tibetan family, where the owners pause their own family meal to prepare a dish of yak and greens for us. I peek into the kitchen to see what is going on. The cook seems to be using the exhaust from a jet engine in the service of stir-fry.
60311 the animal inside.
I am trying to gather what cannot be contained in a waveform. The memory of a thing is not solid. It lives under a tiny glass dome. Upon close examination, it begins to fade. It fades most quickly in the center of focus, a kind of inverse fovea, and it oozes out between our clutching fingers.
60303 wind in the leaves.
On a warm spring day overlooking the Qudyalçay, a river which severs the community of Mountain Jews of Quba from its Azeri neighbors, we gaze out across the valley, teaming with buzzing insects and birds, from under the shade of a billowing apple tree at the edge of the local Jewish cemetery.
60162 sanctuary. An oblique reverie that interleaves the modernity of cities, these concrete nesting zones, this electro-magnetic womb, these veins and arteries of traffic, this neurology of informatic systems, and the metaphorical megabody in which everyone of us, even as each of us is an individual incomprehensibly complex, is a mere corpuscle.
60181 tunnel song. The flash of light from the rack of surveillance cameras above us signals that our pictures have been taken as we enter the Yăyè Expressway, passing through the mountainous Garzê Tibetan Prefecture of Sìchuān — of which we see only brief glimpses among the endless series of long, long tunnels — on our way back to Chéngdū. The driver begins to recite a chant from memory — or is it improvised? Is it a practice simply to keep awake — the road is long — or is it a kind of prayer?
60168 octalogue ~. This is a compilation of eight filecasts, a single thread pulled from the tapestry of work at our presence on the web, nula.cc. Here, each work takes its ultimate form as a 24-bit 48k remaster or remix, and also finds its place within a sequence where all mutually support one another.
About the image: As the wind blows through the surrounding steppe, precisely carved holes in the menhirs of Karahunj (“the speaking stones”) make eerie whistling sounds. The ancient stone circle lies in the lowlands of southern Armenia.
60125 liminal phase. This piece is based on field recordings made in Adıyaman, Turkey, during the continuing demolitions of apartment buildings, many very new, that were structurally weakened by the February 2023 earthquake, with a magnitude of 7.8. The demolitions reportedly razed as many as four entire neighborhoods 1 in the city.
This track is exclusively available on the compilation Framework Seasonal #14 : summer 2023.
60066 street scenes nº2. Mardin. As a small ensemble plays music at the side of a busy street in this southeast Anatolian city, a boy dances along, feeling his way along the persistent stream of rhythm. Meanwhile, the street carries on just being a street, with people doing their people things.
59990 voices from afar. In which we weave together contrasting voices, human or otherwise, drawn from obscure sources, into a magic carpet that plies the waves of the digital ætherium just as did Odysseus the seas of old.
A contribution to the Soundy Variations compilation, edited by Daniel Blumin for the 2023 WFMU Fundraising Marathon.
59955 we see beneath. A dry description of the locale will not satisfy the task of describing the place; especially when the experience of it interleaves objective perception, memory, dilated time, and all the other observations that come from being in an unfamiliar place over a period of days. And so we are left with this set of allusions.
Thanks to: Sonic Futures Residencies and Semi Silent. Special thanks to Anamaria Pravicencu, and all of my fellow resident sound artists.
59787 border crossing. We came up to Kutaisi from Erzurum by bus.
At Hopa, on the Black Sea, we hopped onto a packed marshrutka (minivan bus) and proceeded to the Turkish-Georgian border at Sarp (Georgian Sarpi).
Inside the sweltering border crossing confined area, we stood in line among other border-crossers, many of whom were weighed down with great hauls of cartons of cigarettes and large containers of cooking oil, among other treasures.
On the other side, we got onto another packed marshrutka and proceeded to Batumi. It seems like we are suddenly in the tropics. Banana and palm trees can be seen and the greenery is healthy and lush. It is cloudy and the air is sultry and coastal.
In Batumi, we would like to take the train, but we find out at the station the wait would be four hours and the arrival time would be late in the evening. So we pop onto yet another marshrutka, this one taking us north along the Black Sea coast, appearing as a gray flat surface of inscrutable composition. (It is water? a cloudy mirror? gray linoleum?)
Just south of Poti, we turn inland, along a brisk efficient highway, finally arriving in Kutaisi in the early evening.
I am back at Giorgi’s guesthouse, and I have been here often enough over the years that it starts to feel just a little bit like home. As I write this, I am staring at a great tree sagging with pink apples, the neighborhood dogs hold competitive choir practice, proud roosters crow occasionally from various directions, and cars and heavy trucks rumble by on the uneven street. All sounds that are familiar to me by now.
Next, we get into a car and go to Svaneti.
59784 nightfall. The border town of Kars lies in the eastern edgelands of Turkey, as Anatolia rises up to meet the border with Armenia. It has long elicited in me a feeling of remoteness and melancholy, no doubt the effect of the many romantic travelogues I read as a youth. In these, the town invariably played the character of a wistful, unsettling stopping point on the way to greater adventures.
Kars serves as a stopping point for us, too, on our way to the ruins of Armenian Ani (about which more herein elsewhere). We arrive late, but after dinner, I find my pre-adolescent remembrances of those travelogues surging, and so I wander the depopulated streets with my camera, finding views, as I struggle to recall the feelings the name of Kars once brought up in me.
59785 vantage point. Even from such a cursory visit, (see nightfall), this much we know: Kars is a place of traders and merchants. From our hotel window on the third floor, I spy on their early morning activities: people on the street on their way to somewhere; trucks coming and going, unloading goods; other people as they share tea and make deals before the shops open to customers in the mid-morning. It looks contemporary in these images, but these practices are age-old. The frontispiece image dates from the 1870s, during a period of Russian control of the Kars region.
59786 ruins of ani. We leave Kars behind in the early morning, and make our way across a rolling landscape of grasslands and animal flocks under a brilliant sky pocked with the merest indication of clouds, which the mounting sun means swiftly to boil away. In due course, we reach the the Armenian city of Ani, which is our purpose in coming along this route. Already 800 years a ruin, it abuts a ravine that forms the border with Armenia.
60053 the hypnagogic cycles. Installation for four-channel sound and motion pictureDuring the state of hypnagogia,we enter … “a kind of ‘montage situation,’ emerging from a jumble of random fragments of memories, experiences and perceptions. It is no coincidence that the 20th century has sometimes been called the century of film, and the film medium a mechanism for generating dreams. In a sense, an instance of The hypnagogic cycles is amounts to the author looking back at the vanishing art of cinema” (curator Miloš Vojteěchovský).
The work Hypnagogické cykly will appear at the Dům umění, the House of Arts in Brno, Czechia, from 18 April to 9 June, 2023.
60000 latent subject. My machine eye wanders and roves, it pierces and probes. Through it, eye apparently select what to remember. Its elephant’s memory eye envy, and my wish is to pierce, yet preserve, its enigma.
I have only a blurry idea of what the subject of these photographs is; but I do not doubt that there is one. They were captured in places I have been in recent years, thoughthey have only lately been selected and arranged.
Welcome toJulian day 2,460,000. What will the next ten thousand days bring?
59966 beyond sublargo ~. The tracks that make up this album consist of six distillations of much longer improvisations made for the 22-hour radio broadcast Beyond sublargo, which were produced for the Radio Art Zone project in 2022.
Twenty-two hours is an expansive canvas, an unpainted Sistine ceiling; an ocean, a national railway’s-worth of tracks and junctions. A solar system. An endless steppe. I set out to fill this void with a collection of slow dynamisms that indulge my long-standing fascination with what human attention undergoes when faced with endless plains, vast oceans, the wind and weather, the blur of travel, and the birds and stars above.
59909 kars and environs. It wasn’t the poverty or the helplessness that disturbed him; it was the thing he would see again and again during the days to come—in the empty windows of photography shops, in the frozen windows of the crowded teahouses where the city’s unemployed passed the time playing cards, and in the city’s empty snow-covered squares. These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.
From the 2002 novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk, describing the return of his protagonist, a political refugee and poet, after a long absence.
Kars is a city in suspended animation, a museum of its more prosperous past. … The frozen atmosphere is heightened by the region’s heavy snowfall, by the fact that kar is the Turkish word for snow (in early drafts, Pamuk titled his novel Kars’ta Kar, or Snow in Kars), and by the fate of 90,000 Ottoman soldiers who froze to death in a nearby forest during an ill-conceived operation against the Russian Army in the First World War.
From “Natural Histories: A journey in the shadow of Ararat” by Elif Batuman, The New Yorker, October 17. 2011.
59822 port cetate. On a slowly turning bend in the Danube, on the border of Romania with Bulgaria, sits the old port of Cetate. Once, they loaded barges here with wheat from the hinterlands; now it has found new life as a cultural center.
I recently spent ten days there as a participant in the Sonic Futures residency program. These images capture something of the location.
Thanks to: Sonic Futures Residencies and Semi Silent. Special thanks to Anamaria Pravicencu, and all of my fellow residents.
59669 the void calleth. A place named nowhere, now here — the empty set — a cæsura, break, split or gap — a nonce — an elision — a minimus — a leaving-out — a vacuum abhored by nature, and much ado about it — oblivion — Null Island — Rub‘ al Khali — limbo — mu — ex nihilo — absolute zero .
59850 rift zone ~. From 9 November 2022 to 11 February 2023 at Gallery 3 of the Ústí nad Labem Dům umění, in Ústí nad Labem, Czechia.
Sound Installation for Wireless Headphones
Rift zone can be understood as a cryptic fugue of generated and recorded sounds to somehow represent a cross section of the earth’s energies and capture a perceptible subset of them. It is an attempt to describe in sonic terms the under-the-surface characteristics of the mythic elements of earth, air, fire, and water in the context of palpating the earth as a dynamic integrated system. We know that its processes interleave biological, geological and electromagnetic forces from multiple overlapping spheres which sometimes ignore one another and sometimes interact, creating inscrutable outputs. The geophysical sciences tell us much; we have come to understand a great deal, but the earth still clutches its secrets, and, well, if they cannot be described empirically, then at least we can give the imagination free reign.
59670 escale. The train pulls into the crumbling station, an ornate pile of blackened bricks, steel girders framing dust-fogged windows, statuary caked with grime. Erstwhile passengers run from the gathering clouds and cold gusts as the light swiftly evaporates. The ode of the clocktowers begins.
59789 feast day. The feast of k’virik’oba (კვირიკობა), in honor St. Kvirike of the Georgian church, is held every year on top of the mountain in Upper Svaneti where the church of Sts. Kvirike and Ivlita sits. Hundreds of people from all over Georgia come to visit the church, recieve a blessing, and feast. St. Kvirike is associated with hilltops and the pagan god of thunder.
59510 oblivion. In the crepuscular haze of a decaying, but busy, transfer passageway between old urban train stations, we study the gaits, the postures, the faces, the precise trajectories taken, of those who are simply moving between their own personal points A and points B.
59628 ringings ~. In preparation for the project Beyond sublargo, I set up a practice of improvising for an hour or two in my home studio, every day when possible, over a span of several months. A backlog of scraps from a period of more than ten years of collecting source material made it possible to reconnect with obsessions from the recent past, and combine some of them with fresher interests. The present release stands as a distilled segment of the results of this practice.
A consistent passion for me has been for the sound of struck metal, a bell for example, and early one morning as the sun was coming up, this came into sharper focus as I pulled in field recordings from last year’s journey to some of the historic monasteries of Russia’s Golden Ring. I reshaped and recontextualized them in ways that sidestep the overtly devotional, hopefully without entirely eliminating their emotional resonance.
59574 perimeter. It is often hard to know when we are approaching a limit. The contours of our zone of awareness unexpectedly reveal the crumbling ledge when we least expect it. From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached (Kafka).
59750 the hypnagogic cycles. an installation for sound and motion picture
I am pleased to announce the upcoming opening of an installation for four-channel audio and video called Hypnagogické cykly that I have created for the Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava, Czechia.
In English, we use the phrase “to drop off” to refer the process of falling asleep. Drop off of what? It is not specified. But we are reminded by these words of an abyss, an unknowable depth, the danger of leaving behind the world forever. Here, we posit the mind during hypnagogia as a cinema where random synaptic discharges during the process of falling asleep draw strange pictures before the mind’s eye.
More info at the OGV website.
59700 locomotive (redux). an installation for sound and motion picture
Taking the form of an abstract film, but incorporating a certain narrative impulse, this multidimensional work took its first inspiration from various archival recordings of steam locomotives. During the process, contemporary field recordings were also included, as well as a selection of found footage that further subjectivizes the themes developed in the soundtrack.
In 2022, the work was further developed and appeared under the title locomotive ii, a redux, serving the purpose of an installation commissioned for Prague’s historic Masaryk Train Station, as part of the festival m3 Mezi meziprostory (Inbetween the inbetween places).
The installation will be on view from 15 June to 30 September, 2022, at Masarykovo nádraží in the old ticketing area, facing ul. Hybernská.
59266 displacement. What world am I on? We have a sun that rises and sets; we have a moon, too. There is an absent glow; something torn down, trampled upon, and then put back up, gashed and sorry-looking. I see a diffracted vision of the present, its tides and indifferent coercions. I feel unreal in this world, as these and other doubts amass and accrue.
59437 bells of suzdaľ. In this unmanipulated recording, a performance of the bells of the Transfiguration Cathedral Spaso-Efimeyev Monastery in Suzdaľ, one of the towns on the best-known tourist route in Russia, called the „Golden Ring“, takes place.
59310 stochastic elegies ~. These tracks evolved in an exploration of SuperCollider and its apparently limitless possibilities, as filtered through my own modest ability to exploit them. Basic motifs where laid down using stochastic processes and granular synthesis in mincing through a variety of field recordings, whose subject matter was seen as arbitrary and thus an unimportant consideration. At a later stage, various tracks consisting of found materials were layered on to hint at some dramatic or emotional impulse, lest the results languor in an arid academic state. I don’t know whether or not that was entirely successful. A wise man once said: a work of art is never finished, it is merely abandoned. Requiescat.
59500 a thinking ocean ~. In thinking about the Stanisław Lem novel Solaris, about a sentient, mind-reading ocean on a distant planet, which its earthling researchers are incapable of understanding, I arrive at this homage.
Lem is reported to have thought the various film adaptations of his book were off the mark; their failings for him amounted to turning a philosophical problem into a story focused on the erotic problems of the protagonist. In Lem’s mind, Solaris is about nothing less than the limits of reason.
In this sense, it hearkens back to tracks from my Stochastic Elegies, in which there are ‘a hundred chasms … between us and understanding’.
59505 moscow, of late. On a too-quick three-day visit to the modern megalopolis that is the capital city of Russia, a stopping-off, really, onto a deeper and broader late-summer journey that took us deep into the forests and countryside to the northeast (more about which to come), I discovered these views.
59800 beyond sublargo. a multi-part sound work-in-progress for Radio Art Zone as part of Esch2022 Capital of Culture
59460 intercession. Located in a meadow rimmed by a birch forest, at the edge of a placid pond which was once the place where the rivers Nerl and Klyazma joined (they have since changed course) stands the 12th-century Церковь Покрова на Нерли (Church of the Intercession on the Nerl), part of a UNESCO world heritage site. It was also the shooting location for the opening scenes of the film Andrei Rubľov (A. Tarkovsky, 1966).
59479 the limits of reason. The author Stanisław Lem is reported to have thought the various film adaptations of his book were off the mark; their failings for him amounted to turning a philosophical problem into a story focused on the erotic problems of the protagonist. In Lem’s mind, Solaris is about nothing less than the limits of reason.
59407 cicadas. Cicadas may be all the rage this year due to the 17-year brood emerging in North America. However, this recording of an annual brood of cicadas (ჭრიჭინობელა) in Tbilisi also creates a dense sonic atmosphere from their treetop feeding zone, here recorded on a hot July afternoon in a forest at Lake Lisi (ლისის ტბა).
59447 verso. A richly carved portico, surmounted by a startling owl, frames an entryway leading inward. The tap of your shoes on the hard floor resonates, lending your footsteps a surprising importance. A series of electric bulbs, some burnt out or missing, throws your shadow in evolving patterns, fractured and scintillating, a dark glissando passing along the half-columns that line the walls.
59560 manifestation. The city is full of dark birds. They float down from pointed towers and winter trees, their feathers disheveled by the updraft, and walk among us on two feet. The sky congeals into cold droplets, and the crowd, for shelter, quickly evaporates. As a reflection, this piece is grounded not so much in the fleeting moment of a transient effect but rather in a sense of the eternal here and now.
59360 isle of the dead. A scrap of paper you had earlier pushed deep into your pocket now rests on your fingertips. As you consult the smudged address, you understand that you have arrived. The fillings in your teeth are picking up something — click cli-click ca-clic-click — energies pulsating with the urgency of a message intended only for you.