Nightfalls at Ponto d’Orvalho – Notes on Resounding Memories by Aires is a sound installation debuting a music piece within an immersive and somatic listening context, at Appleton, in Lisbon.
This work was composed exclusively using different field recordings gathered during the artist’s stay at Ponto d’Orvalho Festival. On the occasion of the opening on 9th and on the finissage of the 16th of July, Aires performed a live improvised version of the piece.
In September 2021, Aires was challenged to participate in the festival not only as a spectator, but as an artist who could consider this rural context and environment as a place to work on new ideas, almost as if the festival itself was a residency. With this intention, the artist thought of bringing a tape recorder to Ponto d’Orvalho to be able to register different sounds, alongside a notebook where he could write down the inspirations, memories, and narratives inspired by the soundscape of the festival. Through this recording process, Aires stored hours and hours of field recordings, brief samples and distant excerpts of other artists’ performances; as well as conversations between participants, children playing, birds flapping their wings and other ambiguous sounds with unattributable origins. Once back in his studio in Lisbon, Aires began to listen carefully to each of the recordings and selected the excerpts of the sound materials that would be further processed, altered and organized in order to create a sound piece that condenses his emotional and auditory experience.
Despite all the connections and possibilities for conviviality that emerged during the weekend of the festival, the distance from the city provoked in Aires a reflection focused on the passage of time, repetition, and a specific type of loneliness that can emerge outside the urban environment. This sense of isolation inevitably brought him back to his childhood years spent in a countryside that he described as both “idyllic and sinister”, a space that affected his perceptions and turned his gaze inwards. This piece fuses these autobiographical elements with cinematic references that mirror the artist’s contrasting impressions of a natural setting. While creating the piece, Aires focused primarily on two works by James Benning, an early American filmmaker who since the 1970s has been engaged in the systematic investigation of the relationship between man, time and environment. The first work – which partly inspired the installation’s name – is Nightfalls (2012), a 98-minute film in which Benning used a fixed camera to film the sunset in a forest near his home in Sierra Nevada. This study of light fading into a landscape evokes a more observational and contemplative relationship with nature that stands in contrast to the possibility of solitary transcendence present in the second work that influenced this installation: Two Cabins (2010). For this film, Benning reconstructed the two cabins where Ted Kaczynski and Henry David Thoreau voluntarily isolated themselves and filmed – always using a fixed camera the views from the windows of both buildings. In this work, Benning provocatively brings together the experience of seclusion of two rather distant American figures, that of an eco-terrorist who opposed industrialization and that of the philosopher who in his book Walden (1854) invited us, before John Cage, to stop and pay attention to the sounds and the “silence” of nature.
The final result of the union of these references with Aires’ minimalist compositional methodology is a linear piece that develops through three moments/movements where each is characterized by a different palette of sounds and dominant samples. Although in these moments glimpses of recordings of the festival’s live performances are recognizable, during a considerable part of the audio the different textures we hear are mysterious, creating a hazy and phantasmagorical soundscape composed from the collective memories that were extracted from the festival’s geographies and then manipulated with the intention of bringing us into contact with an inner territory. In Nightfalls at Ponto d’Orvalho – Notes on Resounding Memories, Aires orchestrates an improbable meeting between different temporalities circumscribed in a specific space, with musical languages and distant sonic universes, coming together to create a composition that invites us to consider the infinite field of the worlds sonic possibilities and their endless combinations.
~ Joana Horta e Mattia Tosti
credits
released September 30, 2023
Curated by Joana Horta e Mattia Tosti
Artist’s Credits and Acknowledgements:
António Poppe David Maranha Inês Tartaruga Água Manuel Mota Norberto Lobo Sérgio Hydalgo Stav Yeini Vera Appleton Xavier Paes
Appleton – Associação Cultural Montado do Freixo do Meio Público do Ponto d’Orvalho
Performed and mastered by Aires / July, 2022, Lisbon
Artwork by André Sirgado
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