Cassette – Crónica

This is the first solo release from sound artist Morten Riis, since 2009’s Digital Sound Drawings, a project that focused on the visual waveforms of songs, featuring six songs that were composed by converting a series of images into audio. Riis continues this conceptual engagement that questions how, in an era of ready-to-use software, a composer can produce music in a way that is attentive to the specificity of the media used. Riis relies on homemade synthesizers and modified 4-track cassette recorders. In doing so, it is possible to observe how engaged he is with the contemporary and inescapable relationship between sound creation and technology. The Danish artist modifies and experiments with instruments and the recording process, resulting in a complex work in which different melodic structures are superimposed on each other to create new sounds, noises and textures. This release is accompanied by Lad den samme lyd minde os om (Let every sound remind us of), 25 unique loop cassette tapes handmade by Riis which contain the original material of the compositions. This project is endowed with a sense of loss, a perception that is unconventional but with which we unconsciously develop a strong sense of familiarity. Even within the deconstruction of the work, emotionality does not lose its charge and is full of a yearning nostalgia, of forgotten narratives and existential metaphors. By forcing the mind to think outside the box of musical conventions, the artist undertakes a sort of journey through time and lets ‘every sound remind us of it’, bringing back a sense of excitement through the now obsolete and almost useless tapes. The overall result is very impressive – comforting us with what can be created with redundant media forms.

 

Morten Riis – Lad enhver lyd minde os om