Some soft thing softly stirring soon to stir no more
Feb 03, 2022, 01:36 PM
Scratchy Bottom beach, Dorset, England reimagined by Violetta Suvini.
"I studied modern languages at university, and specialised in Samuel Beckett, an author who regarded sound as architecture in a similar way to how field recordings construct and preserve a space and time from within the capacity of a mic feed.
"For this project, I wanted to play around with the idea of using a section of a Beckett text as a graphic score. I chose Company, a novella from 1947, which repeats specific cells of words, phrases and syllabic rhythms throughout, creating a tapestry of associations which shifts and shimmers.
"From a section of the text I particularly like, I converted the structures of the repeated phrases into harmonic motifs, before filling out the rest of the musical architecture with a wash of sounds I personally associate with the sea, such as church bells and cicada-like buzzing.
"The crackles and fizzes towards the end are meant as reference to the habit of auto-disintegration that Beckett practiced in his prose; pinpricks in an edifice of sound. Thanks to Cities and Memory for letting me experiment with this one!"
"I studied modern languages at university, and specialised in Samuel Beckett, an author who regarded sound as architecture in a similar way to how field recordings construct and preserve a space and time from within the capacity of a mic feed.
"For this project, I wanted to play around with the idea of using a section of a Beckett text as a graphic score. I chose Company, a novella from 1947, which repeats specific cells of words, phrases and syllabic rhythms throughout, creating a tapestry of associations which shifts and shimmers.
"From a section of the text I particularly like, I converted the structures of the repeated phrases into harmonic motifs, before filling out the rest of the musical architecture with a wash of sounds I personally associate with the sea, such as church bells and cicada-like buzzing.
"The crackles and fizzes towards the end are meant as reference to the habit of auto-disintegration that Beckett practiced in his prose; pinpricks in an edifice of sound. Thanks to Cities and Memory for letting me experiment with this one!"