We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Col​ț​e​ș​ti, Rimetea, Gyopan (Sentinel)

from Romania Phonographies, 2015​-​2016 by AKASHIC RECORDS

/

about

Trekking on foot through this region mostly. We arrived to find the main Coltesti cafe and grocery boarded up for Sunday and the village seemed largely deserted; the few people we met unused to visitors, shy. Most tourists come by the busload and and follow a winding road up to the remains of an old castle ruin, one ominous tower surrounded by crumbs of stone.The heat was tremendous and without water we considered it possibly a lethal grapple up, one hour there, the one hour back, down, on foot, with gear. Instead, we waited for the twilight "hour" which the cafe would be open (they seemed to say) and bought, in the end, not much. Water and few cans of beer. Then we walked cautiously through a tree-shaded alley path up to the peak of a very tall hill on the other side of the valley from the old fortress of Torockoszentgyorgy, from which the village derives it's Hungarian name, Torocko. Here we found the local Catholic church and sought some care-taker, knocked on doors, greeted by a not unfriendly dog, heard some chickens cluck and clatter, tried the door to the sanctuary and finding it locked, began wander around the cemetery grounds, well-tended, looking at the ancient tombs, often ornately gated, bearing mostly Hungarian family names. We chose one surrouned by a cement wall, a tiny fortress in itself, to discreetly bed down, watching the sunset, looking out upon the old medieval fortress of the Magyar lords across the valley. Here I recorded the first sequence in one 15 minute sweep of sounds, starting with the crumbly edges of the tomb wall, finding the metal tubes of gate a make-shift gamelan, just as the church bells began to toll and the local sheperds goaded their bell-necked flocks into unseen barns-stalls and shelters and the ubiquitous hounds began to bay squabble. At the 15.50 mark of this selection, you will hear one of the sounds I most sought after: the great stillness of a night without wind and a village somewhere lost in sleep. If you peer with your ears deeply into distances you can hear another village's bells but almost far enough away to seem like a memory. Here and there small clips and plunks of hammers maybe and maybe an airplane on the other side of the planet, only the crickets in the foreground, millions of years old and yet many scarcely alive for more than a few days. It was warm. Heat seemed to emerge from the earth itself or perhaps given off by my own body, bounced back into me. Months later I would come to the conclusion that we indeed had sleep on the ancestral burial mound of the last Torocko clan, the same who had one's who'd erected the fortress & ruled the region until it's sack. At 23 minutes you will hear a recording of a well in another village (searching notes for the name), on the way to Rimatea. We close this episode with cow-herds, dogs and a cowbell chorus at dawn at a campground just outside Rimatea.

credits

from Romania Phonographies, 2015​-​2016, released October 10, 2015

license

tags

about

AKASHIC RECORDS Poland

Guitarist, composer, sound designer, field recordist, shortwave radio poet, blending electro-acoustic, electronica, spectral comp., cracked circuits, sounding organic objects with an ear towards earth voices. Studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan and theories of Partch and Xenakis. Working with dance/theater/butoh co. Djalma Primordial Science. More than 400 concerts throughout Europe since 2005. ... more

contact / help

Contact AKASHIC RECORDS

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this track or account

If you like AKASHIC RECORDS, you may also like: