Manafonistas

 
 

 
 
 
Recordings are strange things. Documentation of a bygone moment that becomes a reality of its own. An artefact, filled up, wadded and weighted with tons of listeners’ projections it sometimes even succumbs to. The Aboriginals had their songlines, vocalizations, songs triggering mental maps connected to walking tracks in vast landscapes. The vocalization led them on the track, kept them on track. One was real by way of the other. The other way round thus.

Every recording – with its own kind of tracks – is an act fixing sounds for memory and remembrance but listening is in the best case an act of vicarious (re)creative imagination by the listener. The artefact recording gets de-reified, momentaneous again. Through listening and listeners recordings become objects of desire, of remembrance, of joy and sorrow.
 
 
 

 
 
 
By listening to a recording the very moment can be elongated, soaked by perceptions of new realities, associated with new sounds etc.. And nowadays we are able to dissolve it all again and again by remixing. In the old days you had variation by establishing new styles. Nowadays you have infinite remixing, rebuilding of fluid forms (until the form is thinned and exhausted). Arve Hendriksen has demonstrated the circle in his collected work box Solidification. The evasiveness and infinite reverberation of sound as a consequence of great, striking forms, their ongoing reoccurrence, their return.

„Anthology box set containing 7 hard-to-find and critically acclaimed albums, released on labels such as Cantil, Opal and All Saints. The box includes: ‘The Serpent (In Quicksilver)’ (1981), ‚Abandoned Cities’ (1984), ‘The White Arcades’ (1987), ‘By The Dawn’s Early Light’ (1991), ‘Music For 3 Pianos’ (1992) ‘Through The Hill’ (1994, with Andy Partridge of XTC), ‘Luxa’ (1996). Also includes 76 page book compiling interviews and essays about Harold’s work from writers such as David Toop, Mark Prendergast and Mike Barnes.“