On the first meeting the participants were encouraged to record sonic patterns, sonic effects and mainly sounds that seemed interesting to them at the moment. The basic idea was to find sounds which are unique, represent and reflect contemporary thessaloniki. The result was the creation of a sound library that every participant could use in order to create his/her piece of sonic art.

At the second meeting the participants shared and listened to their recordings. The interesting part of the process was that everyone recorded something different.

Some participants (Aimilia Karapostoli, Panayotis Dimotikalis) found interest in the sound of natural elements (the sea, crickets, dogs barking, etc) and its antithesis – the mechanical sounds (car engines, bikes, etc) that both can be found in the mediterranean urban soundscape.

Other participants (Ani Kaltsidu) recorded the different religious layers of the city. She collected sound fragments of the liturgies that take place every Sunday morning in different churches (christian orthodox, armenian orthodox, synagogue,etc).

A lot of the participants found were focused the cultural aspects of everyday life like the song of a romani women, the melodic voices of the traders who sell their products in the street market, the rhythmic sound of the footsteps when you walk and the rhythmic sound of breath when you run and so on.

The work of the participants was presented at actionfield KODRA 2011.

“diF return to Kodra with Resonance Chamber, 2011, further afield in the military camp grounds, in the distinctive hexagonal guard-house. The work is a collaboration between diF and the Thessaloniki-based Panayotis Dimotikalis, Anni Kaltsidou and Aimilia Karapostoli, the result of a joint endeavour borne out of the Sound Stories workshop, delivered by Konrad Bayer in 2010 in the context of Soundcity. Various sounds of Thessaloniki, both from the natural environment and human activity, were collected and chosen by the group, who subsequently processed them with special technological means and transformed them, after a series of experiments, into brief autonomous music compositions. Their random playing via the «shuffle» mode of a sound system creates a sonic mosaic, which acts as a condensed urban soundscape, challenging the memory and senses of visitors through continuous, unanticipated changes that are beyond their control. The song of crickets, the voices of a Roma woman and of the street vendors at the open-air markets, extracts from masses of different religions of the city, and the rustling of the wind are some of the sounds that become entangled in the visitors’ consciousness, combining the familiar with the unfamiliar. The all-white, industrially-lit space accentuates this interplay between the soul and memory, evoking associations that range from the sterile isolation of an experiment laboratory to the Tibetan Bardo – namely, the unconscious, intermediate stage between two lives.”
(Evi Baniotopoulou / Art Historian + Curator)

Ohio

Vermont

Maine

Nantucket

Boston

Loose Ends from konrad bayer on Vimeo.

Deodar Darshan from konrad bayer on Vimeo.

Cor Cordis from konrad bayer on Vimeo.