“The duo decamped to Iceland and traveled around the southwest region of the country, visiting many churches before settling on the warm, resonant acoustics of Skáholt Cathedral. In the end they decided to create music spontaneously, embracing the immediacy and unmediated rapport they’d developed over the years. The performances are meditative and pensive and the phenomenal church organ at Skáholt allows Downes to produce a kaleidoscopic range of colors and tones, manipulating an instrument often dubbed the original synthesiser to produce sounds clearly related to much of Railton’s work with spatialisation, uncommon tunings, and electronics. It’s often hard to believe that the only post-production on Subaerial comes on the final track, “Of Becoming and Dying”, where the music seems to evaporate into the ether. In fact, the seven pieces were culled from the three-hour session with only edits breaking up bigger chunks of improvisation. The music flirts with drone and free improv, but it remains gloriously slippery, eschewing any single practice in favor of a more holistic conception of sonic exploration.” (SN Variations)

@ SN Variations

“These works are all related to spatial imagined images. There’s like an old hidden castle by a rainforest or a decaying lab in the desert, where I can think and sleep. Sometimes a peculiar sense of time derived from literature is superimposed to negate or add to the space. Prior to composing, I’m reading repeatedly Anna Kavan, Borges, James Tiptree Jr., Kafka and Samuel R Delany. I then create imagined or received images through animation and use them as a paranormal blueprint for to compose from. [...] Currently, I’m interested in how the sounds are perceived when I take away the historical context of how they are written and created. I make the playing between the computer and the performed score indivisible and induce mutual interference between them to generate a slight uncertainty in the source of the sounds. It’s also a meditative way to observe the sound while keeping a certain distance from my compositions.” (Takuma Watanabe)

Der knapp zwölfminütige Track “Tonewood” enthält Aufnahmen zahlreicher Natur- und sonstiger Umgebungsgeräusche aus der Nachbarschaft der Künstlerin und wurde mit gesampleten Violin- und Celloparts zu einem abwechslungsreichen Narrativ amalgamiert. Das für die pandemiebedingt ausgefallene Ausstellung konzipierte Material war umfangreicher und anders strukturiert – zwei über einen Durchgang akustisch verbundene Räume der Londoner Temporary Contemporary-Galerie sollten mit verschiedenen Auszügen des Stoffs beschallt werden, so dass das Publikum durch die eigene Positionierung und Bewegung im Raum einen individuellen “Mix” hätte erstellen können. Die vorliegende Version erscheint digital über die Bandcamp-Seite von SN Variations.

“There is an ash tree in the communal garden at the back of my flat in north London. This year from my balcony I have watched its buds swell, unfurl, and come into leaf before turning yellow and brown and falling again, leaving the branches outlined against the sky. I’ve seen in this tree blue tits, great tits, long tailed tits, chaffinches, goldfinches, crows, parakeets, green and great spotted woodpeckers, squirrels and jays hiding, nesting, perching and fighting in wind, rain and sun. I recorded the changing sounds of this tree, and cut these various bands of filtered noise and activity together. Into this I mixed samples of my cello and violin, also recorded at home during this time, processed to explore the different voices of resonant wood.” (Georgia Rodgers)

Portrait © Dimitri Djuric

@ SN Variations