Reviews

Beach Sloth

Surreal soundscapes dominate the impossible to define territories of Jacek Doroszenko’s “Soundreaming”. A range of styles are used throughout the album: from sample-laden multifaceted streams to glistening classically inclined drones, the entirety of the album feels alive. Quite joyful at times, Jacek Doroszenko embraces meditative moments alongside near-cacophony. Throughout it all what ties it together is a desire for greater, deeper explorations of sound and texture. Rather sundrenched at times, the songs float by and at times overwhelm, but they always feel welcoming.

“Aberrationmaker” begins the journey off with blissful tones. While the song slowly unfolds, the song moves into more glitch-laden effects. Featuring the disorientation of skipping CDs is the odd swing of “Fiestamachine” whose sense of play is rather jubilant. Tactile gestures grace the elegant arrangements of “Gothic Passage”. Sprawling in scope is the spacious sound of “MACBA Skaters”. Bouncing textures emerge on the hard to pin down funhouse of mirrors that defines “Passion Passion”. Cyclical in scope the song has a crazed chaos to it. Layer upon layer is added until the song feels nearly oversaturated. Quite elegant is the soothing work of “Silent Souvenirs” with lovely gestures that glide by with the greatest of ease. Nearly industrial in tone is the mysterious work of “Borderstatic”. By far the highlight of the album is the gorgeous “Gone and Faded”. Starting off with small gestures the piece becomes all-immersive with the gradual buildup of sounds becoming a near-symphony of the real and the synthetic. Closing things on a warm note is the intimate “HDD Ensemble”.

Deeply beautiful, Jacek Doroszenko discovers new lands on the wonderful “Soundreaming”.

Kaltbut

Soundreaming is an audio-visual art project from the artists, Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko. It is a digital audio-visual archive which uses the environment as the principle inspiration for the project. The project is produced through a framework of Artist-in-Residence programs at Fundació AAVC Hangar in Barcelona (ES), Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik (NO) and Atelierhaus Salzamt in Linz (AU).

Inspired by location, experience and memory and motivated by the inversion of the traditional roles of photography and sound in the media and art worlds. Soundreaming emphasizes the importance of the acoustic environment on our memory and perception of place. Soundscapes replace photography as the dominant documentary element at the core of the artistic practice.

The visual representation is directly inspired by the audio documentation of the locations featured in the archive. Moreover, this technique allows for the transparency of environmental sound to shape the audience’s perception of the artwork and in turn, allows the visual component of the composition more freedom to express itself.

Neo2

Exquisito y delicioso. El sonido de Soundreaming es la recomendación artística del mes que el horóscopo me había prometido. Un trabajo sonoro te cautivará decía el Pronto muy convincentemente en Verdana sobre papel satinado. Así es.

Imagen superior: Silent Souvenirs, Episode I. Soundreaming. 

Soundreaming es un proyecto audiovisual creado en el marco de los Artist-in-Residence de la Fundació AAVC Hangar en Barcelona, Kunstnarhuset Messen en Ålvik (NO) y Atelierhaus Salzamt en Linz (AU).

Los artista Ewa Doroszenko y Jacek Doroszenko han generado un archivo audiovisual que usa el entorno como material para su particular apropiación. Soundreaming es un trabajo de sound art que enfatiza su interés por su contexto y la percepción auditiva de los espacios, todo en clave tecnológica. La obra gráfica que lo acompaña ha sido creada a partir de la documentación de los lugares donde recogen el sonido, conceptualmente acorde con la propuesta sonora.

El sonido es oscuro, cítrico a veces y está repleto de sutiles matices místicos. Esos elementos minúsculos y sencillos están distribuidos por la escucha como pequeñas piezas de gomaespuma colocadas en un espacio, ese lugar que su sonido tiene la cualidad de construir a tu alrededor. Al oírlo aparecen imágenes mentales de liquido descongelante azul derramándose por las baldosas de un spa, charcos grandes esquivado pedicuras.

Su trabajo tiene cualidades exfoliantes y produce una inmersión en un estado apaciguador. Después de MACBA Skaters me dedico a la escucha de Silent Souvenirs varias veces. Voy notando las sorpresas escondidas en las diferentes capas brotando suaves y bien ejecutadas. Surgen algunos tonos metálicos, gomas que se rozan, agudos sostenidos y teclas, acoples de telemin tenue y sensaciones acolchadas. El conjunto tiene ese nopuedefallar del ruido blanco mezclado con sonido ambient en la línea de György Ligeti, el maestro. Soundreming es un placer de escucha cósmica.

Ear Influxion

Jacek Doroszenko has worked as one half of Mammoth Ulthana, and Soundreaming marks his first release as a solo artist. As its title suggests, the album weaves a fantastical sprawl of sound design that feels often dreamlike in its weird juxtapositions and contrasts. Doroszenko’s goal with Soundreaming is to treat sound as a manipulatable palette much in the way that photography or visual art can abstract and alter perceptions of its origins. “Aberrationmaker” starts the album off in a dreamy fashion, but it’s a red herring of sorts. While it may emphasize preconceptions of what “dreaming” sounds like relative to the album name, this is a far more out-there affair than those pastoral prolonged tones would initially suggest. Chirping birds and field recordings creep to the surface with more subtle manipulation, but the subsequent nine tracks veer into more dizzying explorations. Soundreaming was produced through Doroszenko’s residency at Hangar in Barcelona, wherein Doroszenko aims to use soundscapes to replace photography as the main documentary element of his craft. With its sometimes overt nods to source material and obfuscations elsewhere, Soundreaming presents environmental sound as a means of shaping perception and letting its audience bring their own interpretations to the table. “Gothic Passage” layers tinkering acoustic sounds over looping and reversed music recordings and tiny bells, while “Fiestamachine” feels like a skipping gramophone, a jaunty piano ditty betrayed by sweeping orchestral arrangements in the background, sort of an otherworldly oompah.

In “MACBA Skaters,” Doroszenko presumably captures the contact sounds of skaters in front of the Museum for Art Contemporary Barcelona, a popular hangout for skaters in the city. The location and source are not always so clear; “Passion Passion” is a swirl of disembodied handclaps, guitar strums, and human voice that build to a dizzying climax, an almost full tilt wall of sound. Doroszenko is wise in his sequencing of these pieces of sound art, with “Silent Souvenirs” and “Gone and Faded” providing some respite after their frenetic predecessor. The latter is the longest piece on the album, and it seems to suggest the very nature of how ephemeral associations of time and place can be after the fact. By the time its drones are distilled into repetitive, tiny sequences, I’ve lost track of whatever assumptions I may have brought to the track in the first place. The remaining tracks continue to push the envelope as far as source manipulations go, with “Urban Folk” working as a percolating bubbler of sound that in some ways mirrors the hard-drive chatter implied by closer “HDD Ensemble.” The typographic and photographic manipulations that accompany the project and its wonderful online supplement feel like the natural complement, with its sources highly distorted and manipulated into fascinating abstractions of their own. Ultimately, whatever dreams Soundreaming conjures up in the minds of its listeners will be equal parts the result of the sound itself and the perceptions, memory, and assumptions of those listeners, and that’s really at the core of what sound art is all about. I find it an engaging and wonderfully strange set of sounds from start to finish. Recommended.

So What

Un’atipica immersione in un convulso universo saturo di ricordi. A definire il nuovo lavoro di Jacek Doroszenko è il ribaltamento del concetto secondo cui è sempre l’immagine l’elemento preminente nella definizione dei frammenti che emergono dalla memoria, esplorazione approfondita durante un programma di residenza artistica condotto a Barcellona e confluita in un’opera multimediale di cui questo disco rappresenta una parte della componente sonora.

L’indagine che l’artista polacco ha condotto verte a creare un percorso in cui le sensazioni accumulate riemergano guidate da un flusso audio costruito utilizzando in modo moderatamente mediato una serie di riprese ambientali che possano fungere da traccia fondante capace di liberare le visioni connesse e renderle liberamente plasmabili.

Il risultato è una sequenza di incastri estremamente materici che si combinano generando intricate modulazioni in cui si incastrano le frequenze catturate. Introdotto dalla trama luminosa e riverberante di “Aberrationmaker”, il disco si snoda nella sua prima metà attraverso vorticose spirali dense di crepitii e schegge irregolari che culminano nell’incedere obliqui di “Passion Passion”. Da qui in poi il suono converge verso flessuose tessiture dalle movenze liquide che conducono ad una dimensione onirica che, dopo il parziale ritorno a toni pulsanti in “Urban Folk”, si mantiene inalterato fino alla conclusiva “HDD Ensemble”.

Nata da un’idea interessante e affascinante, la proposta di Doroszenko ha il merito di saper trovare una propria autonomia anche distante dal contesto da cui nasce.

Music Won't Save You

Per Jacek Doroszenko l’arte di scolpire il suono va di pari passo con altre forme espressive, che si tratti di installazioni visuali o della semplice sonorizzazione del paesaggio naturale. Da quest’ultima trae spunto “Soundreaming”, opera realizzata a margine di una mostra fotografica, le cui quattordici tracce rappresentano appunto la traduzione in suono delle immagini alle quali sono state associate.

Muovendosi tra dilatazioni, impulsi destrutturati e prolungati loop ambientali, l’artista polacco condensa nel lavoro un ampio paradigma espressivo, risultante dall’applicazione di una tecnica impressionistica, nella quale gli elementi naturali divengono tessere di un mutevole patchwork sonoro.