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About
This album is a companion to La durée poignardée | Fixed duration
“Royaume de lumière” is a 28-minute soundscape I composed using field recordings taken by Éireann Lorsung during summer 2018. The recordings were taken within a 30-mile radius of Lorsung’s then-house in Flanders, Belgium, in locations she accessed on foot, by bicycle, and by train. The title plays with René Magritte’s series of paintings titled “L’Empire des lumières.”
The recording was installed with Lorsung’s composite painting “Royaume de lumière x 144” in January-March 2020 as part of the exhibition Voyager: Migrational Narratives at Emery Community Arts Center in Farmington, Maine, USA.
I assembled the recordings in Pure Data, creating a program that would loop and play and pause and play again these recordings at random intervals to achieve an ongoing and always-changing soundscape. A little computer was built to run this program and continuously generate the ever-fresh soundscape throughout the duration of the exhibit.
This recording is one instantiation of the composition. There was minimal processing done to the sounds and there was no effort to hide how they were made: by someone, moving through spaces public and private, holding her phone, recording and listening. Working on this project was the beginning of what would become my fascination with rough and messy field recordings–recordings where you can hear the recordist, hear fuzz and wind, hear the recordist’s hands as they hold the recorder, and so on.
Éireann made the artwork, superimposing images she took in Belgium.
Artwork
Figure 1: Royaume de lumière cover art
Tracklisting
- Royaume de lumière
Release
- Date
- 2021-04-27
- Label
- Rough Draft Records
- Format
- Digital (originally an installation)