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Mo​ş​na 2: Crypt & Tower Crawl

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

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Unlike the previous segment, where I blended sounds from various recording devices live on site in Mosna and later in post-production, this is a classic sound-walk presentation, without any edits. The grounds of the Biserica Fortificata (Fortified Church) house a very informal museum composed of cast-off items and hand-me-downs, cool junk nobody knows what to do with, the old scythe-blades & antique barrel staves, rings, traditional costumes, saddles, drums, wall-fragments of the 15th century church, alleged neolithic bric-a-brac, a nail said to be from the 8th century (perhaps holding affixed the feet of a statue of the Crucified in place and whose talismanic importance perhaps goes back to folk legends saying that all nails where made by Gypsy smiths imbued with magical powers); then a few old type-writers & mouldy radios & my personal favorite the old community telephone switch-board with a hundred decadent dangling cables, where some operator once sat, connecting, maybe eavesdropping; someone even carried this massive artefact up the medieval wooden stair-case to the third level of the inner gallery of the 9 meter high shield wall that surrounds the church. Outside on the ground-level one finds a host of antiquated carriages, sleighs, old metal gate-works and what must've been back in the day (1860's) a state of the art fire-fighting wagon, manufactured by a Hungarian firm.

Our journey runs along the walls of these relics, haunted like the artefacts of Kantor, or Beuys, and up the stairs of the main bell-tower inside the church & into the shallow crypt, then through a wooden door on refurbished hinges into one of the narrow side towers where the spiral stairs transform the sacred architecture into defensive bulwark, the apertures more like arrow-slits, the claustral narrowing as I go higher coinciding with imaginations of long seige-campaigns & precarity. People must have been smaller and narrower back in the 1500's because I can barely move without scraping the walls with my shoulders and the recording bears the bruises of a bumped head on a few occasions. I will leave the real sounds to turn in the pages of the mind of the listener alone in their experience within. None of the tour was planned. I didn't ask for approval of the custodian, who was very kind and let us pitch the tent in the courtyard and use the electricity without any demands. And yet I wasn't in the mood to pay bakshish just to record in silence and freedom. So I did everything with a certain air of clandenstinity, feeling vaguely criminal for stealing sounds and going into places not clearly open to the public. Ironically enough, some Romanian teens rolled up in vespas around dusk, ascended to the bell-tower and installed themselves, as if it were an everyday affair. Soon after I caught wind of their khif. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, I suppose.

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

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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

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