Valparaiso Ghosts

Reimagined by John Melillo.

"The key to this recording was a voice in a noisy environment in Valparaiso making a political speech about gay rights. In my “remix” I wanted to reframe that voice within the context of two spectral presences: the ghostly presence of a long history of violence towards LGBT folks in Chile and the present-but- absent noise of everyday life that often draws people away from political voice and political action. In this recording, I used a simple spectral frequency analysis tool to select particular frequency fragments from the original recording. I then used these fragments—which created their own weird, synthetic voices—to reframe and cut into the speaker’s sounds. I wanted to transform noise into voice. Rather than just a record of a particular voice speaking to a crowd above the din of the city, the remixed voice is in dialogue with the diffuse and hidden electronic melodies that reside within the audio recording. As these sounds “sing” with and against each other, they recall the implicit past while also foregrounding a desire to be heard and understood. They figure, then, another way of (political) being together in sound, where voice and noise remake each other and make audible the possibilities of a different future."