CD – Fylkingen

Moscow to Vladivostok by train is quite a long journey, more than 9000 kilometers to be precise. The Trans-Siberian is the railway connecting the two cities. Susanne Skog could have surprised us with more variegated and adventurous field recordings. Instead, she chose to make this experience quite minimal. What we hear is a vague and sliding metallic hum, which gradually grows up in terms of volume, eventually becoming a more solid drone. Siberia, 25 minutes long, was composed, edited and mixed at Baltic Art Center in Visby (Sweden), and later presented in New York at Experimental Intermedia, 2015. The musical composition impresses our mind in some abstract, poetic way; it gets some development from the recordings but it seems as though it might not want to refer to a specific place, but to the movement and the spatialisation of a few sonic elements. The following track, Sirens, is based on a selection of siren samples from years of recording from all over the world including several Japanese cities, New York, Athens and Rotterdam. Here it seems as though the sound material might change into new forms and expressions, frictions and correlations, until they lose any figurative connotation or reference point. But Skog, who studied philosophy, aesthetics and feminist theory at the Stockholm University, does not lack of the “narrative” background, after many years of creating radio experiments, radio dramas and documentaries. If this approach might have become “cold” or “rarefied”, when the mechanic sounds go on in an insisted and continuous way, they remain instead very detailed but at the same time impossible to decode. No sound source is clearly identifiable and the general mix is quite indistinguishable. But the listening experience is not monotonous, because even the most subtle changes raise great effects and deeply engage the listener’s attention.

 

Susanne Skog – Siberia / Sirens