INTENTIONAL ARC: Music & Sound Archive Series | 2004-2020
An archive of selected recordings, collages, beats and electronic music spanning a 16-year period of study and travel.
“The life of consciousness – epistemic life, the life of desire, or perceptual life – is underpinned by an ‘intentional arc’ that projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all of these relationships. This intentional arc creates the unity of the senses, the unity of the senses with intelligence, and the unity of sensitivity and motricity.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1945
[Part 1.] Soundworks | 2004-2020 | Archive Series | 6 x CDr + digital file release | ia 01-06
The Soundworks Archive Series documents selected computer music, field recordings and sound collages made between 2004 and 2020. Available through Bandcamp.
ia01 - APOPHENIA | 2004-2007 | UK, Japan | 53:28
ia02 - PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES | 2005-2008 | Japan, Indonesia | 60:28
ia03 - OTOPLEXUS | 2009-2015 | Japan, UK | 75:00
ia04 - RHAPSODIES | 2015-2019 | UK | 70:25
ia05 - DISCOMBOBULATION Part 1 - Reassembled Transmissions from the Infected Past | 2020 | UK | 64:38
ia06 - DISCOMBOBULATION Part 2 - Reassembled Transmissions from the Infected Past | 2020 | UK | 41:27
Music | Sound: Rob Szeliga
Mastering: Rob Szeliga | Unit 102 | 2023
Additional Mastering: John Cohen
Artwork: Karoline M Lange [Disc 1-4], Rob Szeliga [Disc 5-6]
Design: Sam Taylor
Information and sources: www.cinema-of-noise.com/collage
“I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism. I believe also that its formal features in many ways express the deeper logic of that particular social system. I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.”
— Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991
“The contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point of the ‘creative process’ ... but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities. We tinker with production, we surf on a network of signs, we insert our forms on existing lines.”
— Nicholas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay, 2000
[Part 2.] Soundworks II | 2006-2020 | Archive Series | 6 x digital file release | ia 07-12
The Soundworks II Archive Series documents selected music and filmsound collages made between 2006 and 2020. Available through Bandcamp.
ia07 - BEATS & PIECES| 2006-2016 | UK, Japan | 46:00
ia08 - JIGS | 2006 | Japan | 50:00
ia09 - REFRAIN | 2018 | UK | 31:00
ia10 - FILM SOUND 1 | 2018 | UK | 58:00
ia11 - FILM SOUND 2 | 2018 | UK | 41:00
ia12 - INOWHERE | 2020 | UK | 45:00
Music | Sound: Rob Szeliga
Mastering: Rob Szeliga | Unit 102 | 2024
Photography: [ia07, ia12] Rob Szeliga, [ia08] Owen Murray, [ia09] Nic Nazari - still from Hermit (2024) dir. David Alamouti & Rob Szeliga
Film Images: [1] Still from Through a Glass Darkly (1961) dir. Ingmar Bergman, [2] Still from Woman in the Dunes (1964) dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
“It's that archive fever that makes the info world go round, and as an artist you're only as good as your archive.”
— DJ Spooky, In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act, 2008
“Communication is much like a work of art - it is a process of copying, repeating, and varying what we hear.”
— Vicki Bennett, aka People Like Us
I grew up discovering music on the radio and television. In the 1990s I began to buy cassettes, records and CDs. Later I immersed myself in digital downloads, peer-to-peer file-sharing and the never-ending reach of the internet. In 1997 I started to experiment with a digital sampler. This new tool allowed me to consider my music collection as raw material for my own music. By combining and manipulating various sonic elements I could recycle, reorganize and recontextualize the culture around me to create something new. As a teenager this ability to record and manipulate what I heard was what fascinated me most about music and technology. I became interested in sample-based music production and the remix culture of 1990s electronic dance music. This led me back in time, discovering musique concrète, magnetic tape technology and the history and techniques of artists working with collage and found material. As a sound designer I work directly with pre-recorded material in a non-linear, digital post-production workflow. The role involves the sourcing, organising, editing and mixing of various digital sound media, much like the sample-based music I discovered in the 1990s.
The instinct to create from what we find expresses a desire to understand the world around us. Contemporary urban and online life unfolds as a kind of collaging of the sights and sounds that we experience. This urge to combine, synthesize, juxtapose and rearrange what we encounter is part of the fundamental gestures of life in a complex, techologically mediated world. The material presented across these twelve albums is an attempt to understand the various times and places I found myself living in between the years 2004 and 2020. These sounds are part of a personal archive of recordings, collages and compositions that together represent a 16-year period of electronic sound work marked by study and travel. Across the years and from many different locations running throughout this archive is an interest in sound and its digital representation.