Breaking from Broken20, news of an impending audiovisual release from David Fyans, man behind the label’s design aesthetic.
‘Sound has always been an integral part of ritual. The shared listening experience can give a sense of community, of synchronised brainwaves and collective movement.’ (Fyans, The Somnambulist’s Field Guide)
Breaking from Broken20, news of an impending audiovisual release from David Fyans, man behind the label’s design aesthetic. Born of live performance-based installation, The Somnambulist’s Field Guide deploys immersive sculptural audio and meditative hypnotic video ‘to create a magickal space within which the collective listener, as a single organism, may embrace a sense of ‘otherness’, meditate on the spacial and psychological qualities of sound, and traverse dense and varied landscapes, conjured from the absence of silence.’
Fyans’ ways have been variously mystified over a raft of sculptural audio, ritual performances and improvised works by ‘subconscious interventions, mysticism, psycho-geography, extra-dimensional and liminal spaces, and ruminations on time and our understanding of it,’ cf. the likes of Marconi’s Shipwreck (‘gloo ‘view). TSFG builds on this extensive audiovisual portfolio, its visuals presenting as a slow-moving celestial presence, landscape slowly shifting and pulsing in an unnerving endless ripple. It had already been brewing for 2 years prior to this release’s capture, says Fyans, manifesting in various previous forms, such as drowning a gallery in full blackout with the audience breathing in incense and lounging on cushions in a deeply meditative ritual state.
TSFG will feature on Sept. 1st at one of Cryptic’s challenging and diverse productions at CCA, Glasgow. Altered Spaces, its largest installation yet, will be in the round in the centre, offering a focal point to the ‘ritual’ that acts as a mandala for the audience to exchange experiences; drifting over its 70+ mins through discrete sections, bleeding into each other, in Fyans’ signature style, it will afford ‘a deeply transitory experience’ whereby the listener, rather than suddenly finding him/herself pitched into new territory, realises that (s)he is no longer on familiar ground and must take in and process their current surroundings in the drift.
Conceptually rooted as the work is, it engages as an integral sonic entity, lineage being drawn to like-mind sounds, notably ‘the deep and dusty grooves of Basic Channel and other acolytes of submerged/degraded audio such as Huerco S, Loscil and Tim Hecker.’
The Somnambulist’s Field Guide is due for August 19 release on Broken20. Altered Spaces is a Cryptic event taking place on Sept. 1st at CCA, Glasgow
