Why not field recordings? When we hear recordings of natural environments, our memory connects with them. We perceive them from the outside and enter their space by listening. However, I believe that by using an electronic abstraction of natural environments, we recreate them by perceiving ourselves. We enter our own space, our own imagination, and we connect the new electronic sounds through different memories of what they could represent to us. The effort that this requires, awards us with an increased sense of sensibility.
In both types of artistic outcomes, I merged the electronic and the acoustic, and the conventional with the extended. In the music pieces, the relation was established using extended techniques that have similar sonic qualities to the electronic sounds, creating a shared resonating area, e.g. combining harmonics, multiphonics, and electronics. Whilst, in the sound installations the relation was given by the action of listening while carrying out a bodily activity, e.g. planting seeds. This combination generates a sense of illusion in the audience, blurring the limits of both worlds into one, opening an immense spiritual universe of possibilities.
It was a novel process with very strong implications for my aesthetic universe to have the power to decide how the scientific data and theory should sound, and be able to control these sounds, to a certain extent. The intention behind my coded sound objects was to make them enchanting and intriguing, raising a sense of curiosity in the listeners and performers.
While creating them, I targeted a broad range of characteristics connected to my emotionality informed by the science behind each composition topic, e.g. neutron stars. The sounds ranged from sweet pipes and deep oceanic undercurrents with foggy metallic resonances to penetrating high cicadas and winds of destruction. I wanted to recreate a natural environment through artificial means, through a poetic and abstract perspective, and not a replica of the natural world.
During a presentation, I proposed to the audience to do a free writing exercise. I asked them to write about how they perceived the aesthetics of my music while listening to it for the first time. These are some of the comments:
Lawande Othman
Your creation spoke to a very calm place in my soul. The sonic structures were moving in any direction yet going the same way. What you tried to communicate was clear to me. We are in this together, alone, and together. Is there some kind of dynamic narration?
Matt Chobotter
A nostalgic, contemplative space.
Where are we? I am lost in some sonic space, a forest?
a sense of grandness and embodiment. A sense of overwhelmingness. The immenseness of crisis, tension, or needed action. Voice sounds with folk undertones or associations.
Josh Herring.
Lament-like, spiritual, temple (so beautiful). Voice like a lament from an unknown culture, language, vaguely middle east, but not specifically.
Jakob Kullberg.
Ocean-like, powerful, forceful quasi-aggressive force.
Let the wind speak.
The loops make me feel like we are in a construct, are we in a virtual forest inside a spaceship? It is a very active forest -it is as if the smallest rustling of leaves has been amplified. It feels very close, extremely present.
A powerful experience.
Michala Østergaard-Nielsen
Planets, space, then forest. Secret places. Music that’s alive!
Waves. Spirits. Love. Silence. Tears and sorrows and the loss of someone. Fragility. Fairytales and stories to tell. Presence and intensity. Lord of the rings in the sense of great nature and landscapes; hidden in the forest that the music shows us.
Both in the music and the installations, there is always sound activity with no space for complete silence. Instead, I play with densities and dynamics, and unity or diversity of the sounding voices to create a sense of overwhelming presence. This technique allows continuous and small structural changes, enhancing the audience's perception through variations and repetitions.
There is also a dynamic correlation between instruments and sound structures, that was carefully planned. This idea generated a sense of togetherness and security, perceived as calmness, and it also allowed to blend better the acoustic and electronic sounding layers.
In an overall sense, the sounding development of the pieces has the intention to immerse the audience in contrasting elements that move together to later react to each other.
I also decided to write text for my artwork, to increase the level of communication and engagement. The text was treated in two different ways:
1. The text for the installations was presented as an online PDF, consisting of three elements; instructions, a scientific text, and my poetic interpretation of the theory I worked with. The idea was to confront the audience with two perspectives of the same reality: the scientific and the poetic.
2. In my music compositions, I only used poetic writing. Here, the singer performs the poems as a collage over the melodic passages. By choosing to sing specific words or fragments the singer adds a misty and mysterious meaning to the melodies.
The melodies I composed have a certain quality of hopeful sorrow, at times like laments. This is enhanced by the use of quartertones, which makes them sound like they belong to an unknown folk tradition, which I believe induces a sense of proximity in the listening experience.