BIZALOM // The Weather Inside
A sound/dream/memory meditation. A work in progress.
The Weather Inside is an invitation to listen with emotion and allow the sounds of weather and place to suggest places, feelings, textures, temperatures, weather, inside. It’s an invitation to dream. “Bizalom // The Weather Inside” was initially conceptualised with the 4DSOUND system at the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest (2018), during a period of early experimentation. I was playing with field recordings I’d made of the ocean in Greece some time before, exploring the capability of the Budapest studio to create a moving, sounding ocean beneath my feet. I began to incorporate other sounds – captured audio moments in time from summers, winters, springs, autumns of travel; dynamic movements, fields of electronic pulse and swirling voices. This became 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, to speak the word for trust in Hungarian, Greek, and English. Petko also read 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 had a MIDI file of the tune, that inspired another dimension to the work. I began to include my own poetic story prompts, inspired by meditations the word ‘trust’, which I had received as an answer to a question I took to the Delphi oracle. I let the sounds I'd gathered over years lead me down paths of memory. Moments in time; internal weather reports.
“Bizalom // The Weather Inside” 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, it’s an expression of my desire to invite listeners to surrender to dreaming and allow sound to inspire their own internal storyteller.
Live in Athens
In 2018 I performed a live sound, video and DJ set at Chimeres Space in Athens.
This set begins with a live mix of “Bizalom” along with a video mix of my own films and images. The second half DJ set, mixes music and poetry.
Live in Melbourne
The second live version of “Bizalom // The Weather Inside”, part of a live performance for the Space and Sometimes Movement show at MPavilion, February 2019, working with a Yamaha wave-field synthesis sound system.
Developments
Most recently, in residence at the Arteles Creative Center in Finland in March 2024, I returned to “The Weather Inside”, beginning to completely remake it for binaural, spatial sound for headphone listening, with the eventual aim to develop as a public spatial sound installation.
Over the month of my residency in the forests of Finland I considered and developed the central foundation of the word ‘empistosýni’ (‘trust’ … ‘bizalom’ …) Not only an internal process, of trusting and believing in oneself, the word came to have meaning for the process of developing this work over a long period.
Inspired by the landscape and sounds of the Finnish winter/spring and the freeze/thaw and its correlation to ideas of resistance to and surrender to trust, I delved deeper into the idea of using sound meditation to trigger internal, individual storytelling. Releasing my own hold on the journey as the ‘storyteller’, allowing space for the listener to take their own path.
Again, I invited the other artists in residence to record the word ‘trust’ for me, in five languages (English, Hungarian, Greek, Catalan, and Finnish), and to add the word in their own language if they chose. With now twelve voices, I realised that I had a Greek chorus.
Exploring the Seikilos epitaph further, I read the conjecture that his poem is in fact calling on the muse Euterpe, one of nine muses of Greek myth - the giver of pleasure, represented by a flute. I mapped out nine scenes, for each of the nine muses, each calling in a particular place, weather, emotion. Each of the muses represents a different aspect of art and science. Each of the scenes and weather states is inspired by an experience of my own and my own field recordings. I recorded story fragments in my own voice and fellow resident artist Raissa Bailey recorded a calling on each of the muses, to open each scene.
During the residency I sketched out and composed rough binaural mixes of five of these scenes, which I played for residents in solo headphone listening sessions. The listening sessions importantly were designed for complete relaxation, and surrender. This version of the work, about 28 minutes long, explores five scenes: 1, the Delphi mountain in a rainstorm; 2, the Király bathhouse and its chorus/hum of voices and water; 3, rain on the streets of Budapest and the echoes of ghosts in that landscape; 4, the winter freeze in the forests of Finland; and 5, the thaw, exploring the experience of the release of water from the ice in the spring.
The work of composition is ongoing, with nine eventual scenes to make up a work of approximately 90 minutes.
