Label: Cronica

激シブのフィールドレコーディング・ワークス!!80年代末より街の雑踏を使った環境音作品や非常に興味深いコンセプチュアルワークを数多く残して来たダルムシュタット出身のマルチメディア・アーティストMarc Behrens。タイトル通り"雲"の存在をコンセプトに、飛行機内や空港の音を素材に構築した厳ついイメージの加工フィールドレコーディングであり、機内アナウンスの音声を様々な方法で採集しオーケストレーション的に変容させた分厚い音声シンフォニー。16ページブックレット付き。





CD in a gatefold sleeve with a 16-page booklet.

The title "Clould" convolutes the words "cloud", hinting at humankind’s fascination of supposed supernatural beings that lived in clouds or created them, and "could", a potentiality. Historical mythologies are placed in the context of 21st century airborne mass transport that propels large groups of human beings — passive by force — through a space that once belonged to mythological beings and energies. And to the clouds, of course. The "Clould" cycle of electroacoustic music pieces and its preamble "Aiear" (Crónica 218~2024) together consist of 95 minutes of music, five microstories, the libretto for its fifth movement, a number of aerial photographs and text charts, and a performance concept including the first three movements. This CD features the complete five movements of "Clould".

“Clould” is composed with sounds from inside airplanes and airports recorded in various ways: from the check-in luggage, with electromagnetic sensors, from the onboard entertainment system, or just straight with normal mics. Voice recordings from in-flight announcements have been processed in pilgrim’s stride mode, meaning that they have been repeatedly stretched and compressed with slightly altering settings until machinic chimeras appear – the ultimate disembodied voice. In the final “5th Movement” voices were culled from safety demonstrations or other announcements in various languages, some already intoned mechanically even by the human speakers. By fragmenting such recordings down into individual syllables and recompiling them into new, sometimes unintelligible fantasy sequences of various interconnected and orchestrated voices, phantom words and sentences can be heard. As the “Clould” cycle is based on an English language understanding, both in the accompanying microstories and in the music pieces themselves, a libretto-style transcription reveals English words and onomatopoetic exclamations. This dedicated system very loosely refers to the concept of bījamantra (or bījākṣara: seed syllable) used in Tantric Hinduism and Buddhist Mysticism, in which certain syllables contain sonic essences that make manifestations of a certain element, entity, or deity. The most important bīja “oṃ” just for example, is the quintessence and a manifestation of the universe – more a spiritual than an acoustic sound. In the seven chakra system, it is also the seed syllable associated with the crown chakra (psychic center).

However, it is possible to listen to the voices being preconditioned by other languages, trying to extract other words and meanings, just as one would from an oracle.