disrhythms

 “I think I was travelling in my subconscious. Calm, subtle interesting sounds which make us imagine any activity. Keep free but always care about balance…”    
– Motoko Kikkawa (visual artist, cover art in response to looking for glass)

This project and recordings were made on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, the traditional owners of the land on which we may listen - sovereignty has never been ceded. We pay respect to the Wurundjeri Elders, the land and its sounds, past, present, and future, and extend this respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait people from other communities.
Some recordings throughout this work were recorded in Aotearoa. We pay respect to all Tangata Whenua-Māori of Aotearoa and their enduring connection to Aotearoa and Papatūānuku as Kaitiaki of all Taonga.

Looking for glass is comprised of longer-form arrangements, merging environmental and synthesized sounds, digging around in their sonic similarities and relationships, reflecting internal and external experience of place. This album was composed and arranged during Narrm-Melbourne’s second and more extensive covid-19 lockdown of 2020. This time made room for deeper consideration of external pressures and influences in so-called-Australia under colonial-capitalism and how these influences shape our internal experience of place including the temporal, spatial, body-bound, and material. The work intends to remind us to lightly shift focus towards an un-doing through practices of wandering (physically or otherwise), to remain without agenda as much as possible, recognising opportunities for lived improvisation to interrupt damaging colonial ideas around the value of place.

‘Place’ referred to here as an ‘in-between’, vibrating between definitions enforced by colonial-capitalist perspectives regarding division, ownership and value of place. The sounds of place, momentary, generated and recorded, are re-performed and arranged through a transduction as sonic memory by slowing down, listening, and looking closer.

Some sounds are from previous times and other places, reflecting pasts, presents and futures coming together during lockdown, merging and echoing, crossing over in a synthesized spaciousness as a portal. Under the restrictions of lockdown, while unable to be anywhere else physically, instead ‘travelling in the subconscious’, slowing, listening, considering relationships within closer local areas.

The process of recording included layering one-take improvisations drawing on the potential of transduction of place and experience through sound as memory in the body. One environmental recording may influence a synthesized sound-space, while an environmental recording might resonate with a recorded improvisation. Building on these relationships, intertwining their qualities, sound-synthesis has an organic and incidental influence, relating to the overall concept of the album. Between the circuits, energy shifts, modulates, generating new sound, respecting existing sonic similarities, while conjuring a feeling of place and the body through transduction, affording listeners to consider their own relationship to place.