Rizoma As the French philosopher Michel Serres has argued, sound, noise, rhythm, music, language, meaning are the elements that move us away from an understanding of the world based only on phenomenological knowledge. This perspective leads to different territories in which sound questions our notion of language and, generally, our way of moving in an environment, a space or a place in the contemporary era. As another step of a deep research conducted on microsound and vibration, the Medellin based composer Miguel Isaza presents on Galaverna “Rizoma”, a field recording trip located at Iguazu Falls in Brazil and Argentina and thought as a way to “[approach] field recording not as a way of "capturing" the territory but to move, transform and rethink its matter in order to open new listening opportunities".
Once again, in this work the microscopic dimension of sound becomes a key component of the post-digital listening, above all musical terms, focusing on the possible relations between what is infinitely large and infinitesimal units, as a precondition to analyze micro-events and microsonic processes in terms of a kind of molecular activity of sound materials.
Exploring the tiny sounds and vibrations diffused in the soundscape through infinite multiple forms (“granular structures and events, spatial articulations, frequency dances and immense reactions of echoes dwelling in the air”), Isaza shows us how it’s possible to delve with a different point of listening into other territories of sound, where the anthropocentric listening can be questioned, opening different critical spaces to be explored through sound.
To discover once again how "Before making sense – as Serres writes - language makes noise: you can have the latter without the former, but not the other way around. After noise, and with the passage of time, a sort of rhythm can develop, an almost recurring movement woven through the fabric of chance. [...] Whoever speaks is also singing beneath the words spoken, is beating out rhythm beneath the song, is diving into the background noise underneath the rhythm".
Notes from the artist “Rizoma” was composed in 2016 using sounds registered in 2015 at Iguazu Falls in Brazil and Argentina, approaching field recording not as a way of "capturing" the territory but to move, transform and rethink its matter in order to open new listening opportunities.
Therefore, composition can arise from the exploration of certain faculties of the sound masses: granular structures and events, spatial articulations, frequency dances and immense reactions of echoes dwelling in the air. By exploring these relationships at multiple time scales, some particles, objects and groups of them can be obtained and then reconfigured to weave not a representation of the initial place, but worlds resulting from their inner voices, although preserving material essence, but emerging as a new habitat for multiple listenings.
To organize sound is in that sense not about fixing sound bodies in the timeline but revealing a network of sonic possibilities shaped by time as such, exposing a continuum of inter-connected micro/macro sounds which, without hierarchy, in the manner of a rhizome, spread in all directions to make the ears dream.
A sea without a port by Miguel Isaza is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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