[STR 025] World Listening Day 2015 – H2O (Pt. III)

[artwork photo by Tom Lane]

1. Pablo Sanz – #137 (submersion) | Source water recordings made at Jánošíkove diery, Malá Fatra (Slovakia), Gorg Negre, Riera de Sorreigs, St. Bartomeu del Grau (Catalunya, Spain), Bezuidenhout, Den Haag and Waterloopbos, Flevoland (The Netherlands). Field work and composition 2011 – 2015.

2. Atilio Doreste – Manantial efímero del Pirineo | Composición de varios tracks de grabaciones de campo con un micrófono de contacto directo en los últimos hielos del Pirineo, España.

3. Mikolaj Hernik – Jági-tó K-200 | The piece combines processed hydrophone recordings from Jági-tó (a man-made lake turned nature reserve) near Pilisszentiván (Hungary) and unprocessed recording of an outlet of K-200 borehole in Kudow Zdrój (Poland) that pumps mineral water from 200 meters underground. All source materials recorded June-July 2015 and mixed-down for Sonic Terrain World Listening Day 2015 compilation.

4. Walker Wooding – Trinity | A composition of three water-related recordings, springs from the field recording ‘storm harmony’ captured in Texas near the shore of Trinity Bay.

5. Enrique Maraver – Amanecer, Punta Mita | Three moments before returning ……… Sunrise, July 12. Riviera Nayarit, Mexico.

6. The Transient Source – Samtana | This is a composition created from field recordings made in June and July 2015. It’s an interpretation of the behavior of water in two distinct milieus. It focuses on the contrast between the unaltered sounds of water in countryside areas and its characteristic in an urban environment, where the flow of water is heavily modified by the needs and fancies of human culture. The piece has a tripartite structure: it is opened and concluded with the sounds of small, peaceful rivers flowing through rural areas. Its middle part however is a meditation on the sonic aspect of water determined by the context of a big city. There, the water partakes in the urban commotion and even intensifies it, sometimes morphing into a wall of white noise.

The sources used in this piece are the Mala Panew and Rudawa rivers of southern Poland, and several fountains in the city of Kraków (Cracow). The title, Samtana (saṃtāna) is a Sanskrit word meaning “continuity”. It reflects the fundamental biological and cultural aspect of flowing water, as well as my personal history: born and raised in the countryside, I moved into the city, but currently I am slowly drawn back again into the country.

7. Davic Nod – Water Field | Used ‘Iceberg’, ‘Sea waves’ and ‘Rain medium’ from Thalamus Lab’s XSL free sound library

8. Marta Amaro – Water Will | A journey through a water stream in a country side, a storm in a city and ending on a beach. As water defines life, it was my intention to explore the sounds according to the peaceful and the chaotic mis en scene that water can give, going with the flow given by the water field recordings.

9. nobodisoundz – WtRrr | Built with field recording of “waters” around me (lake, river, fountain, faucet etc.), all manipulated. The idea is to take these fragments of the reality, to put them to create and reveal layers and stratas of an abundant and mysterious aquatic world.

10. Kit Brown – Fragmentary Entropic Irrigation | Thirty-six millilitres of water, poured between two white unbranded paper cups, from a height of thirty-six centimetres. The process is completed thirty-six times, the sound is digitally recorded and numbered. One (four second) pouring is randomly selected. The selection is manipulated in accordance with numerous predetermined rules. These systems act to facilitate the realisation of further chance methods. Aspects of which gesture toward musicality, but the majority conforms to ‘simple’ structures intended to provide order to the information.

The investigation amounts to a presentation of tensions between the rigidity of creative processes and the random, ‘material’ actuality of the final aesthetic content. It attempts to reveal rhythmic properties of the sound: those that are ‘natural’ and generated from the movement of water, and those exposed in its technological constitution. To listen to the work is to experience the durational transformation of repetitious, abstract ‘forms’, from clarity to  obscurity, organic to mechanistic. They are copied and overlaid, their tempos increased. The slow changes generating sonic complexity in their changing contact with each other.

11. Whispering Sounds – Intramolecular Dreams | This piece is entirely done by manipulation of 13 seconds of an open faucet. We look for the construction of a static sound that creates an empty space to allow get meditative states. Inside that monolithic sound we can find constants and almost imperceptible movements like water molecules could do inside a drop.

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