Though woven of the loosest skeins of its wool—birdsong, windswept treetops, insect trill—the color and clarity of Between Dawn and Dusk is immediately arresting.
The whole wide world between thumb and forefinger, so tightly concentrated and sharply focused is the day Belgian sound artist Sabri Meddeb shares with us. Though woven of the loosest skeins of its wool—birdsong, windswept treetops, insect trill—the color and clarity of Between Dawn and Dusk is immediately arresting. From a fixed point, rich layers of living landscape stretching for miles and miles in every direction rush in, though softly as the powder off a butterly’s wing.
Two field recordings bookend a work of ambient “sound transformation.” The first, “Between Dawn and Dusk: Cycle of Night-Twilight,” lifts one into an inspiriting state of grace, until a parliament of frogs breaks in croaking wild opinions. Though a million miles away in the mind, suburbia is evidently closely nearby—as it draws to an end, neighborhood dogs barking about their evening walk can be heard.
With “Place for Hearing,” night seeps deeper into the forest and harden Meddeb’s threads into icicles ringing in the cold, branch and twig and trunk now one giant wind chime rustled by the harmonium warmth rising from the ground. Soughing so lissomely, it is an entrancing, adroitly composed piece. After these extended sojourns, each a wink over twenty-one minutes, “Reflection Contemplation” returns us briefly to the unaltered wild to unwind our bodies one muscle at a time, deeply inhaling fresh night air through flared nostrils.
Beautifully rendered edition of banded, rockface-textured handmade paper.
Between Dawn and Dusk is available here.
