Alessandro Rovegno                      A Voice From Below

August 2021­— Tunnel Beach | Oceanside, OR The tide recedes as an enigmatic and delicate voice emerges. The lulling commotion of ships passing in the distance fades. An austere crackling sound claims the foreground; grinding sand and expelling air to whisper from the protruding rock formations. Thousands of acorn barnacles are sounding in a dense yet quiet polyphony. As I get closer, I notice the sounds become more active and frequent. My presence and impact within this environment becomes palpable and haptic; a capillary wave. I notice my breath as it sinks and slows, my steps become tip-toes, and intimacy of these small, quiet sounds shrinks the vastness of the ocean before me. . . .

Like any memory as time passes, this moment fades imperceptibly and irregularly. However, the barnacle orchestra and their impact on my sense of corporeality remains. Like a frequency appearing and dissolving: a kind of memory-oriented tinnitus.

A Voice From Below is a rumination on, and a reconstruction of, this memory. Field recordings, synthesized material, and found sounds are weaved together to create a continuous environment that buoys between degrees of reality and dream-like states of fog.

Tim Feeney                      Mother Shipton’s Prophecy

Four evocations of human presence during apocryphal end-moments:

1. Tide, thunder, snow, footsteps 
Cave Point, Wisconsin, December 2017
2. Spring peeper, pickerel frog, car 
Berkshire, New York, May 2011
3. Transmission tower, freeway, helicopter 
Elsmere Canyon, California, August 2021
4. Flock, crows, highway, airplane 
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, February 2015

Mother Shipton was born in a Yorkshire cave in 1488, cackling to stop the thunder above. She prophesied the ascent of Henry VIII, the fall of the Catholic Church, the Great Fire of London, the advent of automobiles and submarines, and the end of the world in 1881. Or 1991. Charles Hindley published an 1862 chapbook collection of her predictions, confessing in 1873 to fabricating those pointing to his present time. Identical end-of-the-world predictions of “Mother Shipman” were published in the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1878, and a song version collected in Wisconsin in the early 20th Century.
Four sonic environments contextualized via animations derived from sunlight glinting off Lake Michigan.

María Bulla and Juan Bermúdez                find a color, imagine the horizon

find a color, imagine the horizon creates imaginary horizons and landscapes by combining the colors of the summer, of the artists’ daily lives. Despite the physical distance, María Bulla and Juan Bermúdez’s creative process takes advantage of the situation and mixes recordings of seemingly distant locations in Germany and the United States. The artificially created landscapes play with our minds, evoking a mixture of uncertainty and recognition; these are images that resonate with a sense of possible existence, perhaps nestled in our memories. The recordings sometimes enhance and other times contrast the notion of what certain places should sound like. Slowly experiencing this journey reveals five distinct fictional landscapes, discovered by those who wait. Through their meticulous selection, Bulla and Bermúdez invite us to discover these dreamlike familiar places. They were trying to find the sounds behind the colors, and ended up making up new places; places made from other places.