Andrea Dancer: Cloist(au)ral
Soundwalking is a way of addressing a schism between human and world, a philosophical alienation that began with Aristotle and, through its long lineage, has become a habit of sensory imbalance.
In this piece, so called "ambient sound" is given equal weight as the spoken word. It is treated as a type of language, foregrounded, in order to shift one's listening biases. In phenomenological terms, space is constituted through perception as the body moves through it, physically. It follows that if the structure of the listening environment is changed, so one's perception shifts and the space is constituted differently. In this way, soundwalking can be called an act of com-position, although to use that term is to bind acoustic phenomenon again to the history of music. The listening in soundwalking defies definitions of sound or music -- as with all lived experience, it is both and neither all at once. It simply is what it is as one is in it. In this way, the call to "listen as you've never listened before," is as much an invitation to change as a kind of passive activism.
This reconstituted soundwalk, Cloist(au)ral, takes the notion of attentive listening back to the cloister, a place of sequester listening attached to silence and not speaking. Movement through space and time is played like the cello's bow moving across its strings -- it's energetic flow underscored in the body through resonation. Sarah Atkinson's cello improvisations serve to cue the ear to this reconfiguration. Over several months, the same areas in Mala Strana's Templar environs were recorded on different days at different times of day. A route was generally followed, however, sound events determined places of intense layering with the audio clips. In this way, the piece is works linearly in time and vertically in space. What emerges are moments of sequestered listening, a contemporary cloistral experience, a concentration and meditation that retunes the body and conflates inner and outer realms , an ear-ly retreat.
And so...listen. Listen as you've never listened before. Then, listen to yourself listening.