PSYCHE TROPES: EP 9 “AV” (2023)
Psyche Tropes is a radio program on Resonance FM (London) hosted by Steven McInerney (Psyché Tropes). Episode 9 explores sound and musical works by artists working solo or collaboratively in live audiovisual performances.
The work of Sequencial was included alongside a wonderful selection of artists including Sculpture, The Light Surgeons, Herman Kolgen, Matthias Kispert, D-Fuse, Merkaba Macabre, and Ryoichi Kurokawa.
Broadcast on January 23, 2023
The Delaware Road: Ritual and Resistance Festival
The Delaware Road is a multi-media project masterminded by Alan Gubby revolving around the combination of electronic music, state propaganda, and esoteric traditions. Following the exploits of two fictional electronic musicians—Iain Parker and Cissy Wakefield—employed by the “British Radio & Television Corporation” in the 1960s, the duo uncover an abandoned wartime studio once used to broadcast eldritch propaganda to occupied Europe, and are drawn into a dangerous world of bohemian experimentation and veiled state control.
The first Delaware Road Festival took place in 2017 at the Kelvedon Hatch Nuclear Bunker. The second, “Ritual and Resistance”, took place in the Stone Tents—a series of buildings designed for combat training and night vision operations at the New Zealand Farm Camp, an active army training facility on Salisbury Plain.
The Ritual & Resistance subheading nods towards sound being used to harness power, mesmerize, worship or use as a weapon of defiance. Following these themes, the Sequencial audio/visual installation called “Egregore” was deployed with great effect in a room within the Stone Tents.
Cities and Memory: Sacred Spaces (2017)
Cities and Memory is a global collaborative sound project encompassing field recording, sound art and sound mapping. Every location on the Cities and Memory sound map features two sounds- the original field recording of that place, and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. The listener can explore places through their actual sounds, their reimagined versions, or flip between the two sound worlds.
Sacred Spaces examines the role that sound has played in our spiritual and religious lives for thousands of years, and look at some of the similarities and differences between how sound is used for prayer and worship across religions and from country to country. The project is the biggest so far, with 123 artists and field recordists from around the world presenting sounds from 34 countries.
We created two pieces for this project. The first, “a movement from darkness to light…” was based on a field recording of singing at the Igreja de Santa Maria in Lagos, Portugal. Using this field recording, we sought to create a passage through transmutation: from darkness to light, Hell to Heaven, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. Every sound in this piece has been created from the field recording only, utilising not just the singer’s voice, but the murmurs, accidental taps, and the silence itself to create the sonic journey from one state to the other.
Cities and Memory: Sacred Spaces (2017)
Our second contribution to the Sacred Spaces project was “…on glistening singing wings”, based off a field recording of cicadas outside the Monreale Cathedral, Sicily. It is an electroacoustic piece created to wrap around and accompany the evocative sound of the cicadas in field recording 32. This is the imagined sound of the air between spaces, the shifting of elements, the molecules of the delicate membranes creating their song in the slowed down delirium heat of Sicily.
Cities and Memory: Protest and Politics (2017)
In 2017, we participated in the Protest and Politics project-the world’s first global mapping of the sounds of protest and demonstration. Cities and Memory is a global collaborative sound project encompassing field recording, sound art and sound mapping. Every location on the Cities and Memory sound map features two sounds- the original field recording of that place, and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere else, somewhere new. The listener can explore places through their actual sounds, their reimagined versions, or flip between the two sound worlds.
For this piece, we reimagined the sounds of a clash between an ultra right-wing group against a LGBT movement in Krakow. “Napięcie” is Polish for “tension”. This track is a representation of the tension within it- the tension of the protestors, the tension of the argument and the clash of both sides, each fighting to be heard above the other, set against the backdrop of the current turbulence of the world.