TRANSFIGURATIONS: a study in modulating sound

Hey everyone! Here's a post I'm really excited about, so let's get started!

PERFORACIJE & FIUK

There's a really cool festival Perforacije (https://www.perforacije.com/) taking place in Zagreb, Croatia every year. The festival's aim is to promote young artists and conceptual performance art. It lasts for a whole week and hosts various artists from all over the place performing all kinds of art. This year, the festival is also taking place in other major Croatian cities - Dubrovnik, Split, Rijeka, Osijek, Zadar and in my little hometown of Koprivnica! It's actually amazing that such a small town can be a part of this and it's only because Koprivnica has a tradition of recognizing how important art is and promoting performance art with its own festival called FIUK (http://fiuk.com.hr/). FIUK was established 4 years ago by several non-profit art organisations, one of which I am also a part of. FIUK aims to bring together theatre, performance art, dancing and music, all of which take place on different public locations in order to convert the city into an open air theatre.

(this is the festival's main man (the guy that shot the session from the previous post and the guy I'm doing stuff with featured in this post) doing... I guess, assembling the visuals for the festival a year ago.)

(this is my band Moskau performing on the first ever FIUK 4 years ago)

(and here's a video of some other crazy stuff that took place over the years)

TRANSFIGURATIONS: the concept

Anyway, Bojan (the main man) and I started working on a ''no-name-no-particular-idea-project'' that we wanted to feature on FIUK this year. However, Bojan decided to submit a draft of our work to Perforacije festival and we were ACCEPTED! Since it turns out Perforacije will take place in Koprivnica this year, we will not feature our work on FIUK but I am glad we will have the opportunity to perfrom the work in our home town. The problem with this project was very Sartre-like: the content came before the concept so we had to think about what we are actually pursuing here. Everything started with Bojan filming a short slow motion video of his girlfriend putting a black shirt over another shirt and then eventually taking the black shirt off. It was filmed because it looked good and after the video was done, Bojan thought of the term TRANSFIGURATIONS. It is actually a religious term and, put most simply, it means a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state..

(this is a still form the actual video)

He came with the video and the term ''transfigurations'' to me and after a long talk we decided the project should be a study in the change of appearance. The video of his girlfriend changing clothes in slow motion really started to look like a sort of a transfiguration, especially in slow motion. It has an ''altar-like'' quality which also goes well with the projects title so the next step was to decide what kind of sound to put over it.

TRANSFIGURATIONS: sound sampling

The sound design was up to me. We only agreed that the sound should in a way be transfigurated the same way the video is. My initial idea was to write an orchestration piece that would be a cross-over between Mahler and Penderecki because I thought it would work great and I even started to develop something but I quickly realized it would just be too time consuming, given all the other work that was lying around at the time so I dropped the idea (for now). After that was dropped, we sought after a new solution. The second idea was to create something we named SELF SUSTAINABLE NOISE MACHINE. It was to be a collection of sounds recorded on different locations and then modulated into a sort of a noise orchestration piece. It was very important to me that the sounds are organic at their core but modulated beyond recognition. It was also important that the sounds mimics the video. We took the ZOOM recorder and started to sample sounds around town.

(here's me sampling the waterfall)

(and this is a shot Bojan took while recording a church choir in mass)

We ended up with several different sound samples: waterfall, church choir, train engine, crows vocalizing, children playing, the sounds of the market in the morning and construction workers using different power tools.

TRANSFIGURATIONS: the modulating

After the sounds were gathered, it was time to transfigurate them. The self sustainable noise machine idea needed to be something like a audio perpetuum mobile, a sound that starts happening and as it goes along, it starts to become larger and larger, constantly changing in type and volume. I wanted each sound to affect the next and to eventually meld into a sort of noise transfiguration, a crescendo of different effects and modulations which end with the voices of the church choir sort of ''overcoming'' the noise - I wanted the religious to win over the secular. The way to achieve this was to carefully layer each sound on top of another in the form of loops and to arrange the effects in a way that each effect increases the effect and the volume of another effect on another sound - I truly hope this makes sense because I don't know how to explain in differently. So the track starts with incoherent whispers which are actually children's voices modulated with various effects. The whispers then continue but are overtaken by a deep rumble loop made out of the sound of the train engine. The loop is cut by sudden noises of power tools, just to remind the listener that he is, in fact, hearing a loop that slowly grows. I also included the waterfall noise but made it into a more of a hum than an actual sound, just to get something hissing in the background so the listener would pay more attention to other, more articulated sounds. Towards the end, the voices start to come in. At first, they are very vague but slowly start to build up and overtake the noise. The choir is actually in reverse so the voices would be articulate but you couldn't decide which song they are singing. As they build up, the victory of the religious human voice over the secular becomes apparent and all the other noises cannot go through. As far as I'm concerned, the project was a success. We managed to interlock the two concepts of transfiguration over two separate media and then combine it into a singular piece of work. Both the video and the sound make sense with the title and the meaning of transfigurations. The work will be PERFORMED LIVE on the festival because we plan to both modulate the sounds we recorded earlier live as the video plays and also to record the sounds of the people coming in to see th work and then instantly play them back to those people while modulating them. It is going to be tricky, but if we do it right, it's really going to be a cool project. Here's the complete audio track (I will post the video after the festival):