INTENTIONAL ARC: Soundworks | 2004-2020 | Archive Series | 6 x CDr release
“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, 137/170, (London: Routledge, 2012)
The Soundworks Archive Series documents selected computer music, field recordings and sound collages made between 2004 and 2020. Available through Bandcamp.
ia01 - CDr 1 - APOPHENIA | 2004-2007 | UK, Japan | 53:28
ia02 - CDr 2 - PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES | 2005-2008 | Japan, Indonesia | 60:28
ia03 - CDr 3 - OTOPLEXUS | 2009-2015 | Japan, UK | 75:00
ia04 - CDr 4 - RHAPSODIES | 2015-2019 | UK | 70:25
ia05 - CDr 5 - DISCOMBOBULATION Part 1 - Reassembled Transmissions from the Infected Past | 2020 | UK | 64:38
ia06 - CDr 6 - DISCOMBOBULATION Part 2 - Reassembled Transmissions from the Infected Past | 2020 | UK | 41:27
Music | Sound: Rob Szeliga
Mastering: Rob Szeliga | Unit 102
Additional Mastering: John Cohen
Artwork: Karoline M Lange [Disc 1-4], Rob Szeliga [Disc 5-6]
Design: Sam Taylor
Discombobulation Sources: www.cinema-of-noise.com/collage
“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
I grew up discovering music on the radio and television. In the 1990s I began to buy cassettes, records and CDs. Later I lost myself in digital downloads, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and the never- ending reach of the internet.
In 1997 I started to experiment with my first 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 to discovering musique concrète, magnetic tape technology and the history and techniques of artists working with collage and found material.
Today as a film sound designer I work directly with pre-recorded material in a non-linear, digital post-production workflow. The role involves the sourcing, organizing, editing, assembling and mixing of various digital sound media, much like the sample-based music that I first 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 six discs is an attempt to understand the various times and places I found myself living in between 2004 and 2020. These sounds are part of a personal archive of sound experiments, 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 overriding interest in sound and its digital representation.
