.jpg)
.jpg)
A Humid Bell in the Shape of a Bird Resonates the Conspiratorial Landscape
radio travelogue
A Humid Bell in the Shape of A Bird Resonates thew Conspiratorial Landscape, was commissioned by Czech RadioVltava for a program called PremEdition Radioateliér, produced under the project R(A)DIO(CUSTICA).
It is possible to listen to an mp3 of the broadcast here:
Two essays I wrote to accompany the piece (part which appears in Czech language on the above webpage) sandwich my original text used IN the piece (spoken by robots in Czech and English). These are given in full below.
This piece began as an acoustical analysis of the bells from the Basilica of St Peter and St Paul in Vysehrad, Prague. I was fascinated by these bells, and when I lived across the river in Smichov, I used to find different locations close to Vysehrad from which to listen to them. In the beginning of my work on this piece, I thought that the acoustical qualities of the bells would provide me with materials and ideas for understanding my experience of them. However, I quickly realized that it was not primarily the acoustical data of the bells that constituted my experience of them, but rather how their sound interacts with their environment, and with myself as a listener. I realized that it was the echo from the walls and buildings around Vysehrad, the dampening of sound in the grass and its dispersion in air and absorption in water, the mixing of the sound of the bells with the sound of cars, boats, and people that contributed to my experience. Finally, I realized that it was also the sounds within me, within my mind, and my own process of listening, of keeping time, and of understanding my environment that made my experience of the bells so captivating. These bells, with their harmonic qualities, the duration of their peal, their situation within the specific environment of Vysehrad, and the circumstances of the active city around them, create a situation of a sound installation for a listener. Listeners to the bells find that they interact with them psychologically. They listen through the bells rather than just to them, and the sound can take on an almost tangible, physical quality, especially in terms of its changing resonance with the surrounding historical architecture. Furthermore, the bell’s resonance transforms the sense of the immediate present for listeners, as the peal stretches out for several minutes, echoing, attention to the present and immediate memory merges into a single experience. Encountering these bells in their full peal is a truly interactive experience.
My intention for this piece was to use the medium of the radio to extend this experience, offering it to others and prolonging it, by altering its context. Therefore, I developed this piece as Radio Art, a Sound Installation for Radio, in that this work emphasizes a sense of a particular place, and specific qualities of spaces that are broadcast to listeners who occupy different spaces and places. Artistically, this provided both challenges and freedom. On the one hand, this piece is a kind of documentary in which acoustical characteristics of the bells are presented. However, on the other hand, it is also is a personal reframing of my experience of listening to the bells within a personal grammar of sounds. In this sense, the work is not only a Sound Installation for Radio, but also a kind of Sound Poetry, in which a personal experience is re-framed within a new language of sounds, some of which are in fact derived from language, from vocality.
While many artists draw attention to sounds and environments through their re-presentation of field recordings, my project is something different. However, I share with other artists the hope to use the medium of radio to offer an opportunity for an extended listen within our hectic world. We move through these sound environments in our daily lives, too busy to give them much notice. I would like to suggest on the contrary, that these experiences have value: they are revealing. By reframing the sounds and environment of the bells, listeners are offered a new way to enter into this important historical and cultural example of Public Sound Sculpture, and by working with RadioCustica and Cesky Rozhlas, we can create alternative and meaningful listening experiences through the medium of the airwaves. On a long train commute, a lonely drive, or late at night, we tune in: at first the question might be “what is this?” After some time, however, as the recognition of an environment in dialogue with itself is made available through broadcast, fascination takes over. When this happens, listeners carry the dialogue with them, in their attention and memory.
a sequence of four notes
fall heavily in the summer air and rise again
bouncing off the cobblestones, fracturing
reflections flying off in all directions
at the first sign of an intruder
they escape, scattering,
flying off in all directions at the first sign of an intruder
and yet they are partially captured by the intruder
who carries them with themselves
who carries them inside
forever
or leaves them behind
leaves them turning yellow
from moisture stress
the oxidation of memories
as in the fall when changes in the length of daylight and temperature
stop the food making process and the chlorophyll in the leaves breaks down
the green colour disappears
and the yellow to orange become visible
at the same time other chemical changes may occur
additional colors through the development of red anthocyanin
dogwoods and sumacs, the sugar maple in its brilliant orange pajamas
others, like many oaks, display mostly browns
every autumn we revel in the beauty of the fall colors
and her nose was coloured and rose
and fell alternating with
the direction of the wind
all winter they sat on the sofa
listening to the notes through closed windows
and receiving messages
outlined in shadows left by leaves
on their windowpane
these were carefully transcribed
and coded such that none but those meant to understand them
would understand the secrets conveyed therein
the secrets, for example, of the chill that raises hairs behind your neck
in a cold and dark house
on a windy night
without a moon
but with the voice of crows or something
or, for example, the language spoken by the pressure
that reveals itself to the attentive participant
through the sensation that they are not alone in the house
or that someone is in the room with them
perhaps paying attention to them but perhaps not
different in kind from the sensation of being watched and knowing it
this, instead is innocent
the old woman upstairs watches you hang up your laundry in the courtyard
the retired policeman looks on hungrily
pushing his fat lips together again and again
his breathing heavy
he snorts
and the great nose in the Vltava to be discussed later
sinks a little bit deeper into its own dreams
scents, sensual memories
presented again but in code
received from the future in the form of hoarfrost on the windowpane
or leaves across the window pane, the trajectory of their shadows
or even spider webs, (it doesn’t matter, the point is that they were carefully looked after)
they would hold onto them
when the time was right slowly unfold them
read out the plans for the building to be undertaken
the assembly of the great signs
while humming the four notes to themselves
in and out of sequence
without yet within a scope of acceptable synchronicity
the demands of the rhythmic pressure
the humidity of each individual syllable
weighed down with tears yet still with enough blood in its veins to suggest progress, movement
until finally
motionless
silent
and static
waiting
as though
suspended
and
the monument:
a giant nose
emerges slowly out of the Vltava
moving and smelling
progressive but slow
as progress is slow
democratically, of course
and toward the castle
through the swamp
sniffing the air
right and left
left and right
up, down,
and back and forth
swinging
in ever widening arches
but never wildly,
always exercising
great
discipline
in its spread
of scent
across the surface of first water
and then onto land
and then: the occasional sneeze
a gesture indicative
to those who know
who they blow
and the class of
those whose nose they blow
while elsewhere a new church rises
but in this church old ovals
swollen flower hips
vines and berries burst asunder
within their own season
seasoned with their own weight
as within stone circles
beneath a shared sun
sign, they unfold their own plans
& they are the plans that they unfold
they become themselves becoming
and through the harsh green summer
when the leaves become too big
and bend down
perverse
useful but in their last moments
eating and drinking all they can
while suffering under the weight of their own opulence
memories of former beauty, perhaps grandeur
they break their necks
no less than they should
and all autumn
and winter
in its still outdoor air
cold open rooms
nights in which reading by the snowlight is possible
she sits in the shadow of her hourglass
projected on the wall from the moonlight behind
cut by shadows of trees on the windowpanes
she is listening
for the first four notes
to drop
from the grains sand
that now stand suspended
in mid-air
A Humid Bell In The Shape of A Bird Resonantes The Conspiratorial Landscape
Beginning with an analysis of the harmonic content of the noonday peal of the bells from the Basilica of St Peter and St Paul in Vysehrad, Prague, this piece unfolds to become a landscape in dialogue with itself. Processes of interaction leave traces: animal, human, atmospheric: but what constitutes the medium in which such traces are inscribed?
The bells begin their sound when mechanical energy lifts them out of their their equilibrium state, and releases them. The fall first like a landslide, but fixed as they are by one side, they oscillate, gravity acting on them to modulate their kinetic momentum. Their individual back-and-forth motions are simple, but not exactly periodic. Four tones in downward motion combine. However, what begins as an ordered system gives way to an experience of extraordinary variety and complexity for a listener. Contingencies abound.
At times other than the noon peal the music played on the bells may be followed linearly, with the environmental resonances and the collaborative interjections of songbirds, traffic, passing boats, and the weather being relegated to ornament. During the noon peal, however, the bells broadcast an immersive environment in which noon lasts forever. The sound is everywhere at once. It is in one sense the same, and yet simultaneously full of a rich and ever-shifting variety that suspends the listener in an ever present now.
These moments leave traces on memory of the listener long after the peal, lasting about six minutes, has ended. As is the case with the ripe and fertile botanical paintings that clothe the inner walls of the sanctuary of the Basilia, the indentations of the bells peal harken back to earlier, more primitive ways of knowing. Such traces stretch into the future too, into all the now-presents as they arise, touching the everyday lives of all who have listened to it.
Consider the medium of all such traces be they sounds, memories, notes or script on parchment, page, or sand, the writing of an old fire in an ancient hearth or less ancient cottage fireplace, a prehistoric carving in stone or the ephemeral snow angels made by children, a bullet hole left in a rock or wooden wall in the storms and stresses of history, the pressure and warmth of a loved one's hand on your skin, or the action of wind and water on rock, for example.
Such traces are the records of interaction written momentarily or for posterity upon the body of the environment. This body is itself constituted by interactive phenomena that it contains, we are the authors of the traces that are our lives. Gesture and language spread out from bodies, yet likewise define them. While the medium of such traces, as with sound, is defined as presence and experienced in the present, the traces themselves are records of movement, written in the displacement, removal, pressing down or aside, or scraping away of neighboring material.
Descend further, below the four notes that form the opening motive of the Basilica’s noonday peal, and one finds that the hill one stands on contains many rings, layers of memory. History immerses a casual visitor who encounters it simultaneously in the contemporary buildings, Roman buildings, aspects of the Baroque, buildings from the 1800s, adjacent modernism and pieces of the old Prague City Walls. The constructions on Vysehrad resonate not only with the coloured plaster echoes of the ringing bell tones, but also with the voices and intentions of their builders. A highly speculative claim put forth by some acousticians is that it could be possible in the built environment to sonify traces of ancient sound left behind in flexible materials like clays and plastics. It is captivating to imagine playing these surfaces like records, and hearing the sounds of history unfold into the simultaneity of the present. Fascinating, but terrifying.
If we cannot listen to them directly, we can certainly read them, at least partially. Or, if we do not necessary grasp the language, at least we can spot the fossilized outlines of words and letters. Through such we descend, in the manner of the tones that begin the bell peal, into the soil and rock below one’s feet, through and past the earliest settlements around Prague, and to the the terraced bed of the Vltava. Here is etched into stone the history of not only life but of the planet since the Precambrian.
In the present we have this project: a humble study, some music, or sound art, inspired by some pealing bells. For me, this is an immersive experience that subsequently colours memory as a snow-covered landscape or intense heat can colour memory. Separating the bell peal into twenty-nine harmonic partials, I freely manipulated these. I brought them into conversation with the sounds of insects and birds from immediately downriver in Vsenory and quite a bit further afield, from Sumava (recorded in Klatovy an Klenova in a summer of spectacular trips I took there to work with Czech, French, and Norwegian artists who gathered there that summer for an exhibition. The conversations I had in that past summer with Iveta Plna, Anders Gronlien, and Michael Gimenez become interjections into the work of the current summer. Meanwhile, from the shadows of a basement in Vsenory, in a time slightly closer to Now, insects invaded tapes and convolved texts modulated with home-made feedback driven circuits and digitally coded synthesis recorded along with rain in Vsenory, where my colleague Jakub Grosz’ family has a cottage that we would use as a studio as often as possible around the time I was lucky enough to be living in Smichov.
The language of birds is both local birds local and international, they speak a hybrid language, ignoring all borders as do weather systems and vibrations within the landscape itself. By bringing such aspects of my recorded experience together with recorded and re-synthesized aspects of the bells, I hope that the new experience continues an international discussion, and one conducted primarily with our ears, as listeners. Led by our ears we set forth active, but permeable propositions. Some of these take the traces of sound as a form of recording, others modify it in an attempt to embody memory in matter, and still others work by mimicry, performing the environment. My own approach attempts a phenomenological re-framing of the circumstances of my own experience, attempting to re-situate them as experiences for us, framing thereby the interesting structures and emergence of complexity that I hope we can discuss and explore. As a listener, one stands available for sound, for experience, and for cooperation. I am not done deciding what these bells and this place mean or meant for me.
Thus, this question has the function of a reflecting pool and the form a pressure wave, that of cloud of sound or summer rainstorm, felt by all but by all experienced in situation to themselves.
Jorge Boehringer, July 2019
