#soundreaming

Jacek Doroszenko: Soundreaming (Audiobulb)

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.

Soundreaming by Jacek Doroszenko

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.

IDEA: Soundscapes replace photographs and graphic representations are based on sound. 

WHAT: Soundreaming is an interactive Internet presentation that takes the form of an audio-visual archive of locations around Barcelona. This website documents out site-specific compositions and sound impressions. Recording the dreams and both natural and human-designed sounds during the expedition we created sound compositions derived from this material. Sound installations are complemented with a unique electronic audio composition, mixed with sounds recorded in Barcelona and lo-fi music.

WHY: When traveling, most people take photographs and use them to communicate a sense of what the experience of being in that place might have been like. However, the acoustic environment can provide a tremendous amount of the sense of place and feeling of a location in a different way than photographs. The sound recording technique allows approaching the transparency of the environmental sound and translating and presenting it visually in a new context. Sounds are connected with visuals, but with the emphasis on the autonomous power of ambient sound to tell its own story and appeal to the imagination.

BY: Soundreaming, a project by Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko. The project has been produced in a framework of an Artist-in-Residence Program at Fundació AAVC Hangar in Barcelona (ES), Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik (NO) and Atelierhaus Salzamt in Linz (AU).