The ballad of the tuco tuco (reimagined)

Reimagined by Georgia Golebiowski.

"After choosing a recording of the strange and unique sounds of an underground creature I decided to focus on producing a piece that develops this as a concept, creating an underground environment that is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Researching the tuco tuco, I discovered that it is mostly a solitary creature with little evolution over the 10,000 years of existence, and living 90% of the time in a network of self made underground tunnels, coming to the surface only sometimes to eat. Departing from here, I started to imagine the space these animals inhabit, how sound travels, and how sounds from this subterranean realm interact with the soundscape of the surface, that is - the world that these animals encounter when emerging. 

And so, I wanted to create the sense of a large underground space, transforming small tunnels of dense soil into large sonic areas, in which sounds become distorted with spatial reflections, the small tuco tuco transcends its own size, and notions of near and far are brought into question. 

Following the reworking and editing of the original recording into several tracks (with no added effects), I played and recorded the sounds emplaced within a large ground floor room with tiled brick floors and vaulted ceilings. The reverb, feedback and muffled sounds of human/non-human activity in the final piece are all naturally occurring phenomena of the aural landscape in and out of this room. From here, it was a simple process of composition - layering the installation recordings with the clean tracks, producing a new kind of environment that aims to bring different or separate realms and elements together (subterranean/surface, animal/human, ancient/contemporary, plain/mysterious, natural/digital, geographical…)."

Part of the Sounding Nature project - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sounding-nature