Dutch Dada sounds
Two Dada-inspired pieces from Amsterdam today, as we continue our Dada-themed voyage around Europe. Both field recordings are by us, taken from our recent trip to Amsterdam, during which we worked up this piece from the sounds of traffic signals.
The first recording is the melody played by the Westerkerk church on a busy main road, tackled by new contributor Peter Barnard:
“In this work, I attempted to imitate the idiosyncrasies of assemblage and abstraction by editing the incidental sounds heard in the original recording into short samples and rejoining to form a fractured soundscape with sounds jump-cutting into each other fused with clustering atmospheric tones.”
City version:
Memory version:
The second field recording is from Amsterdam’s huge Schiphol airport, as we hear announcements in the terminal and the general thrum of an airport in its daily life. Long-time contributor Nick St. George developed this sound:
“Dada was (is?) many things. A cross-disciplinary phenomenon that embraced the visual arts, literature, the spoken word, journalism, music, film and dance. It was a lot about fragmentation, collage, chance. It was anti-bourgeois, anti-war and maybe even anti-art…