RENGBIRD – ORIGAMI MOUNTAINS
Origami Mountains is the debut album by Dutch artist Rengert “Rengbird” Eggink. Like me, you probably haven’t heard from him before (it’s his ‘debut’ album, after all), but judging by the sound on this album, he definitely has some experience in sound design.
Even more surprising is that these tracks were recorded while on the road in South Africa (where he originally comes from, if I understand right) using only a 4-track cassette recorder, sampler, and a few effect pedals. “Using the cassette as a way to bring life and grainy textures to my sounds’.
The two-month trip came at a personally challenging time, but “these tunes came to me as a necessity of peace and introspection”.
And indeed, they are peaceful, introspective, and surprisingly adventurous in sound design.
Origami Mountains presents six tracks, with the closing title track taking up half of the 43 minutes.
HARA ALONSO – TOUCH ME NOT
Hara Alonso is a Swedish pianist, composer, and sound artist. For her compositions, she ‘explores multisensory practices, memory, space and imagination as instruments for sound-making’.
There’s a lot of philosophy in the liner notes accompanying this album: Touch Me Not ‘delves deep into our approach to sensoriality as bodies and sentient beings, by refusing to operate a discrimination of species’.
The music is inspired by Emanuel Swedenborg’s idea of ‘correspondence‘, and Baudelaire’s corresponding poem ‘Correspondances’, ‘in which the senses are confused, immersed in a synesthetic hallucination’.
I’m having a hard time understanding what all this exactly means, I’m afraid – philosophy is not my forte.
But what I dó understand is that this underlying concept may be the very reason why Alonso‘s intricate compositions sounds so interesting – why it dóes confuse the senses.
With her music, we’re “entering a dimension of inverted senses where the body spills into a circle of desiring sensations and sensational desires, enclosing an innocent memory surrendered to the whole”.