Random Weather collects six distinct, experimental sound art works that address diverse meteorological issues in a time of accelerated climate change. Each of these works offers its haunting, troubling, and highly immersive atmosphere, literally.
Portuguese Carlos Santos is known for his ongoing work with violist Ernesto Rodriguez (the head of the Creative Sources label). His «Atmospheric Cartography» follows an imaginary climate, non-linear, evolving, and disorienting formations, with a quiet, carefully layered puzzle of field recordings, found sounds, digital manipulation, and sparse modular synth sounds.
French multi-instrumentalist Bruno Duplant’s minimalist and ethereal «Crespuscule Insondable» imagines the «unfathomable twilight, where the sky fades into whispers, shadows dance, … various chants rise, elusive, like souls that the night pushes. The wind lingers in confidence, touching the soul with a shiver, and in the echo of silence, the song of the horizons is lost». The nocturnal, wind-based sounds are tangible but introduce a dark, distressing vibe.
Portuguese Paulo Raposo (the head of sirr-ecords and close collaborator of Santos) and Lithuanian Gintas (Kraptavičius) K’s «Vanishing Memory on a Clear Day» visit the Lithuanian World Heritage Curonian Spit, the curved sand-dune spit that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea, with its highest moving dunes, where Thomas Mann had his summer home in front of a deep silver sea. This piece suggests a brighter, softer vision, reflecting the clear blue day when it was conceived.
Spanish JL Maire’s «Los ciervos y los lobos fueron los primeros en huir» (The deer and the wolves were the first to flee, a quote from the book There’s No Calm After the Storm by environmental photographer Matteo de Mayda) is a disturbing, tense-filled drone played on Eurorack modular synths, and warns about the damage of the 2018 storm Vaia to the area’s forests, biodiversity, and infrastructure of the Dolomites valley in 2018, while «the capitalists are taking advantage of the situation». Maire concludes that there is no calm after the storm.
French Philippe Petit’s «Sea Lice Swarming Over Small Outgoing Wild Fish» addresses the climate change effects in the oceans, especially in commercial, coastline fish farms. He plays on the vintage Buchla modular synth and tape manipulations, and offers nervous and urgent, fragmented, and noisy rhythmic pulses.
The last piece, American Johan Hudak’s «Melting Snow», is an electroacoustic study of textural decay and spatial diffusion. He layers high-frequency tones, broadband noise, and granular synthesis to mirror sonically the stubborn process of dissolution of ice crystals, from solid to vapor, encapsulating brilliantly the impermanence and cyclical transformation of all natural matter, including sound.
Eyal Hareuveni
Carlos Santos (field recordings, found sounds, digital manipulation, modular synthesizer), JL Maire (Eurorack modular synthesizers), Philippe Petit (Buchla modular synthesizer, tape manipulations)
