I played a game a couple days ago called Fatum Betula, feeling a sense of lingering enchantment since, holding tight to that feeling through it's soundtrack in an effort to maintain it. Most in particular I'm caught listening over and over to the track «Red Memories» accompanied by a birdsong ambience sample, bringing to mind memories of ambient birdsong samples more generally. I think the main one to come to mind is it's use on «Drive-By Lullabies»... and maybe if Lilith decides to use it, then there, too.
A part of me feels as if the sound of the same birdsong samples possesses a kind of saccharine simulacra to it, like drinking a commercial candy cola. In it's repetition and it's role as decoration to broken piano melodies, electronic drums, or baltic Prussian grēmans, the sounds lose their referent, as the immortalized voices of birds come to signify a sense of serene comfort, storing rivers that run through trees, like veins whos leaves clutter with wind and bird chatter, into MP3s and bandcamp links, comprised of little digits that shift and shake like the ship of theseus. For a moment, none of the birds seemed real to me.
I think I was 14 when I first encountered Musique Concrète, through a music genre iceberg out of my desire to learn about music more generally. I remember taking small samples out of each genre (as one would sample a kind of food), picking the best tracks among them, and then exploring further when I liked a particular genre. Musique Concrète did not capture my attention very long, but it did plant in my mind a lingering thought that often revisits me: Sound is a thing that exists in the world, not beyond it; sound interacts with the world in various ways, responding to other things within the world, stifled by walls, amplified through cones, or contained by headphones. We've become very adept at manipulating sound, as new sounds can be designed and given life, or existing sounds may be recorded and replayed. In capturing a sound, we capture a certain place it happened to meet, on a certain time and a certain day, but all the more important is that certain place. Thus, sound is spatial.
So, when I found Musique Concrète, what I heard in it were collages of space. And so, for a few months, I came to a habit of recording the sound of certain places as they were at certain times, and I would relisten to them over and over. I'd sometimes move around small areas to capture different angles, little points in space. Sometimes walking to a different part of a room, closing a door, concealing my ears, finding all the different ways to hear a sound-- it's coordinates.
https://ashiba.bandcamp.com/track/alone-in-a-room-terrified
Cinematography and photography are practices of our faculties in the domain of sight, and too often might one defer this practice to that of the cameraman, neglecting the auteur within them. One can pan to different angles of a building, linger on certain scenes of hallways, find places that satisfy the rule of thirds, or adjust props according to one's visual taste. It's a worthwhile thing to look at the same thing from different angles, find new ways to see it, find your eyes in different coordinates, or distort your depth perception. Sound is the same.
When this thought came to me, I began to hear the sample as one such coordinate. Not merely the sound of rivers, it is the sound of a specific river or of specific birds, no more diminished by the collages of musique concrete, the same sound of a quiet room or the repetitions of a piano.
not done yet, sorry D: