TERRA D’ÁGUA The exploration of marginal and suburban areas is one of the cores on which is based the aesthetic investigation of Galaverna, with previous releases including: “Sceneries from the castellated Wall” by Yasuhiro Morinaga, and “Re: Fujaco” by @c, specifically focused on the cultural and geographical landscape of rural areas (Irpinia, Londonderry, São Pedro do Sul). In fact, it is the aforementioned work by @c (Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais), released by Galaverna in September 2012 and dedicated to the investigation of sound around the rural village of Fujaco (Portugal), that inspired Luís Antero in making “terra d’água”, a release divided into two chapters. Aside from marking Luís entry in the roster of Galaverna, this work also creates a short essay of sonic reconnaissance dedicated to the two natural elements of earth and water, in the framework of a number of places dear to the artist, in the Serra da Estrela mountain, Portugal.
The places visited by Antero (old water mills, the hydroelectric power plant in Vila Cova Coelheira, the river bed Alvoco) represent the common thread of a narrative investigation suspended between ethno-territorial and political-ecological practices, in which evocative elements coupled with a poetic approach add a special charm to the “concrete” experience of listening to field recordings.
The results of this investigation, concentrated in the opening title track, are echoed in ‘Noventa and Sete (para Luís Antero)’ in which Carvalhais and Tudela elaborate a set of “agricultural sounds” collected by Antero (“without altering the tone nor the identity”, as Carvalhais writes) and deconstruct/reassemble rhythms in a refined way. An organic soundscape, “populated by dynamic entities”, gradually emerges, with each element acquiring an amplified acoustic thickness, multiplied till it becomes lost, almost as in the echo of distant singing. All these elements materialize into a vanishing point “suddenly, as at the end of the rainy season”.
Notes from the artist The sound work “Re:Fujaco”, composed by @c (Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela) and released by Galaverna netlabel, was the motto and inspiration for the sound work “terra d’água”‘. “Re:Fujaco” is diffusely considered one of the best sound work in a rural context for 2012. Later, I decided to make a pretty bold yet natural decision addressing Miguel and Pedro’s invitation of to remix their sound piece (the result is track number 2). Inspired by the work of the duo @c, I traveled toSerra da Estrelaand made field recordings in Covão da Ametade, at that time a place full of snow and with the cristalline Zêzere river, running slowly and loudly. Then I decided to get out in the wild, a few kilometers from Parque Natural da Serra da Estrela towards Alvoco da Serra, where I met a nice couple working hard, digging the land for the sowing season, and they kindly allowed me to record the sounds of their doing. Water is also a constant throughout this region, running through green valleys and jumping ancient terracings, now abandoned for lack of labor force. The remaining sound recording was taken in the Hydro Electric Central of Vila Cova a Coelheira, in the water mill of S. Gião and in the Water Treatment Station of the Alvoco das Várzeas village, on the banks of the AlvocoRiver.
This work was constituted as an approach/tribute to the two elements of “terra” (ground) and “água” (water), which in here are drown together in years of popular, environmental and architectural history. “terra d’água” can also be seen as a further contribution to the promotion and preservation of the acoustic heritage of this area of the country, intent that I carried on since 2008 and that can be followed on the web platform www.luisantero.yolasite.com.
A very special thanks to Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, who kindly accepted the invitation to remix the sound piece ‘terra d’água’ and also to Enrico Coniglio of Galaverna, early enthusiasts of the work presented here. Thank you!
Luís Antero, april 2013
luisantero.yolasite.com greenfieldrecordings.yolasite.com
---
@c – Noventa e Sete (para Luís Antero) (24:44)
Composed by Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais in Porto in 2013 from original recordings by Luís Antero.
Field recordings are something we often resort to, but our approach to them in composition or performance is irregular: if at times we may be very straight-forward and even sporadically quite narrative (at least to our ears), trying to preserve the character of the sounds and most of the details found in them, we often heavily manipulate the sources, occasionally leaving but a faint trace of the originals as glimpses for possible recollection or recognition of the contexts of recording. We may decontextualize sounds, we may build (fictional) ambients or narratives, or we may — and we tend to — approach sounds with little or no semantic concerns, using them in a process of audio collage.
‘Noventa e Sete (para Luís Antero)’ was created upon Luís’s kind request for a remix of his piece ‘terra d’água’. Having nurtured a long-standing admiration for his work we were thrilled by the opportunity to work with his recordings and upon hearing his composition, we quickly decided not to use unprocessed recordings as they were so prominently featured there, but we also felt that we shouldn’t destroy the timbral identity of the sounds we would come to use. We therefore decided to focus on a single pair of takes and to built our composition from their deconstruction and rhythmic reconstruction. Having disassembled the sounds of digging, we followed a nondeterministic approach to their reconstruction, structurally reshuffling all the slices to a regular grid. After this, and through a systematic process of addition with multiple asynchronous overdubs, we set in motion the emergence of a mass of sound that was simultaneously a breaking up and an accumulation of parts that evoked the process of digging the ground, of breaking, granulating and rearranging the dirt, leaving tracks and residues along the way.
Our piece therefore starts with a markedly man-made sound, clearly mechanical, steady, slow-paced and evolves to a flow of a myriad of events that progressively become less human, less mechanical and much more organic. As it progresses and the events multiply, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish particular events and the listening experience shifts from focusing on a particular action to a meandering through a complex organic landscape populated by scores of dynamic entities, a landscape that eventually and suddenly fades away, as the end of a summer rain.
Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais, april 2013
www.at-c.org
terra d’água by Luís Antero, Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.galaverna.org.
