Resilience and play

"In my work with sound I look for the materiality and rhythm of other than human critters, materials, spaces and textures. I strive to build a composition that can allow for non-linear, abstracted narratives that takes listeners on a journey through them and puts the audience into a listening position. The anticipation, the hidden frequencies, the unexpected, a voice or was that just the sound of a door? When my listener is inside of the sense making I hope them to be at their most altert, that they give space for the unknown without being pushed into it. I believe that a state of listening that comes from a safe position is filled with curiosity and all our senses are spiked and we truly can be aware and allow for the unexpected to reach us. in this composition I drew form my recordings that I was lucky enough to make in the polar regions of Iceland and Finland in the past decade. I mixed it with recordings of my daily urban surroundings, with a knock from works in the upstairs apartment 8 years ago, from a studio session of recording foley for a film, from a recording gathered at an installation of mine a few years ago and more.

"I have opted to create the journey from the deep sea slowly up to the ice covered shore where the singer would stand conjuring with her singing and drumming softly the Cetaceans, alga, microbial life and seals that might swim below the surface. All the critters and Microbes take their space and inhabit and through that life they live they disable unwanted destructive machinery not with violence but with simple resilience and play. Of course I took the artistic liberty of projection and therefor this is far from a claim of how it truly does sound but merely what it might to me. 
The reason why I chose this recording is my genuin curiosity towards the polar region that I was lucky to go back to a few times in my life (Iceland and Finland) but Greenland has not been my fortune just yet. 

"Through this challenge I have had a glimpse, though, maybe a way to travel there via the work with the recording and it made me very happy to work with this short sequence. I love mythology and the connection towards the frozen sea and the sky of the polar region in particular. The idea that through sound and music we find access to other than human life, that we can explore their proximity and even communicate by way of vibration makes all the sense to me. So I decided to turn the recording into a 10min conjuring and playing ritual."

Greenland drum dance reimagined by aR.

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This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights.

Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage