CHELIDON FRAME: FLATLINE VOYAGES
Thursday 5 February, NZST1900
This date refers to the radio exhibition, "Exposition Audioblast #10", hosted by APO33, where Flatline Voyages was first presented.
Flatline Voyages is a sound project that explores the relationships between drone music, radio interferences, and shortwave transmissions. It combines a series of SDR recordings from all over the world (number stations, Iran radios, Chinese traditional music, beacons, radio hams) and sounds gathered from fellow electronic musicians, coalescing them in a slowly evolving artificial soundscape. It was conceived as a series of extended listenings I made during lockdowns, navigating the SW spectrum from my studio.
During quarantine and lockdowns, I found myself listening to short-wave radio stations more and differently than ever before. If before the COVID-19 situation, my research was only to gather new material to use in my sound practice, after the first days of confinement, all those far away radio stations became a way to plunge myself into a new dimension, where nostalgia, absence, distance, and presence lived together. The aural component was partially deprived of its information content and became a means to explore a world forced away from us. After some months, I found a word that perfectly described it: "flatline voyages”, inspired by a passage by Mark Fisher.
If according to Pierre Schaffer, ”the only difference between music and noise is the intention", then both radio signals and musical sounds can be decontextualized and coerced in a different environment, trying to rebuild that aural soundscape that accompanied me back then, in a dialogue which is not yet sound art, nor is radio art, floating in between.
The project is conceptually divided in nine movements. The fourth and sixth movement make use of sounds kindly provided by four different electronic musicians: Andrea Marinelli, Asymmetric Cut, A Distant Shore, and MDC.
– Chelidon Frame
Chelidon Frame (aka Alessio Premoli, 1990) is an Italian musician, composer, and sound-artist based in Milan. His focus is divided between data sonification, electroacoustic composition and live electronic music.
In his sonification projects explores over-consumed data, trying to rebuild a more immediate and direc experience with the underlying information.
In his sound works, he deals with non-idiomatic improvisation with small and large ensembles both in a live and studio setting, incorporating influences from drone music to experimental electronic music.
- https://chelidonframe.site
Flatline Voyages was released by official release on Difficult Art And Music (DAAM) on the 29 March 2024.
https://difficultartandmusic.bandcamp.com/album/flatline-voyages