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COSTA, RUI & FRIENDS - Sightseeing for the Blind

Format: CD
Label & Cat.Number: 1000füssler 012
Release Year: 2009
Note: "sonic sightseeing": sound-artist from Portugal doing psycho-geographic recordings of Lisbon based on a tourist-guide; re-working of this were done by MARC BEHRENS, GREGORY BÜTTNER, PALI MEURSAULT, BILL JARBOE, MAILE COLBERT. Very interesting concept & result!
Price (incl. 19% VAT): €12.00


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"Ausgehend von der Idee, dass Touristen beim Besuch einer Stadt die Eindrücker derselben unbewusst mit ihren Wünschen, Vorstellungen und Ideen des Ortes abgleichen benutzte Rui Costa Empfehlungsrouten aus einem Lissabon-Reiseführer quasi als Instruktionen für eine Klangarbeit. Sightseeing For The Blind ist eine knapp halbstündige Soundmap der persönlichen Art geworden. Costa hat in der Folge der Fertigstellung seine Rohmaterialien seinen “friends” zur Verfügung gestellt, unter ihnen Gregory Büttner, Marc Behrens, Bill Jarboe u.a. Einige haben eher mental-psychische Kommentare abgeliefert, andere haben ihre eigenen Feldgeräusche mit dem Ursprungsmaterial vermengt und lösen so den direkten Zusammenhang zwischen Aufnehmendem und Geräuschpostkarte auf." [Zipo / Auf Abwegen]

"The idea for the piece first came to me in 2005, when I was invited to develop a sound project with the city of Lisbon as its theme. I decided to wander through the city, making a series of sound recordings using a pair of binaural microphones. What I concluded from these recordings was that, more than capturing the sound of the place or its “atmosphere”, they reflected a lot about me: my decisions of where to go, what places to avoid, how fast to walk, how long to linger in one place… preconceived ideas of what I wanted to be captured on tape. Later I followed up on this idea by introducing an element of “sonic sightseeing”. I grabbed a tourist guide of Lisbon, walked along the recommended hiking routes and made recordings with binaural and shotgun microphones. I wrote down my impressions, states of mind, mental associations and decisions and then mapped the recorded sounds against these notes, considering them as “instructions” or “cues” for a sound composition. I suppose that the experience that tourists get from a city is in great measure determined by the randomness of these almost unconscious impressions, of a permanent mapping out of what they see against their desires, preconceived ideas, memories, etc. All in all, my intention was to convert this process into a method for sound composition using field recordings. (Rui Costa, 2009)
Sound recordings made by Rui Costa between 2005 and 2008 in Lisbon, Portugal. Composed and mixed by Rui Costa in 2008,

About the Artist:
Rui Costa is a sound artist from Lisbon, Portugal. He has been publicly presenting his work since 1997.
From 1999 to 2003, Rui Costa collaborated with the Spanish musician Iñaki Ríos, under the name ja_dijiste. This duo explored improvisational and compositional techniques based on Max/MSP and Lisa computer software and developed a series of site-specific works in the village of Nodar, Portugal, with subsequent presentations in sound and media arts festivals in Spain.
In 2007, Rui started collaborating with the Italian vocal performer Manuela Barile, through a large scale intermedia project entitled ‘La Scatola’, which was conceived as a series of installations and performances. Rui developed processes that captured the reverberations of the voice inside the body (laryngeal microphones, amplified stethoscopes) so that the spoken word is invested with a musicality and spatial dimension that further extend the expressive capabilities of the voice.
Rui has performed in many venues and sound art festivals in Portugal, Spain, Italy and the United States. He has played with such musicians as Maile Colbert, Iñaki Ríos, Manuela Barile, Pablo Rega, Nilo Gallego, Toshio Kajiwara, Casey Rice, Lê Quan Ninh, Richard Antez, John Herndon, André Gonçalves, Carlos Santos, Pali Meursault and Cédric Anglaret.
Rui Costa is a founding member and artistic director of Binaural, an arts collective dedicated to the promotion of context-based sound and media arts. Binaural runs an artist residency space in Nodar, a small village in the north of Portugal.
Rui Costa’s current artistic research is centered on the use of the psycho-acoustic characteristics of sound to create “sonic fictions” where the notions of space, perception and meaning are submitted to a process of recontextualization and of creation of improbable and unstable relations. He investigates the different ways of making the space audible and of studying the place of the listener within the triangle formed by him/herself, the sound and the space. By capturing the sound resonating through the materials that structure a given space, manipulating it in real-time and then projecting it into the same space, it is possible to create “sensorial extensions” that configure a sonic architecture that operates in real-time and is therefore fluid and unstable. An example of this approach is his ongoing project “The Future Memory”, with the American sound and video artist Maile Colbert, where they visually and sonically map abandoned and almost silent spaces to create poetic fictions around them." [label info]

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