VA: Sounds of Absence
Gruenrekorder
With so many public spaces left uninhabited by a human presence during two years of pandemic lockdowns, it makes perfect sense that Gruenrekorder, the Germany-based sound art label known for its many field recordings-oriented releases, would issue a collection exploring the concept of absence and specifically what it sounds like. That's the question Peter Kiefer, head of the research group ARS (art research sound) at the Mainz Music School, first put to himself and then to others in order to ascertain their responses to the state-of-things. The website ARS created to collect those responses eventually, with curation handled by Wingel Mendoza and Joshua Weitzel, developed into the seventy-two-minute compilation volume fittingly titled Sounds of Absence (available in digital and CD formats).
The diversity of responses from the sound artists reflects the range and complexity of experiences individuals living throughout the world grappled with during the pandemic. Yet despite such differences, there's no denying we were united in dealing with a phenomenon that held people everywhere in its grip. In similar manner, while the seventeen pieces are wide-ranging in sound design and concept, an interpretation of the theme of absence is common to all. In some cases, silence dominates; others are far noisier, as if the sounds of particular physical locales have been magnified to create engulfing environments. The electro-acoustic micro-sounds streaming through Patrick Hartono's opening “Lockdown (binaural for headphone),” for example, resonate with such dynamic intensity, the material starts to seem claustrophobic and even nightmarish. Processed recordings of fireworks set off during BLM protests ripple through Nicola L. Hein's “New York Oh My Mind” alongside other noises, the collective soundscape effectively mirroring the incessant combustion generated by the city even at its quietest.
Ghostly noises permeate Emmanuelle Waeckerlé's “What is left if we aren't the world,” with faint wind sounds and the rustlings of nature occupying spaces normally shared with humanity. Absence is pushed to its greatest extreme in Lasse-Marc Riek's “Ausgangssperre, 01.01.2021_21Uhr 05, Steinheim, Hanau,” which might be even more “silent” than Cage's 4'33”; far noisier is Roland Etzin's static-smeared “Electromagnetic Fields MTZ,” sculpted from field recordings of Frankfurt storefront windows, and the cheekily titled “I am sitting in a z[u]m” by Weitzel, Jim Igor Kallenberg, and Michael Zwenzner, which fashions a convulsive collage from a glitch-saddled online conference.
Places as contrasting as airports (Danbi Jeung's “Opacity Crowd,” which incorporates intercom announcements and other site-specific details from Frankfurt Airport), trains (Viola Yip's clangorous “Silent Train”), and homes (Cecilia Arditto's “Anatomy of a Jar,” assembled from utensils-sourced sounds) are plundered for source material. Field recordings of outdoor settings are also extrapolated from, as in Haco's “Sho-Fuku Hill” and Raphael Kariuki's “Defiance,” with a walking tour in the latter capturing the sounds of illegal Easter worship gatherings in a Nairobi neighbourhood. Whereas some settings hint at the psychic stress the pandemic wrought, Dominykas Digimas's “Flow Song” is striking for the peaceful mood its lulling sounds of the Neris river in Vilnius engenders. The compilation is at its most imaginative in Stefan g. Fricke's“K119,” which stitches together voice samples of Theodor Adorno with field recording sounds collected at his Frankfurt grave. Each piece in its own way reinforces the idea intimated by 4'33” that silence is an illusion, even if Riek's contribution comes close to suggesting it isn't. Even the absence of human beings can't mute the vibrantly alive locations captured in the seventeen settings.August 2022