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NM presents ‘Érodé/Tunnahan’ - a composition and a field recording from French composer and archivist Guillaume Malaret, crafted between 2020 and 2022.
A protected site of the Bunurong National Marine Park, Eagles Nest is positioned in Boonwurrung Country, in Australia’s region now known as Victoria. It’s a plateau of crags and rock formations, aesthetically prehistoric and protruding with a thousand calcinated shapes, encompassed by a promontory, a beach and a tidal island. Its innate beauty is its constant destruction, shaped by the caress of water, wind, sun and sand.
‘Érodé’ is composed entirely from geophonic recordings taken here, actively centering the resonances between its water and rock masses. Guillaume compiles recordings from a number of meticulously placed microphones so as to optimise listening perspectives, often positioning them beyond the average human’s reach. These recordings are treated and interpolated into a 17 minute composition, transforming this obsessively collected source material into a fascinating, heterogenous repertoire of sound objects. He repurposes these objects to draw us an imagined soundscape, not with the intention of simply transcribing Eagles Nest’s audial environment, but rather to deliberately invoke impressions and images of its harsh beauty. It’s in this sense that ‘Érodé’s fastidious studies anchor to the oscillation between its fabricated, subjective sonic reality and its metamorphosis from the source recordings - a material in perpetual states of change.
The entire second half of this release is ‘Tunnahan’ - Guillaume’s field recording captured at the pebble beach of Tunnahan cape, also within Boonwurrung country, known more recently as Cape Schanck, Victoria. With feet entrenched in the granulated coastline, he follows the movement of waves with a pair of microphones at arm's length. ‘Tunnahan’s contemplative, unadorned field recording serves as an aching, unmetered rumination and the perfect counterpart to ‘Érodé’s complexity and concept.
nicemusic057
35 minutes
Nice Music 2024