Jiří Lukeš: Reverberations
Basklarinet: Hanuš Axmann.A walk through the winter countryside, a train journey to work in the morning, the bells of Salzburg Cathedral and many other acoustic recordings of different environments / situations.
The initial impulse for creating Reverberations was a review of the archive of my own sound recordings made within approximately one and a half years. Nowadays most people take lots of pictures on holiday, at different social events and in other, often very unphotogenic situations. The sound form of the environment in which we find ourselves every day is no less important and often as rich a reservoir of various stimuli. That is why I regularly make recordings of such acoustic situations that attract my attention for some reason. They might include an archetypal conversation between two partners overheard during a train journey, the sound of the bells of a church close by or “mere” ambient natural sounds heard during a walk.
When I listen to such recordings, I often discover many sound elements which really ask for being turned into a composition. An important role during the classification of the individual sounds and during the general creation of the form is played by the reverberations of different environments. Another connecting element in the composition is the sound of my own footsteps on different kinds of surface (gravel, dirt road, tarmac road, grass), which I regard as one of the main evolutionary elements of Reverberations. An analysis of selected parts of such a track helped me to generate the material for the second layer of the composition, which consists of twelve bass clarinet interludes. It was the sound of the bass clarinet that I intuitively decided to use.
The almost magical sound potential of the bass clarinet corresponds ideally to the character of Reverberations. Each interlude is conceived as an instrumental “comment” sui generis based especially on transitional phenomena that are almost imperceptible to the common ear. The reverberation parameter, along with other effects, creates a bridge between both layers of the composition. Therefore, the natural reverberation of the given environment is connected with reverberation created by post-production. The result is a kind of “virtual sound walk.”