Bird & Renoult: Gold Lines
Gruenrekorder

Jorn Ebner: Perifaerye
Gruenrekorder

Bless Gruenrekorder's ever-beating experimental heart. The German company has never strayed from supporting unusual projects, and its latest Soundscape Series releases are quintessential exemplars of the label's vision. Issued on a gorgeous slab of purple vinyl (a 300-copy edition), Perifaerye is built around soundscape recordings Berliner Jorn Ebner collected in spring 2023 of urban spaces in the Hamburg district of Eidelstedt and is presented as a multi-part work comprising audio, images, and text. The cassette release Gold Lines (200 copies), on the other hand, is the brainchild of Paris-based DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult and presents recordings of Super High Frequency radio waves, signal noise, and field recordings. The material collected by the sound artists between 2016 and 2020 originated from antenna bases from Chicago to New York and London to Frankfurt. Both releases (also available, of course, digitally) are uncompromising in their sound presentation, but they're also engaging and thought-provoking.

Perifaerye is a striking physical product that augments its eighteen action-packed soundscapes with thirty-six drawings, twenty-four texts (the latter displayed in German only), and a fold-out poster (a web site was also created that links online soundscapes to their real-world counterparts). Eighteen images appear in the booklet and eighteen on the sleeve housing the vinyl disc. Ebner produced the drawings and texts; as stated, the thirty-six minutes of audio were captured by him from urban areas within Hamburg-Eidelstedt. Those with no command of German will have little clue as to how text and image connect; even in the absence of such clarity, the project is still fascinating to look at and listen to.

As eye-catching as the visual pieces are, the audio component is the primary aspect. Collectively a sound portrait of a particular urban zone containing small detached homes and apartment buildings, the material blends the sounds of humans and industrial phenomena, from the locale's people and cars to airplanes and trains, into eighteen mini-collages. They're not undoctored field recordings, by the way. Ebner's shaped the material into compositions by sometimes assembling elements into metronomic rhythmic structures and by repeating fragments, moves that strangely give a number of these abstract entities an almost pop song-like form. Mangled chatter and laughter, the hydraulic noise of writhing machines, twittering birds, the violent cawing of crows, the clip-clop of horse hooves, burbling water, typewriter clacks, audience applause, worksite hammering, the shriek of a passing train—all such bits coalesce to form a vivid evocation of an urban centre where residents and workers go about their daily lives.

Gold Lines is part of the larger project Antenna Gods that Bird and Renoult initiated in 2016 and that maps the routes of high-speed radio waves used in High Frequency Trading (HFT). In such a context, every microsecond is critical and can carry huge financial implications, so obtaining the most direct route between exchanges is imperative. To map those pathways, the collaborators identified the locations of the pylons, frequencies, and relay links that transmit the data around the globe. The Gold Line itself is the nick-name given by Chicago traders to the data transmission route connecting the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).

The cassette sides are titled “Line A” and “Line B” to reference the physical networks the transmission routes use to relay info back and forth. Satellite dishes are placed at tall structures such as buildings, water towers, and out-of-service radio antennas so that unobstructed “lines of sight” can be established between dishes. As any obstruction may cause interference or the blocking of a signal, tall towers are ideal for dish placement. The material itself, eight tracks totaling forty-three minutes, is electroacoustic in nature and, much like Perifaerye, could be classified “sonic geography.”

January 2024