Radia Show 314 | Crossings

RADIA
Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so…the street migrates into the living room.
Porosity is the inexhaustible law of life in this city.
[From Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, Naples, 1925]
 
City of ships!? (O the black ships! O the fierce ships!? O the beautiful sharp bow'd steam-ships and sail-ships!) ?City of the world! (for all races are here, ?all the lands of the earth make contributions here;)?City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides!
[From Walt Whitman City of Ships Drum-Taps, 1865]

Crossings is an emporium of memories documenting Naples and New York along the imaginary 41°parallel that ties them on the same latitude line. Two cities in continuous metamorphosis, revealing how fragile the fringes between reality and the imaginary may be. Analog and digital meet to witness  sounds of strangers, unknown horizon, private memories and crowded streets.

These sound collecting events are aimed at creating a dislocation in the listener's uncertain perception of space through sound: a sort of unerasable "shadow zone" for the imaginary city walker to inhabit a no man's land where the boundaries between the two cities are hardly palpable, proposing a displacing where gaps between audio fragments become for a few instants a sole "modified" city.

Credits: most sounds have been gathered in New York and Naples (sometime between october 2009 and february 2011), then manipulated, filtered and and re-worked. The track makes use of field recordings, found sounds, synthesizers, filters, Luigi's Pizza Fritta conversations; liturgical rituals at Napoli Dome (during the days of San Gennaro's blood miracle); Akira Kasai 's Buthoh Performance at the National Museum, Napoli; Porta Capuana Fruit market; Peppino reading excerpts of Alzaia by Erri de Luca; Banda and voices during the San Rocco Parade in Nyc; Coney Island subway stations and library sounds from the american radio archive; The Naked City, Union Square Farmer Market (nyc); student's protests in Napoli; Marc Ribot concert at the Rose-Brooklyn; New York and Napoli harbours/seagulls/ships; open/broken cables, children; vocal and spoken words and cries, casual frequencies and a few more sources.

Recorded with MD Sony, telephone, Zoom digital recorder with a stereo microphone and in-ear binaural condenser mics, Edirol R4 Pro and Rode Shot-Gun mic.

 

Barbara De Dominicis likes to record natural or urban sounds and merge them in her music. Her projects include Cabaret Noir (with Pasquale Bardaro), The Body exposedPoe-Si (with Mirko Signorile and 99 Posse dubber Marco Messina);  Kuul-Ma, an audio-visual project in collaboration with the media artist Davide Lonardi. In 2008 she wrote and produced the songs of her album Anti-Gone based on a narrative theme of Greek mythology. In the same years she met the canadian cello player Julia Kent;  together they brought into existence Parallel 41, a musical/visual/improvisatory project. Her growing interest in Sound Portraiture, led her to work on A tale of two cities, an audio collage documenting Naples and New York. In 2011 with a dozen of other artists, she gave life to Exquisite-What!, a collective web/project based on surrealist's Exquisite Cadaver practice. At the moment she is working on a new solo album under the moniker Apres Soon: an assemblage of drones and field recordings, electronics, voices and string instruments.

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