Voyages to album z utworami brytyjskiego twórcy muzyki konkretnej i elektroakustycznej. Na materiał opisywanej płyty składają się dźwięki zarejestrowane w różnych miejscach na świecie. Są wśród nich: trzeszczące drzwi, śpiew ptaków, bijące dzwony, woda uderzająca o brzeg, przejeżdżający samochód, komunikaty wygłaszane na stacji metra, odgłosy zwierząt i natury, padający deszcz, burza, fajerwerki, przelatujący helikopter, harmider ludzki, manifestacja uliczna, czy wezwania muezinów do modlitwy. Wszystkie te rejestracje otaczającej nas rzeczywistości zostały ze sobą sprawnie połączone i wzbogacone elektroakustycznymi efektami. Wspomniane partie elektroniczne nadają tytułowym podróżom niezwykłego kolorytu. Krok po kroku podążamy śladami kompozytora-globtrotera. Ten album to indywidualna historia o podróżowaniu opowiedziana w oryginalny sposób.

10. Jonty Harrison — Voyages

“[…] large-scale tapestries that exist at the delicate liminal point between authenticity (raw and untouched) and artifice (clearly juxta-/superimposed). The latter is emphasised throughout the fourteen minutes of Espaces cachés, something of an essay in qualitative shifts and jump cuts between assembled groups of sound sources. […] As its modest but ambitious title suggests, Going / Places doesn’t simply expand this idea, it explodes it […] Harrison’s moulding of the recordings into complex fabrics turns Going / Places into a stunningly vivid piece of uncanny metarealism that encapsulates both the physicality and the psychology of the present experience together with aspects of memory and anticipation.” (Reviewed in December 2016.)

In Espaces cachés and Going / Places, two recent works by Jonty Harrison on a CD called Voyages from empreintes DIGITALes, the ‘actual’/’virtual’ interplay emerges entirely from Harrison’s use of field recordings. Specifically, the way he shapes and positions them into large-scale tapestries that exist at the delicate liminal point between authenticity (raw and untouched) and artifice (clearly juxta-/superimposed). The latter is emphasised throughout the fourteen minutes of Espaces cachés, something of an essay in qualitative shifts and jump cuts between assembled groups of sound sources. The effect is cinematic, the episodic nature of the piece resembling a sequence of discrete ‘scenes’ — which somehow declare and defy their artificiality at the same time — demarcated by brief moments of disorientation. As its modest but ambitious title suggests, Going / Places doesn’t simply expand this idea, it explodes it, resulting in a 60-minute soundscape in which the structural divisions are no longer clear-cut and often themselves feel like an integral part of the activities captured in the field recordings. At its world première at HCMF 2015 I wrote about the “transparency of Harrison’s methods of collage and juxtaposition”, resulting in music that “certainly isn’t ‘electronic’, and one even hesitates to call it ‘acousmatic’”. That’s even more the case in this two-channel version, which sounds awesome through headphones (in no small part due to the fact the sounds were recorded ambisonically) and has the effect of turning one’s listening space into a vivid kaleidoscopic whistle-stop tour of the globe. But it’s more collage than reportage, and Harrison’s moulding of the recordings into complex fabrics turns Going / Places into a stunningly vivid piece of uncanny metarealism that encapsulates both the physicality and the psychology of the present experience together with aspects of memory and anticipation.

I imagine that some atheists or rationalists could get captivated, after they’ll listen the overlapping of farming animal sounds and field recordings grabbed in some mosque full of praying devouts and in an Italian church while reciting the rosary in a moment of Espaces cachés, the first 14-minute lasting track of this collection, assembled by an impressive quantity of sound samples, which got premiered on June 7th, 2014 during the Klang! électroacoustique festival in Montpellier under commission by Maison des arts sonores. Similarly, fans of nautical themes or seaside places could get entranced by a group of tracks, belonging to Going / Places where many sounds got grabbed nearby harbours and quays (including underwater echoes of the quays and floating strain at their moorings caught near Sidney Opera House, barnacles found in Sydney Harbour, in the surroundings of Great Barrier Reef, and on the beaches of the isle of Corfu — Greece —, recordings of boats, swifts and harbour activities in Corfu and Poros, boats straining taken at the yacht club in Boston, Massachusets) and lovers of Iceland — I met many people devoted to that chilling place in the recent times (hoping it’s not a mass phenomenon following the funny way by which Iceland football team used to greet their supporters at the end of matches at the recent European football championship) — would be delighted by the sounds of bubbling waters taken from geothermal pools at Seltun, the buzz of radio cables hanging from Hellissandur radio masts in Snaefellsness overlapping the sound of melting ice and subterranean glacial stream, taken nearby the Solheimajokull glacier. Besides the evocative sonic collages that Professor Jonty Harrison provides in this huge selection, the aspect that could interest in sound explorer like us and most of our readers is the way by which he transplanted field recordings into stereophonic channels, particularly in the above-mentioned Espaces cachés, initially a 30-track tape for multichannel sound system, which was entirely produced and mastered by Joseph Anderson in the first months of 2016 at the Sound Lab of the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media of the University of Washington in Seattle by means of stereophonic Ambisonic UHJ Encoding. The final result of this “transcoding” process is — believe me and my headphones — really impressive, while the most relevant aspect of the 23 tracks by which Jonty split a selection from his massive sound archive, collecting a plenty of recordings grabbed during many journeys all over the world, is the criteria that he mostly adopted to group together those recordings. Most of the tracks manage to assemble events that could be related to similar or sometimes identical phenomenon or cultural happenings, where the aggregating element is mostly aural, and these aural manifestations are similar to colors depicting the same event according to more or less mysterious rules that vary by different cultural environment! For instance, you’ll hear bells from four different places (Chartres, Venice, Berlin and Corfu plus the Montaione clock in Tuscany), sounds from four different railway station (Florence, Pisa, Rome and Castelfiorentino in Italy), interlacing of pipes and drums from many different sets and settings (ghaitas in Marrakech, Morocco, piccolo bands parading during the Carnival of Bael in Switzerland, bagpipers in Morelia, Mexico and aural entities such as firecrackers and the noise of coins in offering bowls in a religious procession nearby the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok) in single tracks. Harrison’s collages define an engaging way of matching audio travelogues and field recordings. (Trained audiophiles should check these guidelines for a really immersive sound experience: http://www.ambisonictoolkit.net/publications/2016/06/22/harrison-voyages.html)

Sometimes, arguably at its best, music has transportative qualities, either by capturing the essence of a place, or by triggering a memory which takes the listener to another time or place. On Voyages, Jonty Harrison marries these elements together.

The field recordings collaged to form Espaces cachés are eclectic, from birdsong and passing traffic to distant voices, the wash of waves, and creaking doors. Lifts and tannoy announcements, trains and miscellaneous, extraneous sounds bring the city and countryside together over a low-level hum.

Going / Places takes the travel and transportation theme further, having been inspired, Harrison explains in the accompanying notes, by contextualising the work thus: ‘One day, nearly 25 years ago, when I was recording a journey on the London Underground, a lost overseas visitor asked me directions: that incident gave me the idea for a piece based on the broad theme of travel…’

And, essentially, Going / Places, is a collection of field samples which documents a journey, or a succession of journeys, literal and mental. Because geography is a state of mind. It’s perhaps worth taking into account the fact that while the sounds were gathered from around the globe, the listening experience — even on a mobile device — is likely to e rather more fixed, geographically speaking. And the location is the context, is a way.

Although the track listing shows this as a single track with a running time of 59:55, the disc is mastered to twenty-three individual tracks, all segued, with some of the segments less than a minute long. Along the way, Harrison takes sounds from different countries, and gives flavours of myriad different cultures. Ringing bells on trams, marimbas, chatter of a bustling market, birds and insects, myriad sounds of life, and life on the move. The sense are vivid, vibrant, recorded in full colour (so to speak). There’s a palpable sense of movement, of motion here, and Harrison describes the segments as ‘scenes’. In his ‘rough guide’, he lists the locations and sound sources. The notes, in their way transport you there.

With this album you may never need to leave the house to cross the oceans to explore the world. But after hearing it, you may want to.