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Complementary Disconnections, Interview with Slavek Kwi

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As he puts it himself, Ireland-based sound artist Slavek Kwi is “obsessed by freedom”: The freedom to accept or refuse traditions, the freedom to use or disregard cultural references, the freedom to establish his own ideologies only to question and discard them again. For his possibly most ambitious project to date, “Boto [Encantado]”, Kwi made full use of this freedom, travelling to the Amazon to record the sounds of the Boto river dolphins. Floating along the river in a canoe, he spent weeks in almost perfect isolation, living with an inside the sonic world of the Boto and the “ever-changing mysterious subaquatic soundscape” surrounding him. The recordings were later condensed into a headphone installation and a radio-play-like, otherworldly LP on the Belgian ini.itu imprint. And yet, the human input is without doubt the least fascinating aspect about these works. With their wide range of timbres, chatter, click noises and rhythms, the vocabulary palette and expressive capacities of the dolphins question our conventional notions of language, turning our perception of music upside down. Aptly for someone as obsessed by freedom as Kwi, the solution to the confusion is simply not to choose a black-and-white interpretation: Perhaps if we can accept the paradox of our experience, the meaning will reveal itself most clearly.

Full interview at The Field Reporter

Miguel Isaza M

Listener, speaker.