LP – Persistence of Sound

After Cage, the awareness of our outside environment cannot be unbound from the integration between art and technology, in a link full of experiences and now enriched with the contributions of the 3-D electroacoustics composition and with everything new in sound art also coming to us from site-specific approaches. Reconfiguring the Landscape is a project Natasha Barret did between 2019 and 2022. The Norwegian sound artist created a series of sound installation on open, located in public spaces for different periods of time (few days or some months). The outside sound landscape, according to the way the historical avantgarde meant it to be, is always the interpretation the listener, or even better “the perceiver” has of it, and now it seems even more mandatory to examine this relationship under the ecological lens, which means based on the analysis of the relationship between living beings and environment. The surrounding space, the space we cross, is unavoidably lived by the sound in a dynamic of mutual revelation and not casually in the definition of “sonority” there are two distinct, but deeply connected, meanings: the objective physical phenomena and the subjective sensation. Telling about the world in its sound aspects from the “listening point” of the human being supposes, at that time as now, a broad palette of audio captures. Natasha Barret left them unchanged and collects them in this CD in the remixes of three installations, plus a two-parts work planned for both installations and live shows. Immediately the first track, “Impossible Moments from Venice 2”, immerses us in the right mood, with the voices of children, people, birds chirping, bells, with the overflowing of water and a choir singing a hallelujah. We cannot know how these sounds of the splendid lagoon city can be experienced by passers-by in a totally different urban context, we can just imagine, and this is a creative act the author suggests. In “Speaking Spaces 2: Surfaces from Graz” again the voices of the children and the most delicate jingles are present, and the noise of the ping-pong balls maybe comes from an old Barret album, Heterotopia. The voices travel among the headphones and get mixed, it’s impossible to distinguish what they say, and the bells of a church also here set a rarefied and estranged time. “Presence / Nærvær” is even more delicate than the other recordings and adds some melodic movements, perhaps in the desire to indicate in the presence the need for participatory listening. With “Remote Sensing on the Beach” hissing drones, auditory emissions obtained from the movements of the water and the chirps of seagulls are the elements in evidence, despite together with voices of people and other birds, one of the leitmotivs of the album. The experience finishes with “Impossible Moments from Venice 1”, who goes back to the same sensations of the opening track, in a continuous of similar styles, probably adopted to underline the differences in the similarity and in the repetition.

 

Natasha Barrett – Reconfiguring the Landscape