URBAN SONIC DERIVE: A SONIC DETERRITORIALIZATION OF THE CITY
Part of the third session of "No Lockdown - Transonic Sessions" commissioned by Transcultures Media Arts Center, the Brussel-based Interdisciplinary Center for digital art and sound cultures, and the Transonic label to sound creators of various aesthetics but all adventurous practices (electronics, sound art, sound poetry, post rock, ambient, field recording, improvisation…) honors artistic singularities from different countries and sound practices.
All the material was recorded, collected and processed in September 2021 in the city of Milan (Italy) for the performance by MMT Creative Lab “Parade Electronique 2021: Paesaggi Sonori” at Teatro Arsenale in Milan.
Further information here.
The "derive" is a psycho-geographical technique with exploratory, politic and artistic purposes that consists in a break from the classical way of crossing a territory, and that prefers a casual way of walking and moving, letting oneself go to new stimuli and unexpected events and adopting new points of view.
It consists in taking escape routes from hegemonic notions of order, rationality and structure, encouraging the emergence of an open, borderless, unpredictable territory: the linearity of time is suspended, deceived by the transitions and hidden forces of the city; there is emotional disorientation. In this way it is possible to capture non-dimensional information that expands the vision of the territory: aspects and nuances from real life, information and sensations that help us to understand, deterritorialize and riterritorialize space. The urban context thus loses its organization, is reset and reconstructed through the emergence of new situations and new models.
In terms of sound, this becomes an act of decomposition, disintegration and subversion of the structured and organized urban soundscape, for the benefit of an emergence and reorganization of the individual elements that compose it: each sound-object-event takes on meaning as such, and not only as part of a structure, linked in an ecosystem, revealing in turn new meanings and languages.
A PO(I)ETICS OF THE DISEMBODIED VOICE
A Po(i)etics of the Disembodied Voice is a work which focuses on the sonic potential of the voice as a phenomenon inits own right, separated from the body.It is a 47 min composition made using my voice elaborated through spectral processing and granular synthesis techniques.
Originally composed fo PARA, Parasitic radio takeover and digital sound exhibition on Radio 80000.
Pre-Listening via Radio 80000: March 1 - 25, 2021.
Radio takeover & opening weekend: March 26 - 28, 2021.
Digital sound exhibition: March 29 - April 30, 2021.
The project is funded by the City of Munich Department of Art and Culture & the Goethe-Institut.
Further information here.
A Po(i)etics of the Disembodied Voice is a work which focuses on the sonic potential of the voice as a phenomenon inits own right, separated from the body.In all ancient cultures and traditions, voice and orality have always played a fundamental role in the transmission of culture, and of course in the act of communication among living species.With the advent of the Gutenberg era, with the introduction of printing, sight took over from hearing: there was a shift from an oral culture to a visual, ocular-centric culture, in which the sense of seeing acquired greater weight and importance than the sense of hearing.Although this, the hearing has always occupied an important place in modern society through the reinvigoration of media such as radio. In recent years, especially if we see at the past year, when it was physically impossible to move, see and meet with each other, the voice through radio, podcasts, web platforms of various kinds, vocal messages etcetera has managed to overcome the barriers of the real world to connect people with each other. It has achieved a level of awareness that was previously missing or taken for granted.If we jump back in history, before the invention of electronic and electroacoustic devices for recording and transmitting sounds, every sound was original and inextricably linked to the source that produced it. This separation of the original sound from its source and its recording was first discussed by R. Murray Schaefer who conceived this condition of separation as a phenomenon called "Schizophonia". Following the operating mechanism of Schizophonia, a similar separation also occurs between the voice and the body: there is a partition of one from the other through the fragmentation and omnipresence of new media and technologies. The voice thus becomes an unknown, mysterious territory, a fluctuating and ethereal phenomenon.There is a liberation of the voice from the signifying words, from metrical and grammatical structures of discourse through the destruction and fragmentation of the discourse itself, of the words themselves, preferring to the semantic aspect the sound aspect, which is full of expressive and communicative power. Indeed, properties such as voice modulation, tonality, expressiveness, quality, vocabulary, cadence, rhythm, accente, volume etcetera carry a subtext of cultural meanings that are lost with the written text, which is marginalised, as opposed to the evanescence of the voice.All this provokes an emotional response different from the meaning of the words themselves. Hence, the audio is the text, a sound text in which words act together with sounds and silences creating a dramaturgy of voices without a body. On the basis of this, I like to think this work can increase and extend the awareness of having a voice, physically and metaphorically speaking, and using it in the most diverse and unconventional ways to explore hidden or seemingly meaningless cultural levels.
EXPANDED RADIO RESEARCH UNIT
Independent radio art platform for innovative works at the intersection of music, spoken word, performance and sound to challenge the limits of broadcasting; a laboratory which considers radio as an art form and a practice of experimentation and creation of multiple sonic possibilities and imaginary spaces. The aim is also to interconnect different cultural and spatial spheres and to explore the techno-sociological nature of radio, alongside its heterogeneous practices of artistic production.