La Ciudad -concierto en ciclo Pet Sounds (Stadtgarten-WDR, Colonia)
THE CITY
1.-
Good evening. You were listening to a fragment of urban reality. To a raw sequence similar to any of the ones daily passing before our ears. Captured with a microphone, recorded, played back here and now, …I don’t know, perhaps it’ll even attain a certain aesthetic value.
But if we extract the most attractive, add to it a new contrasting sound and toy with it all, we come to something a little more musical. An example:
2.-
However, the elements we are listening to are totally fixed. We may, with the help of the technology available here at hand, free those sounds from the closed-form mix; combine them in every possible direction. Such as the encounters and clashes taking place as we walk down some street.
3.-
The following is enhanced by all those techniques and realities as well as by the mix, which overlays realities that could never be naturally found together, forming a whole. The task of the orchestrator is thus added to that of the "sound hunter". I open the balcony door.
4.-
Disorientation. We are in a no-man’s land. This isn’t a city. It’s just a scenery.
5.-
A piano in the middle of a square. Simulation. The sonic geometry of a city corresponds to the gestures of a performer.
6.-
A tramp in the underground. He reads a paperback. Starting from the last page. It is written in English. He tears it off. Then he rips it to pieces. Keeps the remains in a bag. He systematically repeats this very action until he comes to his stop. The book: "Divine Comedy". The author: Dante Alighieri. The destroyed passages correspond to Hell.
7.-
Nothing to say
I talk and talk. Automatically.
Inspiration comes through work.
True or false.
I turn on the shower tap. Water sounds.
Screams and voices are drowned.
A male voice, a fight in the street. Drown by the water.
Blood-red dyed water.
But no.
Nothing to hear.
Nothing to say.
We add up different realities to reconstruct a certain order. We know that, as Flaubert said, there is nothing more difficult to describe than banality, mediocrity. To this we add the unthinkable, incorrect, paradoxical. And the result also equals the city. All this corresponds to the sum of architectural styles and the absurd proliferation of urban furnishings. Warehouse of sounding furniture. The city.
