BIZALOM (‘from Seikilos to Euterpe’) // The Weather Inside
A sound/dream/memory meditation, the weather inside
This audio is the second live version of the work-in-progress Bizalom // The Weather Inside. This formed part of my live performance for the Space and Sometimes Movement show at MPavilion, February 2019. I was one of a number of artists asked to compose for a custom Yamaha wave-field synthesis sound system installed in the MPavilion in Queen Victoria Gardens, Melbourne. The above audio is a simple stereo mix created during the rehearsal preparation.
Bizalom was initially conceptualised with the 4DSOUND system at the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest (2018), during a period of early experimentation with the system. I was in residence at the SSI creating SONORITY and began with experiments using field recordings I’d made of the ocean in Greece some time before, exploring the capability of the omnidirectional Budapest studio to create a moving, sounding ocean beneath my feet.
I began to incorporate other sounds – captured audio moments in time from summers of travel, dynamic movements, fields of electronic pulse and swirling voices, building a sound meditation that I used as a practice of deep listening for myself and whomever came into the studio to listen. I enlisted the voices of other artists in residence, including Petko Ognyanov, Ana Amorós, Kate de Lorme, and Vladimir Razhev, speaking the word for trust in Hungarian, Greek, and English. Petko also reads the inscriptions from the Seikilos epitaph.
I’ve long been intrigued by the Seikilos epitaph, the oldest surviving complete musical notation; a timeless poetic message of love. I have a MIDI file of the tune, that triggered a whole other dimension to this work.
I began to write poetic story prompts on my daily walks during this time, first inspired by the word "trust", which I received as an answer to a question I took the month before to the Delphi oracle (along with a thunder storm). I let the sounds I'd gathered over years lead me down other paths of memory, moments in time, internal weather reports.
The work developed organically and continues to develop, a meditation on the complex feelings and memories that sound and atmosphere triggers, responses to the weather, outside and inside.
Most of all, this work is an invitation to surrender to dreaming and allow sound to trigger memory.
A version of Bizalom was performed live as a stereo mix, with accompanying video mix, at Chimeres Space, Athens, October 2018 (see the video). The mix of this version is not as gentle. It was a different kind of performance, and so I was pushing the volumes harder. The mix also blends into a DJ set for the second half of the performance.
