Aural Hypnox – Underworld Transmissions Label: Aural Hypnox – AHUE09 Format: CD, Compilation, Limited Edition Country: Finland Released: 08 Oct 2019 Style: Abstract, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Drone
Underworld Transmissions was Aural Hypnox label series, filmed and captured on tape in the private séances held in our subterranean lodge located in Oulu, Northern Ostrobothnia.
The concept was to invite artists from the Helixes collective, in different combinations, to join a séance and to establish through sound and movement an elemental communication. In greater sense, apart from personal goals, these séances aimed to bring forth the seasonal currents of the lodge; the undertone of the Aural Hypnox label and the artists involved.
Each séance was guided by a unique automatic-portal-portrait reflecting the planetary and stellar distances seen at that particular time in the lodge altar mirror-receiver.
All audio was captured live on tape by using binaural recording technique. Films were captured during séances and also in the preceding and subsequent sessions that took place in Other Rooms and in the surrounding wilderness.
The candles have been extinguished; transmissions completed.
Underworld Transmissions CD edition is housed in an oversized, screen printed cardboard covers and includes a 16-page xeroxed booklet. Limited to 150 copies.
Marc Behrens – Sleppet Label: Crónica Format:CD, Album Country: Portugal Released: 14 Oct 2009 Style: Abstract, Musique Concrète, Experimental
Sleppet originated from a sound art project in 2007, when six renowned artists — Natasha Barrett, Bjarne Kvinnsland, Steve Roden, Chris Watson, Jana Winderen and Marc Behrens — recorded sounds on a 10-day trip through the Norwegian Westlandet region and used the nature experience for a couple of sound installations and music pieces.
Sleppet leads back to Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, for whom contemplation of nature and its influence on the artistic creation had high significance.
Sleppet deals with the energy and the transformation processes of the early springtime.
In the frame of the composition, realized exclusively with concrete sound material, Behrens created several parentheses: the first part starts with an unaltered field recording of a clamouring flock of seagulls as exposition, from which this part is further developed. The final part ends with an equally unaltered recording of a springlike forest patch with various songbirds, a few kilometers up the hill in the fjord valley — in which seagulls can be discerned in the distance. Bird song can be heard at other points within the piece, as by-products of recording other sounds, as sound windows into spring.
The second parenthesis consists of the sonic intensity of drones used in the first and the last part — in the first part sounding like a string group alongside acute cymbals, in the last part sounding purely electronic, but always displaying a certain sonority. Such nearly tonal quality does not exist in the middle parts of the piece. Instead of that, the third, rather noisy parenthesis depicts movements of tilting, slipping off and falling, as culminations within the internal structure: a rubble avalanche (the loudest one in a sequence in part 2), and a collapsing part of a glacier (which closely missed Behrens when he recorded melt water drops), after or framed by audible melting.
Acoustic utterances of animal impatience, which belong to nordic spring like the melting of snow and ice, bring forward the composition: besides the clamour of seagulls there is the noise of impatient cattle, still chained inside their stable. The atmosphere of a sheep shed in the final part picks up the theme again, but is almost completely warped by noises from a hydroelectric powerplant and a ferry.
Phases of contraction (loud, dense) and expansion (quieter, sometimes permeable) define the structures of parts 4 and 5. The first three parts show a somewhat more consistent sound impression. At many points in parts 1–4, figure/ground and foreground/background relations are fathomed out.
The great movements throughout the course of the 41-minute piece put focus onto the rendering conscious of accumulating and discharging energies.
