sound experiments

I've been listening to a lot of this quirky Danish-German dude, Jacob Kirkegaard, lately.  I don't really know his back-story, but he seems to be a scientist/musician/field-recordist 'hybrid' of sorts, always having his musical projects motivated by some weird sound-study.  For example, my first exposure to him was my discovery of 2008's Labyrinthitis, a short little piece in which he initially plays a certain frequency, which apparently triggers some movement of the inner-workings of yer ear that produces a separate frequency, then layers that frequency on top of the previous one, repeating the process for 30 minutes or so.  I was intrigued, so I checked out his older works, all of which proved to be even more absurd/awesome than Labyrinthitis was.

4 Rooms

For this study, Kirkegaard traveled to Chernobyl, which had been empty of human life for nearly 20 years because of a radioactive 'meltdown' at some nuclear power plant, and recorded the silence in 4 'rooms' that were still marked as 'radioactive zones', thus being permanently desolate.  He plays back the silence in the said rooms, and then records that, and does that over and over again a bunch of times, layering them in sequence so that near the end of the song we reach a climax of utterly frightening drone, convincing us that between the waves of 'silence' in these rooms live the ghosts of the estranged men and women who once inhabited them.  There's a study that says you can hallucinate by wearing a blindfold and listening to radio static, that you'll hear dead loved ones speak to you, or see animals from you past; this record has a similar effect , albeit one with a frightening aftertaste.

RATING: 9.1

Eldfjall

I watched a film a few months ago called Khadak.  I honestly didn't know what the hell was going on, but its visual and aural beauty were overwhelming; filmed in Mongolia, each shot was a beautifully extended portrait of the barren, wintry plains of the country, backed by a neo-classical soundtrack with the sounds of droning winds and snowstorms as accompaniment, each scene stretching for minutes on end and suddenly cutting to a starkly different yet similarly desolate panorama .  Listening to Kirkegaard's Eldfjall, a collection of field recordings by microphones he placed in the ground of different volcanically active parts of Iceland, I was immediately reminded of the film.  Gurgling seismic activity captured by one of his mics will drone on for minutes, then unexpectedly cut to a new recording--it too murmur of the earth, but one of a different nature.  In grasping that this is our planet that is actually making these sounds, such masterpieces of drone beneath seemingly frozen surfaces, you find a similar sublime quality as you do watching the pristine beauty arise from Khadak's shots of emptiness.

RATING: 9.0

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