radio premiere of the work > ghosts <
February 22nd, 2024
The deeper I am investigating field recording as both artistic and listening practice, the more I become aware that each recording session is an intrusion into the landscape and that the landscape, whatever historical, biotic, or environmental system defines it – is sentient to my presence.
No matter how considerate my “intrusions” are, an abstract form of communication always takes place, and it largely depends on my ability to maintain this connection, which goes beyond the soundscape and sonic properties of the place. In this sense, my capacity to employ deep intuition and activate a specific neural architecture developed through a compound of skills also defines the recording process and its future aesthetic transformation. Thus, making a field recording fully personalized practice and soundscape composition a discipline of open interpretation, as well as a vast field for misuse and false representation of a particular soundscape. Regardless of an evaluation system, whether we contemplate an act of listening through scientific observation of one’s cognition event boundaries or through the capacity to comprehend the existential phenomenology of Zulu spiritualism, the possibility that two or more listeners can have the same listening experience is minuscule.
We are all deeply rooted in a diversity of psychological constructs; neural and sensory imprints, memory compounds, cognitive abilities, and many body-mind pathways determining our current psycho-physical state. Therefore, if the field recording practice is based on any form of active listening – it is a discipline based on interpretation.
With that in mind, I am asking: How do we approach the landscape of severe devastation and a dense history of warfare? Knowing that serious ethical and moral consequences are involved in the effort to interpret a particular soundscape.
In the work “ghosts” I am using obsolete instruments – a modular synthesizer built in 1970, a discarded wheelchair wheel salvaged from the Adriatic Sea, and the piano fallen in disuse which belonged to the Austrian conceptualist, filmmaker, improviser, photographer, environmentalist, and writer – Karl Katzinger aka John Tylo (October 1953 – April 2021). Next to these elements of the past and their voices rediscovered, I am incorporating hydrophone and field recordings from several locations appropriating them through the discourse of critical tourism and a culture of memory – more specifically through listening to the inherent memories of environmental devastation due to exploitation of natural resources as well as warfare – in the South Adriatic (Old town Dubrovnik and island of Vrnik), and the Czech-Austrian borderlands nearby of Mauthausen–Gusen concentration camps.
Instruments:
EMS Synthi 100
Wheelchair wheel salvaged from the sea
John Tylo’s old piano
Field recordings:
Dubrovnik – Stradun air conditioning units and collection of rubbish containers
Vrnik Island South Adriatic – crickets in an ancient limestone quarry
Adriatic dolphins *hydrophone recording by Robertina Šebjanič
Harrachstal village on Czech-Austrian borderlands – crickets in the abandoned granite quarry
Hydrophone recordings of the river Schwarze Aist
Train coming into Freistadt train station in Austria
All sounds performed, recorded, composed & edited by Manja Ristić
Some sounds gathered at the SHAPE + musikprotocoll residency, July 2023
Hydrophone used for underwater recording made by Jez riley French
Mastering by La Plant Studio