And once in a while I come across something that I am hugely intrigued by but can't hear anything of or acquire elsewhere. The latest cd for this to occur is Jacob Kirkegaard's Four Rooms, the concept of which was enough to make me buy it straight away -my first cd purchase for many months.
The basic model for Kirkegaard's work is obviously Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room. In the latter recording, a tape is made of a message. This is then replayed in the room and recorded again, a process that is repeated many times. What happens over time is that the acoustics of the room subtlely distort each subsequent play back and, over time, the original recording gets lost under a series of strange distortions.
Kirkegaard's Four Rooms was recorded in Chernobyl in October 2005, nearly 20 years after the nuclear disaster. Ten minutes of silence was recorded in each room. This was then played back into the room itself and recorded over and over again. Gradually a dense sound develops full of complex overtones. The cd consists of one of these late recordings from, respectively, a church, an auditorium, a swimming pool and a gymnasium. Four beautiful and very different drones - what is there not to like about this concept?
.
The cover of Four Rooms - available from Touch Records now music fans
.
One of the Four Rooms
.
Other work by Kirkegaard includes a series of recordings of the sounds generated inside his own ears - the acoustic effect called "otoacoustic emission" or the "Tartini tone" - and recordings of the "singing sands" - often considered a mythical phenomenon caused by the movement of sand grains of a certain size caused by a certain humidity.
.
What is there not to like about this guy?
.
He has a sound installation in London's Space Gallery opening this month - maybe this is another thing I should go and see in London this summer?
.
Grains of sound - Oman's singing sand dunes, photographed by Jacob Kirkegaard
.
The man himself - Kirkegaard on location
No comments:
Post a Comment