Composed, edited and mastered by SEC_ between December 2010 and September 2011
Using: Revox tape recorder, computer, no-input feedback, field recordings, radio, microphones and pick-ups
The first version of this piece has been produced in the framework of the serie "A short guide to becoming-bat", curated by Stefano Perna for ORF Ö1 Kunstradio - Radiokunst in 2011
| 1. | Swarm of Flies | |
| 2. | Echolocation | |
| 3. | Becoming an Insect | |
| 4. | Small Traces | |
| 5. | Moscaio |
Long time before humans began to exploit the properties and the uses of the electromagnetic spectrum, animals had already developed a sophisticated system for the manipulation of waves and the transmission of sound signals for the purpose of communication and orientation. Ethologists and natural scientists have shown that many species of animal like dolphins, whales and insects live into an undulatory space made of signals and calls, of frequencies and amplitudes, a radically temporalized space, a pulsating space, that constantly changes, evolves, expands and contracts.
But what an insect feels? How does it perceives the environment, itself, the other living beings? Science, on one side, can give us some answer in the form of concepts and theories; this way we can understand the process. Music, on the other side, can assemble for us swarms of perceptions that drag our senses and bodies toward zones where man and insect become indiscernible; there, we are affected by the process. In that region, one is suddenly caught in a becoming-animal that alters its organs, environment, space and time. It let us enter into a waveform space, whose geometry is unknown, a kind of non-human spatiality populated by forces and signs to which our perceptual system is not correctly attuned.
This is the way this composition works. No naturalistic descriptions, no documentary impulses, no metaphoric translations. Here we have a contraption. And, like all machines, this device doesn't ask to be read or interpreted. You have to activate it, to put it into work, so it can start extracting from your body ways of perceiving of which you were not aware. An insect body appears: weight loss, oblique speed, exhausting slowness, entangled spaces. A shift in the umwelt happens: an imperceptible and obscene sensorial universe comes to the senses, done of buzz, drone, tiny sounds, sudden appearances, unpredictable trajectories and sharp movements.
But these sounds are very far from any desire of reproduction, a simplistic acoustic mimesis of the natural world. Everything here comes from a deeply altered technical world.
In fact, unlike all machines, this device avoids functionality, it works through series of faults: the ambiguous analog autoeroticism of no-input feedbacks, the uptake of radio signals, interferences, the unauthorized excavation of electromagnetic fields, quirky bits of digital data, all stuffed into shreds of tape abominably manipulated. All communication technologies, once designed to preserve information and to exchange watchwords, are brought to the threshold of collapse. And now they start talking an unprecedented language: a nomadic population of traces and marks that, like a swarm made of millions of flying hungry insects, flutter rapidly in the space, than suddenly flock around a piece of meat and then, again, dissolve into chaos.
(–) Stefano Perna