Christina Kubisch / Annea Lockwood: The Secret Life of the Inaudible
Gruenrekorder

Though this double-CD collaboration between sound artists Christina Kubisch and Annea Lockwood comes with the kind of pulpy title one might expect from a ‘60s TV sci-fi episode, it actually represents the project content in literal terms. One of the more fascinating things about the recording (and something of which I constantly remind myself as I attend to its seventy-four minutes) is that the sounds presented didn't originate as audible material but rather as non-audible phenomena and energy fields the artists translated into audible form. Even to characterize the originating materials as being below the threshold of human audibility is a misrepresentation when Kubisch and Lockwood, despite using different techniques, function as sound mediums, channels through which sonic waves sourced from natural and cosmic sources turn into listenable material. Issued in a 500-copy edition as part of Gruenrekorder's Soundscape Series, the release presents four pieces, two of them credited to Kubisch and Lockwood individually and the other two collaborations.

Born in New Zealand and Bremen respectively, Lockwood (1939- ) and Kubisch (1948- ) are long-established and much-admired figures in the sound art field who first met in New York in 1975 when Kubisch was writing an article about the city's experimental music scene for an Italian magazine; four years later, they recovened in Italy where they performed a Lockwood piece at a festival in Como. The two share common ground, yet explore it from different angles: in Kubisch's words, though “both investigate soundworlds which normally are not audible ... Annea questions how the forces of nature influence us, I question how man-made electromagnetic fields have an impact on our lives.” To create The Secret Life of the Inaudible, the two exchanged sound materials and allowed each to select what she would for the production of a new composition. From Lockwood, Kubisch received recordings of solar oscillations, earthquakes, gas vents, and the like; Lockwood, on the other hand, worked with recordings of electromagnetic waves supplied by Kubisch.

Representative of the release is Lockwood's opening “Wild Energy,” which draws upon recordings of the sun, gas and hydrothermal vents, tremors, radio waves, earthquakes, bats, trees, and even a Sei whale for its half-hour presentation. In general, the source elements lose their identifiability after being manipulated by Lockwood, though connections to the source materials might be made for those intent on doing so. Punctuating the subdued dronescape are synth-like flares and bright glissandi that intermittently swoop and whistle across surfaces that by turn burble, percolate, and convulse. Rumbles, rattles, rustlings, and gaseous emissions surface in a presentation that undergoes constant mutation. To give some idea of the scope of the materials with which she worked in creating the piece, consider that it begins with solar oscillations recorded by the SOHO spacecraft and ends with material sourced from the interior of a Scots pine tree. The Lockwood half concludes with “Streaming, Swirling, Converging,” which she created using six sound files from each collaborator. The range of sounds is again noteworthy, with Lockwood sourcing everything from solar oscillations to a bench collapse, and Kubisch providing her with electromagnetic waves taken from a subway station, shopping center, and power station, among other things, to work with on this comparatively more industrial-tinged soundscape. Again a pronounced synthesizer-like sound design imbues the result with a spacey electronic aura.

Taking its cue from the first book to deploy the technique of automatic writing (1920's Les champs magnétiques by André Breton and Philippe Soupault), Kubisch's “Nine Magnetic Places” unfolds mercurially, its creator intent on letting electromagnetic sounds advance in a dreamlike flow. Assembled using recordings compiled from Las Vegas, Montreal, Bordeaux, Manchester, Paris, Venice, Bangkok, and elsewhere, the setting swirls, grinds, buzzes, sputters, and whirrs like factory machinery and broken-down radio transmissions for thirteen engrossing minutes. “Below Behind Above,” her collaboration piece, grew out of an experience Kubisch had witnessing the wrath of two, chaos-inducing storms that wreaked havoc upon northern Germany and Central Europe during a three-week period. Given her sensitivity to electromagnetic vibrations and energy fields, it's natural that Kubisch would be powerfully affected by the experience and eager to translate it into sound form. Working with sounds supplied by Lockwood taken from volcanic gas vents, VLF chorus waves and whistlers, earthquakes, solar oscillations, and ultrasonic tree sounds and her own recordings from light systems, transmitter systems, and the river Rhein, Kubisch concocted a woozy, twenty-two-minute soundscape that plays like something beamed down to us from a distant galaxy.

April 2018