FLOATING SOUND GALLERY
Vienna
Rodolfo Caesar
Circuit Fantôme Season 6 Episode 4curated by Anton Iakhontov (Patrick K.-H.) and Daniel Teruggi.
VOLTA REDONDA (1992/93) stereo 19’35"
Commission by the Groupe de Recherches Musicales - INA, Paris.
Contrasting materials like beads in a crystal bowl and trains were approached by emphasizing some of their common frequencies, in a sort of espectral study. It was my attempt with S.Y.T.E.R., which I considered interesting at the time, but let me down, forcing me to find solutions with the CDP’s filter banks and Akai samplers loopings, as I had already explored in Introduction to the Stone. The title is the name of a city in Brazil built around the main steel mill in the country. A river’s bend names the city: 'volta redonda' means ‘round turn’, which, for me, is a happy pleonasm for ‘loop'.
CÍRCULOS CEIFADOS (1997) stereo 17’
Commission by the Fundação Vitae, São Paulo, Brasil.
Because I always thought that pieces and their titles kept an estranged relationship, for this one I invented that the real authors of the mysterious crop circles cut in many British fields were insects and frogs during the night. Of course this is ludicrous, but I wrote a book in order to prove this point. Or, better yet, it was the opposite: I composed a piece in order to prove my book. I used a lot of Csound and a sampler Kurzweil K2000, and many field recordings.
ESTUDOS I, II & III (2026) six channels 10’
This will be the first performance of the piece.
In these studies, I deal with recordings made with two different six-channel microphone setups. One of these is a result of research developed by José Augusto Mannis, and the second is a portable version of it, improvised by myself. Mannis also allowed me to play one of his beautiful recordings.
Not everything to be heard here can be called ‘natural’, or ‘original’, for nature's inaccessibility under so many layers of media. I believe that not only technology, but even our own bodies, the air, and specially our minds, are sufficient barriers to deter any pretensions towards the idea being in contact with ‘nature'. Therefore, I dare to extend François Bayle’s notion of i-son, saying that, even un-mediated by technological devices, what we hear are not sounds, but sounding images. This is a work with no authorial destiny, since most of the material was produced by animals, probably already dead and certainly unpaid for. Apart from attending to my personal research, I hope the piece will entertain in a listening session.
Supported by Stadt Wien Kultur and Bundesministerium für Wohnen, Kunst, Kultur, Medien und Sport .
