Your cart (0 item)

SHOEMAKER, MATT - Tropical Amnesia One

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Ferns Recordings ferns_stem_01 Release Year: 2010 Note: field recordings from the Amazonian rainforest made with standard & contact microphones & hydrophone; mysterious soundworlds, lim. 300 Price (incl. 19% VAT): €13.00 Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock! More Info "In November of 2007 I was part of a group of eleven sound artists who journeyed to Brazil to participate in the Mamori Sound Project, an annual residency/workshop under the direction of Francisco Lopez that convenes in an isolated area of lowland lakes and rainforest, perhaps around 4 hours' journey outside of Manaus, right in the heart of Amazonia. I had some very limited experience with tropical rainforests from travels in South East Asia, but nothing like the immersion that was central to what Francisco had organized: direct access to a staggeringly diverse bioacoustic environment unmatched anywhere else on Earth. Over the course of the two weeks we spent at Mamori lake exploring and recording, there was never a pause in the stream of curious animal sounds. Not even during sleep, as the nighttime would roar to life and pass into dreams. I had come prepared with the equipment that I could afford to bring: a pair of condenser microphones, several homemade contact microphones, and a single hydrophone. With these I was able to capture all of the sounds used to make the three Tropical Amnesia parts. While assembling the field recordings, I was immediately drawn toward the idea of imagining the rainforest, and the bodies of water contained within, as an unfathomable void of sorts, and something beyond the scope of enduring memory. Reflecting on my own memories from Mamori Lake and the surrounding area, I can of course picture the individual ant or frog, but it is the sheer multitudes and abundance of life that persists in my mind as a consuming, evolving abstract." [Matt Shoemaker] "More field recordings here, this time around taken from the Amazonas, Brazil, to precise the Mamori Lake. Shoemaker went around and inside the lake. He tapes the sounds there and treats the whole thing into one piece of music that lasts forty-six minutes. I have never been to the Amazonian rainforest, nor it is perfectly clear what Shoemaker did to the recordings. That aside, this is a great work. If I was to imagine how the Amazonian rainforest would sound like, I think it would sound like this. A fairly thick mass of sound of busy buzzing insect sounds, birds and wind like sounds. Shoemaker opts for a dramatic approach in this work: things start out relatively quiet and moody, but over the course of those sixty some minutes grows with some violent intention. Shoemaker uses strong equalization, adding low end sounds to the piece, that makes the earth tremble among the heavy weight of this piece. Yet he never looses the clarity of the sounds, birds and insects are always to be recognized here. An excellent piece along the lines of the best of Francisco Lopez in this field, especially 'La Selva' (which I think deserves a re-issue). Shoemaker delivers here a great work, perhaps his best so far." [FdW / Vital Weekly]