Taprobana (Sri Lanka)

Mangrove swamp and temple prayers, Heenatigala, recorded by Stéphane Marin, reimagined by Enrico Ascoli.

"One of my best historical and geographical interest is about islands and in particular about utopian and mysterious lands; so when I discover that Stephan Marin fields recordings were about Sri Lanka, my mind immediately dreamed about Taprobana, probably one of the most ancient name given to Ceylon (alias Sri Lanka). Here is not the place in which talk about the long journey that this name did from ancient Greeks to late Renaissance, but what I would like to remark, is that for centuries that land was non only a possible, but non verified and imprecise geographical point, but a real state of mind: an imaginary concept about Orient and his marvellous forests and people. It was the idea to give a voice to my fantasies about this ancient phantom that drove me to choose the track 19, a over layered texture of sounds with a very rich spectrum of frequencies. "In this complexity" I thought "made of insects, birds, monkeys and human ritual choirs, I'll will find for sure that dreamy archetype".

At the base I worked with 3 different techniques.

1) Spectral synthesis in order to select just the frequencies in which i was interested in;

2) Granular synthesis to move at the same time in the different sample positions and different ptichs;

3) hyper Time Stretch to create a slow and harmonic base

then I filtered all this stuff with a light Shepard effect in order to create the illusion of a continuum falling sound matter, a gateway from past to contemporary.

At the end I gave a touch of spiritual concreteness mixing this ethereal soundscape with the field recording of a Hindu purification ritual: a Puja recorded by me for a documentary."