“Whenever I go, I can't help but notice signs of a looming change. I eavesdrop on conversations of creatures big and small, and like me, they seem uneasy and uncertain about what's to come. Something is in the air, dark clouds gather, winds are shifting course. Amidst the confusion and restlessness, the voices of non-human and human worlds blend in a worrisome symphony. This piece is an ode to anticipation, to the beauty of different forms of life on the brink of the sixth mass extinction. Joining in the chorus are the American toad, northern winds, an old kettle, Mr. Cat, tawny owl, crickets, domestic chickens and pigs, trumpeter swans, honey bees, truck horns, cormorants, seagulls and other elements and critters.” — Alëna Korolëva
Something is afoot, the Tkaronto/Toronto-based artist and curator, Alëna Korolëva tells us in her new soundscape composition “premonitions”. American toads and water beetles set things in motion before the long-form piece journeys through a multitude of field recordings and non-human voices in a quasi-cinematographic fashion. Korolëva layers and manipulates sounds from the real into a sonic chimaera which mutates concrete ambiances into vaporous surrealities through the modes of collage. A storm blankets the soundscape, things grow quieter. Distant parallels with Luc Ferrari’s "musique anecdotique" come to mind, yet here the piece materializes in an acoustic docu-fiction of some sort, that takes the form of a waking dream. Various scenes, ranging from the mundane to the uncanny, unfold in eardrums exposing an underlying sense of earthly melancholy. A weight lurks throughout while winds, pigs, chickens, and mechanical apparatus weave into a strange agitated tapestry. A kettle whistles, a cat meows – Korolëva sprinkles the gloom with touches of humor and audible senses of home. Trumpeter swans are joined by a trumpeter human; Chayka Chekhov responds to the avian songs in a interspecies dialogue – echoing Jim Nollman’s “Playing Music With Animals”. Environments cascade into a finale droned out by truck horns. Their ringings and animal cries swell in a somber abstraction bearing the weight of a presentiment. “What does the future hold?” we ask ourselves throughout the album as we dissolve in imbrications of positionings, emanating from one another like stacking dolls. Poly-layered, “premonitions” engages in play, in negotiation with the disparate spaces and voices of a troubled world as if it created harmonious discord to decipher the ominous clouds gathering in the horizon.
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"premonitions" was originally commissioned and broadcasted by Radiophrenia (2023)
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radiophrenia.scot
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Alëna Korolëva is an artist and curator, who works with sound, photo and video. She has a degree in documentary filmmaking, made a few short films and curated programs for film festivals, but since 2018 she's reinvented her practice with sound art. Her sound work is focused on field recordings, soundscape studies and electroacoustic composition. Her technique employs elements of documentary storytelling and musique concrète.
"I am fascinated by the potential of accidental or routine sounds made by people, machines and animals to create music. As a neurodivergent person my art practice is closely related to my acute sensitivities to auditory stimuli and synaesthetic experiences which I try to translate into the language of sound art."
Based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada.
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www.alenakoroleva.com