This piece proposes a sonic journey through the depths of the unconscious mind. Patterns repeat, evolve, mutate and dissipate into other shapes, just like a dream where you can wander freely without ever knowing exactly where you are, when it begins or ends – just a blank space to be filled in the void.

Rita Silva (PT, 1993) is a Portuguese composer and multi-instrumentalist with a focus in analog synthesizers and algorithmic composition.
Part of this year’s roster of Shape +, a renowned european platform for innovative music and art.

Rita released in 2022 her debut album “the inflationary epoch“, which resulted in several media mentions and positive feedback. She has played in venues and festivals such as Out.FEST, Zigurfest, ZDB, GnrATION, Paard, Madeira DIG, The Grey Space In The Middle, among others.

Currently, her research is focused on the use of recursive melodic patterns that can manipulate the listener’s cognitive processes, where the boundaries between sound, space and time are intertwined in a psychoacoustic cosmos.

I spent my time investigating insects.
At the beginning, I started with silk worms in my home town of Frankfurt.
I realized that other caterpillars produced beautiful butterflies or moths, and that silkworms did the same. This led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed

Maria Sibylla Merian
foreword to Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium [1705]

A preparatory studio for SURINAME, a soundwork inspired by the groundbreaking work of Maria Sybilla Merian, a seventeenth-century illustrator and naturalist.
This audio portrayal represents the first phase of an ongoing sound project that explores the evolving, intensifying interior landscape of this passionate explorer, who was also one of the greatest botanical and insect painters that ever lived.

Her extraordinary work on caterpillars, moths and butterflies, her unconventional life and her contributions to art and science turned her talent into a mission. Considered one of the founders of modern entomology, Maria Sibylla combined her passion for drawing with her interest in insects; in her vision art and nature are inextricably bound. Although it was extremely difficult for a woman to gain a foothold in science at her time, she emerged from her chrysalis to establish herself as a woman and a scientist in a world yet to be discovered. She happened to be a pioneer in the field of natural science anticipating several of the discoveries later made by Linnaeus and Darwin. Her stepfather, the naturalist painter Jakob Marell, chose her as a pupil in his studio. Maria Sibylla then started collecting caterpillars, worms, leaves and flowers, which she drew with great precision. She was particularly fascinated by the transformation of caterpillars into moths and butterflies.

At the age of fifty-two (1699) Maria Sibylla and her daughter Dorothea ventured thousands of miles from the Netherlands (where she had moved after her divorce) to Suriname to observe and document the metamorphosis of insects. She spent two years illustrating new and unique plant and animal species and behaviors. Many of these illustrations are featured in Sibylla’s incredible self- published Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) She was one of the first to demolish the belief of the spontaneous generation of living organisms from inanimate matter and the first naturalist to recognise and document the wondrous transformation of caterpillars and illustrate the metamorphosis of the butterfly.

Her life, her perseverance, her vision, trace the imprints of a rarefied and inexorable inner world, offering a glimpse of the extraordinary vitality and variety of her perspectives, consistent with an ethical, poetic yet scientific gaze over plants and animals.

Inspired by this extraordinary woman, our work makes use of found sounds, imagination, voice and whispers, shamisen, cello, electroacoustic textures, noise, butterflies, frogs, archival research, letters; just like a sort of sonic score induced by an interior monologue, trying to trace Sybilla’s scientific attitude trapped in an artist’s soul. We tried to paint the critical moment of the brave, intrepid and long sea voyage to Suriname: the sea, the doubts, the solitude, the imagined dangers of the jungle, her being an independent but lonely woman in a male-dominated world ! To draw a woman’s private labyrinth made of doubts, fears, solitude, vulnerability, alienation, illness, identity.

Conceived, written and produced by

Barbara De Dominicis & Cristian Maddalena
Barbara plays voice, electronics, kalimba, synths, found sounds Cristian plays shamisen, keys, electronics, drums, found sounds with contributions by Andrea Serrapiglio (cello)
Words by Barbara De Dominicis and Cristian Maddalena,
Maria Sibylla Merian, Clarice Lispector [Água Viva], Virginia Woolf [Waves], Maya Deren.

We thank all the butterflies, crickets, birds, waves and frogs involved and, above all, Paulo Raposo for his supportive vision and trust.

Maria_Sibylla_Meridian (PDF)

Walking alone generates embodied comprehension through non-intentional encounters with the dynamics of specific places, especially remote conversations. This is a personal interpretation of sound and conversations in which, I non deliberately, solely, insert myself.

Credits
Cellos – Louis Wilkinson

~
Joana de Sá (2001) is a Portuguese sound artist from Viseu. In his work, she seeks to explore textural sounds, derived from field recordings, articulated with phrases made from guitar, synthesizer or voice.
After loose themes released on Soundcloud’s personal profile, in 2022 he released the album “Shatter” by the Portuguese Sirr-ecords, having presented and collaborated on sound pieces for the festival “Radio Art Zone” or at the Champalimaud Foundation, in collaboration with several artists about Metamersion II.

Flux of Fragments (voice/loops/electronics – Line Horneland)

what would it take
to be filled with light
split
divide
in the middle
open and become
nothing
everything
would it take for my scream to become one
with the silence

A central issue in her work is whether the voice through the artistic trajectory has a potential for the individual’s listening experience in the public space. The vocalscape is seen as an auditive framework, a potential sound space for centering in the listener’s own story, in a process of tuning in to…something, in the paradox of the desired state of flux, the perception of fragments, and the friction between them..the in-between possibly being the true sound space?

Line Horneland (Norway) has her background in the music field as a vocalist, drawing on different kinds of material from jazz to free improvisation and loops, evolving into an artistic practice on vocalscapes for installations and soundworks. The solo album Where nothing has a name was released at Sirr-ecords/Portugal in 2022. Recent installation work includes Beautiful as the flip side of ugly – voicing a sound space (2021) at Stazione di Topolò (Italy), Innimellom er lyden stille (2019) at the sound art festival Il Suono in Mostra (Italy) and at Lydgalleriet (Norway 2018). Since 2016 she has been involved in the interdisciplinary improvisation project Sono Flux. Line has a MA in Creative Disciplines and Learning Processes (Music) from Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, in addition to language studies and education as a physiotherapist.

I am listening in awe to surrounding environment. I wonder how I, as a human being, fit in? What is my place? How can “I” be an integral part of my environment by simply being “present”: here and 

now _ as an equal participant _ in the same way as weather, wildlife, any other occurring event. I am instinctively seeking a sense of balance, a feeling of harmonious belonging, a being-together. Connection. 

The music, the sounds, seems having magical ability – superpower – to tune effortlessly together, to collide in energetic harmony. Through intensive listening everything becomes alive, every subtle sound shivering in the air in tandem with my feeling of belonging. The music rises from an unknown and I am listening – speechless – in the core of creation itself:_: just listening to the primeval tone of my soul weaving into every moment, every other moment and another: perpetually changing _ adapting _ seeking for harmony _ seeking for that feeling I am attracted to: freedom … an opening of heart to the world – fearless: … 

I am using the immediate surrounding environment as interface for connecting with “the rest of the world”, call it “the reality” if you wish. I have impression when I am trying to tune myself to my immediate sound environment, it helps me to be more sensitive to every perceptible miniscule fluctuations and changes between tension in my body – the emotion and the environment. Sound is my portal: a place to dream of endless possibility, of  another future unfolding. A dream. Abstraction.

Conceived by Slavek Kwi / Artificial Memory Trace 

Slavek Kwi is a sound-artist, composer, adventurer and researcher interested in the phenomena of perception as the fundamental determinant of relations with reality. He has a long-standing fascination with sound-environments, developing what he terms ‘electro acoustic sound-paintings’ that oscillate between sound only works and interdisciplinary works exploring social, spatial and temporal processes. These complex audio-based situations are created mainly from field-recordings, resulting in subjective reports for radio broadcast, ‘cinema for ears’ for multi-channel playback, sound installations integrated into the environment and performances. From the early nineties Slavek has operated mainly under the name Artificial Memory Trace. 

Nowadays, since some years, he is mainly focused on exploring the deep relationship in between sound-environment and human consciousness via sound-art under moniker name of alfa00. Slavek is interested about exploring the idea of “absolute freedom” in connection to extrasensory communication possibilities via international project uni.Sol_ (United Artists for Well-Being of Solar System & Everything Else). 

He facilitates experimental sound workshops with children, children on autistic spectrum and those with learning disabilities. The workshop technique emphasises extensive listening and the stimulation of creativity and freedom through observation and the support of natural tendencies. Currently he is working for Creative Schools of The Arts Council of Ireland. Slavek was born in former Czechoslovakia, lived 14 years in Belgium and has been based in Ireland since 2000. 

www.artificialmemorytrace.bandcamp.com
www.unisol.bandcamp.com
www.alfa00.bandcamp.com 

Where does it come from?
The impulse, plucking my neural plexus, leaving behind open doors for the algorithm of consciousness to inscribe the new path. Memories compressed in cells’ membranes, wriggle, dissolve, combust and ripen. Nothing remains in your name* until paths are cleared and psyche’s sediment is purged.

The Desire of My Heart is a collection of intimate interventions extracted from my daily life and observations of my immediate environment from the perspective of transcendental attuning. On the trace of early 20th century esoteric practices of automatic painting and writing, I build a meta narrative in three stages, using field recordings, sonification and improvisation on amplified objects, exploring and manipulating basic frequencies from electrical fields.

Instruments used –
thick jar with the ice cubes
broken radio receiver inside the thick jar with the ice cubes
home fan
radio receiver tuning to a FM scale (excerpts from HRT3 programme about WWII)
wheelchair wheel salvaged from shallow waters in the Adriatic, played with wooden sea debris, electrical coffee mixer, soft xylophone stick and a pine cone
radio receiver placed on the wheelchair wheel
cardboard tube rubbed against a window
refrigerator
kitchen sink
stones rubbed with the soft xylophone stick
baby megaphone toy

field recordings –
Porec marina, ventilation behind the restaurant in the park (June 2021)
hydrophone and field recorder buried in the stranded sediments of a dry Posidonia oceanica algae, Dobre vode bay, Silba island (July 2021)
St. Marco’s Cathedral church bells, Korcula town (December 2020)

instrumental excerpt from the Depression for the Bass Clarinet graphic score, interpretation Vasa Vuckovic (April 2018)

All sounds gathered, played and edited by Manja Ristić contact mic & hydrophone built by Jez riley French Mastering La Plant Studio Belgrade
August 2021

*from the poem by Liu Xiaobo – You Wait For Me With Dust

“The Borderguard’s path” was recorded in the Sumava forest between the Czech and German borders on the 2nd of January 2021. I set out to explore the sounds that can be heard inside some of the 1st and 2nd World War bunkers in the area, which are said to total around 2000 in number, most of them forgotten and still to be re-discovered.
After an hour walk through a snow covered path I managed to find and crawl into to one of these bunkers. It was a very damped and dark space, where the only source of light was a small shaft window. I had with me a couple of synthesisers (Gakken SX-150 and the DRC running on a tablet) which I placed inside two separate rooms and recorded short improvisations with them, along with some “ghosty” sounds coming from the inside of the bunker’s rusty pipes. Two microphones were placed not far from each other in another corner of the space.
This audio piece was quite a personal experience in self-isolation and overcoming an unavoidable fear of being alone in a dark unknown space. I will never forget the exhilarating feeling of crawling back out, from the darkness into the light. For further information, check: https://sirr-ecords.bandcamp.com

Virgilio Oliveira /2021

DIVersa_Nula – Thelmo Cristovam (2020)

As a sound artist living in brazil, i bear in mind the idea of broadcasting. Distances spray along different lines and overlapping spatial identities. but there are fixed spaces which identity and segment this vast space yet multiple.

The piece is composed of three distinct moments & interests that collapse & run in parallel, the saxophone used as machine, the field recordings (here in the sertão, in particular) & the space/time manipulation through diverse fragmentation and  aa labour of modification from the sound files themselves provided through a physical process. 

Brazil is a complex location. Indeed it crosses through a mobile variation of spaces, continuously shaping and interacting beyond geography stereotypes. The piece attempts  thus to reach an imaginary, immediate and simultaneous aural access to various locations, where I was always and now no longer visit. The image is from one of these locations. 

Where i live in, up in the northeast, makes me wonder how to pose  interrogations and singularities which are kept invisible when thinking of Brazil as a whole. Departing from this, i try to present my work, not only agains this fixed identity, but mainly and obviously as a personal process of sound -making

Thelmo Cristovam, born 1975, lives and works in Olinda, Pernambuco, northeast region of Brazil. Improviser & composer, his academic background is in physics and mathematics, but he is an independent researcher in psychoacoustics. Breath/throat (sax, trumpet, trombone, flute) & electromagnetic waves (satellites/radio) are the main focus on his free improvisation performances and production/recording nowadays. His range of research/poetics includes radio art, noise/drone & field recordings based compositions. Besides his own production, he has given workshops on deep listening, sound art and field recordings, subjects that are the focus of many of his works, besides electroacoustic compositions and free improvisation. He also works as a sound designer for local short films and does research and sound engineering to several projects.

https://thelmocristovam.bandcamp.com/

after Constantine P. Cavafy
with Steve Peters, Marco Scarassatti, Galina Sendrea, Jean-Philippe
Renoult, Paulo Raposo.