Posts tagged One Thousand Dreams I Never Had
No Colour / No Sound, Part I
taken from Survey #2 (One Thousand Dreams I Never Had. Out now on Room 40’s new A Guide To Saints imprint.
Survey #2 (One Thousand Dreams I Never Had) is available now as limited edition of 100 hand-printed cassettes with immediate digital download.
For those who don’t know, I made the record while I was snowed in for 80 days up in the Austrian alps last year. Here’s some writing regarding the making of the thing. It is best read in a Sir David Attenborough style voice.
Notes From The Mountain
Colour drains way from the alps at the onset of winter, especially when living just a few hundred meters below the tree-line at 1800 meters above sea level. There, all the human eye is really left to observe are two, maybe three tones of colour. On overcast days, the white of snow covers almost everything in sight, bar the spaces of dark browns and greys made up from the bare mountains and the dormant fauna. Only when the cloud cover is lifted, a striking blue is added to the composition. Surrounded by this duo-tone landscape, observations find new purpose and meaning. Attention is honed on clouds and fog of varying consistency moving through space, snow falling with changing intensity and direction, as well as the peculiar transformation of light that happens throughout the course of each day. Time begins to slow and a sharpened type of cognisance sets in – even to the point of noticing small changes in the position of the rising and setting of sun and moon.
Ears also attune to the new surrounds and they become very eager for any type of sound in what is a mostly muted environment. Most animals are hibernating or too cold to expend energy on making noise, and especially on still days, there is very little ambient sound for your ears to pick up upon at first. Eventually though, the ears become calibrated and begin to hear all kinds of things: the distant creaking of a branch under the weight of snow, the faraway trickle of a spring, and on warmer days, you easily hear a fly – having hedged in anticipation of spring – buzzing toward you from kilometres away. You can hear snowflakes falling and hitting the ground…. well, maybe not so much hitting the ground, more like fusing with it. And the wind… the multitude of sounds that the air moving through those mountains will generate is quite a thrill, providing random performances of great beauty.
So all of this unleashed nature began flowing into the musical sketches that I made everyday. More and more I found myself abandoning the original reason for moving to the cabin. (I had intended to head up there and finish an album of songs based in a more traditional style – a work I had started a few years earlier in Australia). But instead, slow and simple movements of mostly minimal chord progressions started to dominate my days. Guitar drones interpreting cloud patterns, meditations on the full moon’s light hitting the frozen surface as well as random fragments of sound arrived daily – like gifts presented by a muse, namely solitude.
The absence of human contact began to impact. Time not just slowed, but during a period that is probably best described as a manic episode, time actually seemed to evaporate and cave in on itself. Best illustrated perhaps by the fact that a moment occurred where I became totally disoriented about when I had last slept or eaten. I still don’t know whether it was ten, twenty or seventy hours. No idea. All I know is that when I realised, I was sitting there with the guitar working on a version of Elvis Presley’s ‘All Shook Up’. I did go to sleep not long after that.
So anyway, that’s a small glimpse into how gigabyte after gigabyte of data was being written to the hard drives during those months in the mountains. The days then got longer and the snow slowly gave way to a breathtaking awakening and transition. And as spring arrived, eighty days after moving to the cabin, I packed my stuff and reluctantly left the place behind.
Some months after coming down from the mountain, Lawrence English messaged me about a new imprint he was starting and whether I may have something to contribute. I remember the subject line in the email read ‘Cassette Diaries’, which immediately made me wonder that perhaps some of the work I’d done up in the cabin may suit Lawrence’s brief. So I went through the hard drives, trawled through the vast amount of audio, and picked thirteen ideas – tried to give it some shape; and now here it is.
Maybe you’ll dig. Thanks for reading.
Seeing that the recording coming out soon was made entirely up in the mountains, it seems reasonable that I remind you of some of the weirdness that takes place when spending 80 days alone at 1800 meters above sea level during the alpine winter.
Everyone needs friends. Here’s who I hung out with during the early months of 2011.
Survey #2 (One Thousand Dreams I Never Had) will be out on the 1st of May this year through Lawrence English’s brand new A Guide To Saints imprint. Made in early 2011, it’s a collection of sounds and ideas that appeared during 80 days spent in a wooden cabin high up in the Austrian Alps. A mostly instrumental audio postcard that transcribes (amongst other things) the sensations of extreme isolation and freedom.
Manifested in tonal experiments and simple movements of minimal chord progressions, it features guitar drones interpreting cloud patterns, meditations on the full moon’s light shimmering on frozen surfaces – as well as randomly fragmented expressions of sound.
All of it wrapped and illuminated by the duo-tone of deep alpine winter, Survey #2 contains 13 pieces of music, intertwined to make a 34 minute edition of sound.
Out via A Guide to Saints on May 1st 2012.
Written and recorded by Heinz Riegler.
All Instruments by Heinz Riegler.
Mastering by Lawrence English at Room 40.
Cover art by Matthieu Rynkiewicz & Heinz Riegler.
Cassette cover art print: Matthew Deasy.
