I have been working with ideas of the alchemical process as a way of describing / understanding process.
'of a day' - October 2016
This is a piece made from gathered sounds through the process described:
I am proposing that the alchemical process of transformation can be used as a way of describing my praxis. Taking initially the four stage process, (paraphrasing N. Hamilton) where each stage is an increasingly intense purification, which is followed by a union, a rebirth, then a death in order to proceed to the next stage.
Nigredo: chaos or prima materia (prime matter); is the stage of gathering sounds, everything to be heard in that place at that time. By gathering / recording this diversity of sound I am turning it in to signal, matter.
Albedo: further purification, for me a sorting of the gathered material, doing this by felt response, not because of any attached notion of importance of the sound, but because it is needed in the mix. as Hamilton says ‘like the vapours that rise from the chemical vessel, … carrying the essence that is sought after and is to be extracted’.
Citrinitas: creative intelligence, this for me is a continuation, a point where not to think about my felt response to sounds, but to feel the broader picture; how it might develop into a new thing.
Rubedo: a return / coagulation, bringing all the elements and parts that the process has retained together. A rebinding as a new form.
This can be added to from the seven steps, especially if looked at as a chemical process: (from a description by J.D. Dismore)
Calcination: reducing to ash, describes the changing of an active thing, the sounds made that we then hear, to a signal when recorded.
Dissolution: to dissolve down / become fluid; the reconfiguring of the signal in my computer so it can be edited.
Separation: splitting up the sounds, listen through repeatedly, to again cut and hone; deciding what to kept. Discarding unneeded elements.
Conjunction: joining, beginning to construct from the elements, layered ‘areas’ of sounds.
Fermentation: breaking down; taking the elements away from their original order of time and relationship and giving them new relationships.
Distillation: a refining of what’s there.
Coagulation: a pulling together, so times and places overlap, existing together.
In this work I am exploring the transmutation of mundane sounds, gathered from my everyday, into something that makes us differently aware of these tiny bits of information generated by us / the world around us; things we ‘hear’ but often miss, aren’t consciously aware of. A changing of something through a series of listenings and editings; picking out of elements, re listening, cutting, layering, filtering and distilling down. Generating something from the elements; merging and mixing, making chimera sounds, out of the hearings of sounds created by that which does exist.