Weekend. ANDREW HAYLECK
(Winds Measure Recordings 2011)
For this work Andrew Hayleck, sound artist from Baltimore Maryland, works under a very interesting premisse: he explores how he’d hear things if he was an insect. He takes in consideration that sound travels approximately 1 foot per millisecond to work with an insect’s height of 1.3 cm (half an inch) in comparison to his own height 1.80 mts (5’11”). The result is 48 hours of recordings speeded up to 24 minutes.
To research and question on animal’s perception offers an interesting way to force us out of ourselves and listen / experience things differently and a premise of such nature it’s a great attempt to explore the experience beyond our body’s specificities.
To work under a question of this kind leads to a field of ambiguous certainties: a blend of scientific and artistic decisions that deals with the exposed problem not necessarily by solving it scientifically, which will be merely illustrative, but by putting the question on a sensible context.
Weekend offers an amazing sonic experience, where the opaque and detailed textures and high pitched sounds lead to a careful hearing where the listener experiences a multitude of fast-occurring strange tiny sounds that serves as an entrance to a microcosmos, the cosmos of insects. When a series of events that took 48 hours to occur now occur on a lapse of 24 minutes, everything becomes tinier and quicker so the listener’s sense of time is affected, and this is where the release is highly successful at, at methodically playing with the senses under the premisse of listening like one would feel and perceive things if one wasn’t himself.
Aside from its beauty as sound release, Weekend is a very thriving attempt to artistically answer questions of a scientific nature through the sound work. The two pieces are great examples of how to succeed when dealing with a premise and a method with relevant strong results on an sensible level.
-Alan Smithee
