nature folds

E14 - GRIPIA CITY (Luca Resta, 2021)
produced by OTO Sound Museum

Luca Resta's URBAN SOUND series gathers works realized through the recording and editing of sound collections. The sixth piece, Gripia City (2021) comes from a series of street musicians’ recordings started in Paris in 2012. Each recording captures a melody and the surrounding soundscape – the frenetic footsteps of passengers, horns, rails, voices – giving life to a portrait of specific temporality and spatiality.
Like in a walk in the city, the work evolves over the time of a journey among the different metro lines and the street melodies played by international musicians, also translating class struggles, the daily frenzy and the health dramas, shedding light on those invisible and atonic sounds that continue to fill spaces of transient sociability.
Between pauses and movements, the strikes against the labor reform and the manifestations of the French feminist group and of the European act of Black Lives Matter contribute in drawing a portrait of Paris with its social and political complexity. Animated by the ephemeral, the work lives in the condition of invisibility and, paradoxically, highlights the a-sonority of underground music performances.

Luca Resta is an Italian artist living in Paris. Collecting is an important part of his practice: he collects everyday objects, traces of consumerism, memes and soundscapes – in particular, traces of a human expression and political voices that persists while remaining at the urban margins. 

Many thanks to Francesca Ceccherini and OTO Sound Museum!
Image: courtesy OTO Sound Museum
https://oto.museum/

OTO Sound Museum is a nomadic space dedicated to fostering sound experimentation, listening, and the amplification of voices. Founded with the mission of producing, disseminating, and collecting recent or unpublished sound works, the museum invites contemporary artists from different backgrounds, geographies and generations.

"Twilight" is an extract from Martina Testen and Simon Šerc's field recording project "Nokturno", giving us an aural glimpse into the rich lifeworlds of animals and guiding us through the mysterious soundscapes of the nocturnal world. The recordings were gathered over a period of ten years, during which the authors spent countless nights in the forest.

Divided into eight chapters – Sunset, Twilight, Dusk, Nightfall, Midnight, After Midnight, Predawn, and Dawn – the album traces a natural arc from the fading light of day to the awakening chorus of morning. From twilight frogs and nocturnal beetles to the haunting calls of owls, the roar of stags, and the distant howls of wolves, the album reveals the hidden symphony of the night.

Beyond sound alone, Nokturno invites reflection on the inner lives of animals - creatures that think, feel, and navigate their world with subtle intelligence. It is an intimate, immersive celebration of nocturnal realm, a journey into the fragile ecosystems that sustain life under the veil of darkness.
Immersive and atmospheric, "Nokturno" captures the beauty, mystery, and fragility of nocturnal life. It is both a celebration of nature’s hidden orchestra and a reminder of the importance of protecting the habitats where these sounds still resonate.

Image from the film In Search of UIQ (Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, 2013)

Écologies de la brousse – Aadaajii laɗɗe (2024 - ongoing)
 
Started in 2021, "Écologies de la brousse – Aadaajii laɗɗe" is a non-linear project of photographic, textual (Katia Golovko) and sound (Cristian Adamo) exploration of termite mounds and the savannah environments of northern Senegal.
These are conceived as metaphors for synergy, complexity, and symbiosis in the more-than-human environment, and as a search for alternative paths to the inherent violence of capitalism.
Termite mounds are living monuments, self-contained ecosystems, straddling the visible and invisible, serving as refuges for both living and non-living inhabitants of the savannah, and as examples of cosmic conviviality.
This audio track was initially made for Katia Golovko's installation "Écologies de la brousse – Aadaajii laɗɗe" on the occasion of "Branching Streams - Sketches of Kinship’"exhibition in May - September 2024 in Dakar. The recordings included in this composition were made between late December 2023 and early January 2024 on the Île à Morphil, in the department of Podor, Senegal. Panoramic microphones, Geophone and radio tuner on different frequency bands were used for these recordings.

Installation: Katia Golovko
Recording and editing: Cristian Adamo 
Mastering: Giuseppe Ielasi 


Read more about the project here

An aeolian sound art project, listening to the landscape and the spirit of the times. With the words of Virgile Abela, "Single, serial or multiple synesthetic experiences, they all take up the vibrations of the air transforming them into the music of the wind .The instruments and the environment work together, plunging our perception of reality into a meditative, vibratory fiction. A holistic invitation to inhabit the landscape differently.

(Horizons-Sancy Festival)

Thank you Virgile!

https://www.virgileabela.com/

A spring walk around and through a house that sits on the drop edge of yonder whose soundworld we are only beginning to discover.

A trip through the Tunis Medina, dissolving from Dar Meso’s secret garden to the voices of the Kasbah, from the trance sounds of Stambeli to a whispered poem from Gaza.
 
Field recordings and editing: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni
Mixing and treatments: Graeme Thomson
 
Many thanks to Ali, Nicène, Salah, Emel and all the artists at Dar Meso

SOUND ASLEEP creates a safe space for different species of animals to sleep together: a puddle frog, a cat, a brown bear, a lion, a southern seal, a crow, a family of elephants and a dog.

MONTAGE AND MIX: Silvia Maglioni
A big thank you to Bernhard Günter and Chris Watson.

In the second episode of her Sud Sound Secrets Alessandra Pomarico shares with you a voice of Adriatic salty waves hissing and splashing, agitated yet calming, strong and stormy, magic and sublime. The secret narrow stairway сarved directly into the limestone massif and leads directly to the water where this song was given to Alessandra will remain secret.

This is the sonic portrait of a mixed forest that grows on a limestone cliffs somewhat seven meters above the sea somewhere in the south of the Apennine Peninsula.

This recording was made in a secret place at Tiputini Biodiversity Station located in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. The place is used by different animals to get some minerals and then other animals use it to hunt them. The location is very special because it's full of animals and activity. In the recording there are some frogs, crickets, a lot of insects, including two or three flying insects or unidentified animals surrounding the microphones very close.
Mikel R Nieto

One raw recording made in the Amazon rainforest (Ecuador) recorded the night of 24th September, 2014. Mastered at “H Studio” in Berlin during winter 2018.

mikelrnieto.net