CYCLE #2  EXPANDING MY INSTRUMENT & MUSICAL CREATION THROUGH ECOLOGICAL THINKING & TEXTURAL SONIC MERGING WITH FIELD RECORDINGS

Broadening my horizon through gathering new sonic material, unfamiliar tools & examining the artistic impact they could have on my musical language.
In the first cycle of my research, in autumn 22, I embarked on a field trip to Bretagne & found a growing interest in incorporating field recordings into my musical creation. Without knowing the outcome of the direction I initiated, I emerged into a process of familiarizing myself with recording binaural audio. The initial point of interest was to collect sonic reflections of diverse cultural traditions & practices, as well as  broadening my horizon in terms of artistic creation & context. Through this I first got aware to the concept & the discipline of ethnography as the "principal source of data for cultural anthropology". (Steven Feld) I mainly focused on the cultural expressions as an object of study and started to document the human relationship to a specific strain of wild yeast, conceptualized in the human interaction with this organism. When I first attempted the incorporation of this material, I discovered the similarity in conceptual thinking of dramaturgical elements from audio plays. First, I simply created a binaural, storytelling narrative by linear aligning simple field recordings. Through this I begun exploring the contrasting of certain field recordings juxtaposing my circulating modular music.

Questions that guided my research were:

How can I expand my musical creation & the understanding of my own sonic identity exploring the realm of field recordings, in order to investigate the artistic potential of circular rhythmic/ambient electronic music?
How can I challenge Individual habitual boundaries & broaden my musical imagination through a foreign practice like working with field recordings?

Here, by bringing elements of the world and earth - natural and organic sounds - into an electronic context & environment, I started to blend my improvisational musical language with field recordings from the wine making- & fermentation process in Bretagne. In the following track you will hear the synthesis of several dramaturgical elements I’m improvising with, including my circulating rhythmic electronic set up, the bubbling sound of a 2000 Liter barrel, filled with grapes starting to ferment, as well as two women talking and sharing their experience, while sitting naked in the barrel, crushing the grapes with their bodies & making sure the juice of the grapes are distributed and available for the fermentation. A particular traditional practice from the natural wine making process in France.

                                                                            {BUBBLES}

Looking back, the integration of field recordings into my creational work describes a big potential for further crystallization of the aesthetic vision for creating circular rhythmic and - especially -  ambient music, because it gradually opened up a different mode of listening to my music. A mode of listening that is enriching the already existing sonic landscape with sound-based characteristics such as timbre and spectrum, as well as acousmatic narratives.

Even though I spent a relatively short amount of time creating an archive of field recordings within the realm of documenting the fermentation process, the process keeps inspiring new ways of creation in the present. Looking back to this working method in my research, this beginning of CYCLE#2 represents the process in which I can come back to explore the creation of an artistic outcome with the field recordings as a main source for sonic & artistic material. Especially within the context of Acousmatic Music, with a particular focus point on the consideration to sound-based characteristics such as timbre and spectrum.
Additional inspirational influences from audio dramas, or radio plays can be further explored in future circulations as well as integrated & merged with my electronic & electro acoustic circulating music.

                                               {field recording 22/23, connected with bubbles}

Beside the obvious collection of available sounds and familiarizing myself with an optimal field recordings set up for potential use and integration into my musical creation, as well as the newly discovered dramaturgical aspect of storytelling in my music, I came across an invaluable revelation. One of the most important discoveries of this process revealed, that my working methods and artistic practice were up until this point completely dominated by an isolated manner in regards to it’s natural surroundings and other people. What I’ve found truly valuable in this methodology represents an expansion of my electronic instrument. A branch of my artistic practice that connected me to an investigative manner outside of my own four walls of my practice room into the creational space of other people.
This inspired me to adjust my methodology.

Additional notes:

I decided not to document the creation of an archive consisting of captured sounds from this field recordings trip. Also the insights regarding difficulties in building the actual field recording set up and techniques are left out. The reason and purpose for this resides within keeping the first part CYCLE#2 as a main creative drive & potential for this research, that can be picked up, circulating around it, and further investigated any time from now. The specifics aren’t nearly as important as the possibilities. I also want to state, that I left this working method pretty soon, since my main curiosity then resided in the…

ECOLOGICAL THINKING & TEXTURAL SONIC MERGING WITH FIELD RECORDINGS

As mentioned, whereas the first part of CYCLE#2 the focus was to get more familiar with the integration of field recordings into my musical interface, as well as playing with binaural parameters & the conceptual thinking of dramaturgical elements from audio plays, upon further circulation around that topic and exploring my work with field recordings, the focus then shifted to the relationship of mine to my immediate environment.

Unaware of this danger in embarking on a solo project, I begun to recognize an underlying pattern of some sort of mechanistic linearity in my music creation. Therefore my main inspiration during that state in research reshaped into an expansion of my electronic instrument with the attempt to transform an isolated creational space in music production through integrating ecological perspectives and contexts into my artistic practice. I’m deeply inspired by our interconnection to the web of life that surrounds us and the ecological context of my work. Initially, one starting point and working method which I begun to develop was including elements of the world and earth - natural and organic sounds of my surrounding environment - into my circular electronic music context. I begun to refine a blending process in my musical language with field recordings and investigated the aesthetic potential of overlapping and processing sonic expressions of natural habitats and living organisms.

The study of natural phenomena represented an analogy to my core aesthetic vision of a dynamic & transforming musical experience- and through this they shined light onto the bigger context of ecology.

                                                                             {ECOLOGY}

One aesthetic outcome I observed through merging the rhythmic circulating patterns with aspects of my surrounding acoustic ecology was not only that the integration of field recordings included the possibility of creating an overall more „organic“ electronic sound structure - as it appears obviously, but further encouraged a different mode of listening. To my own ears and the perception of peers I shared my music with, the addition in layers created a bigger perception of the imaginary space, especially when I begun to practice aspects of tonal value, initially for the headphone production.

Parameter of tonal value.

Through creating awareness to the tonal value, I practiced the binaural aspect of merging the field recordings into the rhythmic mixing process, whereby the field recordings would not only  be overlapped, but mixed into the circulating generative feedback of my musical language. Through this process of further merging rhythmic, melodic & textural components of the music, I applied tonal/textural values to the overall sonic structure in order to create a more refined sense of depth. In the visual arts, the tonal value refers to how light or dark one color (or shade of gray) is relative to another. (The intention is to further separate different planes, through successive layers. It is important that the steps from one value to the other, are sufficiently visible.)

With these practices absorbing, my complete vision of the rhythmic circulation & resonation further crystallized my rhythmic circulating ambient context. Now I was able to create refined tonal nuances to give additional depth to the sonic structure.
The awareness to tonal value also sparked an overall interest to find sounds in my environment, that resembled a sonic textural surface that was similar & ideally almost identical to the rhythmic circulations, entirely created with my modular set up.

                           {ROTATE & RESONATE}                                                {LIQUID LIGHT}

Within an aesthetic context, the merging of my electronic music, developed within CYCLE#1, with field recordings, explored within this investigative CYCLE#2 has led to an overall more organic sound, further defining and specializing the crafting of a unique aesthetic context, that guided me outside of my habitual artistic context and connected me to my surrounding environment.