8 Tracks: Of Inner Space Poetry With Wsr

The discovery of this piece marked the beginning of my never ending obsession for reverberation and its capability to shape sound, and all the physical aspects of it. The author recorded his own voice in a space and repeatedly played this recording back into the same space. The reverb of the room progressively degrades the original speech recording and what’s left at the end is an eerie drone with a super rich texture made of the resonant frequencies of the room.

Heavy and beautiful record – ‘4 Rooms’. Kirkegaard used the same process of Alvin Lucier’s piece without the use of human voice, starting instead from the recording of silence, taken within the same room. He did this in four spaces in Chernobyl so the whole sonic exploration becomes very meaningful.

Another electroacoustic piece from a very mysterious artist. I suspect that she used a process very similar to Alvin Lucier’s, but I’m not too sure cause there’s not much documentation about it, it’s from the 70s but it was only released a couple of years ago. She takes a looping Chopin sample and progressively destroys it with room acoustics, it’s super interesting how something so gentle and beautiful turns eventually into something so huge and haunting.

To continue on the topic of churches, ‘Music For Church Cleaners’ is one of the most bizarre and interesting records I’ve discovered in the last few years. The whole album is a collection of improvised pieces recorded in a church that Áine was given free access to, but only during cleaning times. What you hear is a constant interaction between her improvising on the organ and the cleaning staff working, at points they also engage in conversations with her.

I’m a big fan of Grouper and when I found this recording I got super excited. It’s a recording of ‘Alien Observer’ performed live in a place that apparently has an 11 seconds reverberation. She basically used the room to do what she normally achieves with lots of reverb pedals. I think it sounds incredible.

I went to see this installation by David Byrne back in 2009 when I was still in high school and it really fascinated me. He set up a system with which one could play different elements of the building from an organ keyboard, you could also just sit there and watch people make the Roundhouse resonate and trying to create some kind of improvised performances with the sound of the building.

I love the way Emptyset explore musically the concept of playing with the medium and adapting the musical input according to its sonic potential. The whole record ‘Material’ is a collection of large buildings made out of vast concrete/rock walls and resonating metallic apparatus, used as instruments by making them subject to sine waves and noise and then recording the reaction with several microphones.

This album ‘Be Mine Tonight’ is one of my favourite records ever. It’s four songs of only voice, guitar and drums, all quite long and destructured in the sense of conventional singing-songwriting. One of the thing I like the most about it though is the way that it has been recorded. It sounds like the microphones are always pointing away from instruments and vocals and it’s very beautiful to perceive the space so much and from so far away, and it is probably the only way to convey properly this kind of writing.