U39 | Stéphane Marin | Invisible(s) Archipelago(s) #1 – Serendib rhythms
Serendib rhythms_excerpt1
Serendib rhythms_excerpt2
format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies
all copies come with an additional art card on 300gr satin paper
release year : 2016
length : 43’30
status : still available
>>> order via Paypal : chalkdc@unfathomless.net
(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
Un lieu peut-il se définir comme la somme de tous les espaces qui le constituent ?
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Une île est un archipel
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Existerait-il un réseau invisible qui relierait entre eux certains endroits distants selon des modalités inentendues ?
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L’archipel est un éclat d’îles
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« Invisible(s) Archipelago(s) » est une tentative de connection audio entre différents espaces insulaires. Chaque île visitée, écoutée, enregistrée fait l’objet d’une nouvel opus dans la série. Chaque île est découpée en fragments phonographiques et est re_composée sous la forme d’un archipel.
« Invisible Archipelago » est le réseau invisible qui relie toutes les îles entre elles.
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Une île est une émergence
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« Serendib rythms » n’est pas une carte postale sonore dressant un portrait d’une insularité exotique. Il est bien plutôt la mise en relief et en forme de motifs rythmiques (patterns) enregistrés aux 4 coins du Sri-lanka.
De l’atomisation des espaces opérée par les microphones, et rassemblés en un réseau original par la composition, jailli un archipel inouï à la surface de l’île morcelée.
La structuration des motifs entre eux redessine une géographie sonore inédite.
« Serendib rythms » est la première pierre affleurante venu sourdre dans les eaux qui bordent cet Archipel Invisible.
(Stéphane Marin, Novembre 2016)
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Can a site define itself as the sum of all its spatial constituent parts ?
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An island is an archipelago
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Could there be some invisible web which would interconnect certain remote places according to unheard ways and means ?
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The archipelago is a shard of islands
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“Invisible(s) Archipelago(s)” is an audio connection attempt between different insular spaces.Each visited, listened to, recorded island is the subject of a new opus in the series.Each island is cut into phonographic fragments and re_composed as an archipelago.
“Invisible Archipelago” is the invisible web which links all islands together.
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An island is an emergence
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“Serendib rhythms” is not a sound postcard giving a portrayal of an exotic insularity.
It is much more an emphasizing and a shaping along rhythmic patterns recorded all over Sri-lanka.
Through the atomization of the spaces operated by the microphones, and assembled together into an original web by composition, springs out an unheard of archipelago on the surface of a broken up island.The structuration of patterns themselves redesigns an original sound geography.
“Serendib rhythms” is the first emerging stone surging from the waters bordering this Invisible Archipelago.
(translation by Daniel Crokaert, December 2016)
: reviews :
The contours and frontiers of an island can be designated or traced without difficulty; and within an archipelago, from island to island, circuits of navigation and exchange form fixed and recognized itineraries that draw a clear frontier between the zone of relative identity (recognized identity and established relations) and the external world, a world of absolute foreignness. — Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Super-Modernity
No, islands cannot be traced, and there is no absolute border. Coastlines vary over time in both shape and extent, an interplay of tide and current. Come back next month and the shore face has retreated due to erosion. Return once more and the vines might have overgrown their previous limits, now trailing the salt water. Everything is in constant process. Crab shells lie where gulls have discarded them. Sea greens rot above the reach of the sea. Piers for fishing boats extend the built environment out into the water. And there always remains, as some excess of reality that we cannot contain or contend with, glaciers melting on the other side of the globe. There is no permanence or stasis, no “clear frontier”. This myth of natural harmony is long overdue for revision.
A dog barks suddenly. Like a canine alarm-clock, it’s been fashioned and positioned to wake us from our reverie. It ushers in a drone of insects, a dark sound bed harbouring some industrial noise. Is it a motorboat offshore? Or a generator closer to hand? The auditory world of Stéphane Marin is open to many interpretations, each provisional by necessity. In the opening minutes of Serendib Rhythms, the composition grows in density and intensity, before dropping away suddenly to reveal a tool impacting on wood, part of some agrarian activity. Or so we guess.
Sounds are fluid here, a product of Marin‘s complex audition of his milieu, and his powerful desire to make us listen as well. The arrangement is theatrical, the album structured in movements, sutured by sudden sonic events that demand our attention. This is the opposite of “nature recording”, that Romantic desire to represent a pristine world exempt from our influence, as some sort of refuge. Instead, Serendib Rhythms incorporates patterns of working life as prominently as the pulse of water or insect.
Marin foregrounds sounds others choose to avoid. A barking dog is conventionally heard as interruption, as noise. Many would exclude this sound, but Marin‘s contrary decision calls attention to itself. Some might find this difficult listening, but it is also invigorating. The album notes speak of “de l’atomisation des espaces opérée par les microphones”, which is a powerful phrase. Marin doesn’t present sounds as evidence of an indexical reality. Instead, they are deliberately reconfigured for the ear through montage.
The title of this soundscape is as dense as the material : Invisible(s) Archipelago(s) #1 Serendib Rhythms. The word “archipelago” describes the re-assembling sonic fragments into a “web of composition”. It also retains the geographic meaning. Narratives of shoreline and border are enacted, sometimes physically. There is a remarkable section where a hydrophone is dragged through various materials. The alternation between submerged and emerged sound worlds creates a rhythm, a trace in time and through space. We are encouraged by narrative convention to interpret this sequence as a journey, a literal walk through the littoral. But Marin also ensures that we maintain awareness of the microphones as objects in the world, rather than transparent transducers.
Augé sees an archipelago as defining fixed circuits of exchange, but nothing could be further from the truth. Monsoons, floods, and currents change the optimal route through an island cluster. What today is a clear path might tomorrow be overgrown with vines, threatened by crocodiles, or simply dried up into sand. We must navigate each time anew, sensitive to changes in the biotic and abiotic. Marin represents a month in Sri Lanka in just this way, as continuous activity and change.
If there is no permanence in extent and exchange, there are no fixed borders either. The line that delineates the “foreign” is fractal in dimension. Our guides wear Nike shoes; plastic bottles are discarded by the baobab; the sound of gasoline-powered chainsaws cuts through the early morning air. Marin banishes the conceit of the exotic. If this disturbs a classical sense of order, then it is about time.
Well past time, perhaps, as the glaciers measure it.
This album is available on Unfathomless in an edition of 200 hand-numbered compact disks. It has just now (August 2017) been issued as a digital edition on Bandcamp.
Also recommended is Marin‘s previous album, Matins d’Arièges, available as a free download from Galaverna. His own website is Espaces Sonores.
Robin Parmar
Theatre Of Noise
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The Unfathomless Series returns with another pair of fine releases, whose moods are polar opposites. Five Elements Music‘s lokrum patterns draws the listener in, while Stéphane Marin’s Invisible(s) Archipelago(s) n°1 – Serendib rhythms contains sounds that many would choose to avoid.
Now to Sri Lanka, a land of many islands, whose sounds have been worked into a single composition by Stéphane Marin. The title may be unwieldy (Invisible(s) Archipelago(s) #1 – Serendib rhythms), but the idea is not; this archipelago is an amalgamation, meant to represent all islands and none.
Serendib is an old Persian name for Sri Lanka, a word nearly forgotten by the outside world, suggesting serendipity to English-speaking readers, and for good reason: the Eng-lish word is a derivation of the Persian word, inspired by an old fairy tale. And Invisible(s) Archipelago(s) #1 operates as a fairy tale by creating a world that doesn’t (quite) exist.
The rough part of this recording is its integration of off-putting sounds, in particular a dog-barking introduction and a period of hammering mid-piece. These are sounds that one normally wishes to escape, and not sounds one normally associates with an island. They represent the dark part of the fairy tale, and perhaps the inescapable pres-ence of sound pollution. (Wild dogs would be another story, but these seem to be guard dogs, domesticated and angry.) The human presence is also far more upfront here than in the prior recording, from footsteps to yells to car horns to the sound of things thrown against the ground ~ and in one instance, muted fireworks or gunfire. Given the sonic choice of two destinations, most would prefer Lokrum Island to this archipelago.
But wait ~ bear with the recording long enough, and one begins to hear the beauty in con-trast. More peaceful sounds await, from quiet rivers to tropical birds to the rocking of a hull against waves. The composer chooses to unveil both forces simultaneously: birds and babies, engines and seas. Yet even the abrasive sounds begin to intrigue as they clump into drones midway through the piece. When the dogs return at the end, they are a bit quieter, as if contemplating what they have heard. Given the choice of silencing certain sounds before hearing them, we might have agreed ~ and in so doing, missed some of the best parts of the invisible archipelago. Better then to plow forward into the cacophony of life, to preserve the possibility of serendipitous surprise.
Richard Allen
A Closer Listen
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Years ago Unfathomless started as a sub division of Mystery Sea, and while there have more releases on the main label, it seems that they are now more active working on the sub-division. There was one by Five Elements Music last week, and now it’s time for one by Stéphane Marin, of whom I think I didn’t hear before. His album contains a piece of music with sounds recorded in Sri Lanka, and the cover details the various places, such as a jungle beach, roads, temples and a water tank. Marin asked the question “could there be some invisible web which would interconnect certain remote places according to unheard ways and means?” and all the sounds he recorded at various dots that he connects by composing them into a piece of music. This makes that this is not to be regarded as a sound picture of Sri Lanka, but it is, so Marin says, about “an emphasizing and a shaping along rhythmic patterns recorded all over Sri Lanka”. Sounds from different places are imposed over each other, and don’t have a strict rhythm pattern, it is not ‘dance’ music of any kind, but in all of the sections there is at least one rhythmic element, insects, birds, dogs, cars but also very slow ones, such as sea waves towards the end of the piece. I don’t think Marin uses a lot of processing in his music. It doesn’t sound like that he does. But through his extensive layering of very distinctly and different sounds he reaches for something that is close enough to sound processing I think. It is the placement of these sounds that form either sharp contrasts or similarities, which work out very well, in a highly refined way. It is a great release and with that tropical feel that one just needs in a cold climate (well, at least ‘now!’); it offers that holiday feel I guess.
Frans de Waard
Vital Weekly
Unfathomless 