How and where we listen to music is hugely important. I would venture to say that it often has a significant impact on how we perceive it. I listen to Oda by Argentine artist Vic Bang in my aunt’s temporary flat, where I am staying now. In one room, a huge carpet several metres long lies on the floor, while in the next, the walls are lined with panelling. I feel a bit like I’m in a Kashubian cottage on holiday by the lake in the 1990s, while on the other hand, it feels like a variation on Twin Peaks. Everything is in a housing estate, in one of the blocks of flats. I go up to the fourth floor and move into another space-time.
Composer and sound designer Victoria Barca combines bleeps, crunchy percussion and chirping electronics on her albums to create music that blurs the line between acoustic and synthetic, laboratory-created and field-recorded. Her fourth album, released by Mondoj, has the power to create musical worlds. It combines electronic, electroacoustic and acoustic sounds, juxtaposing exotica-style sounds, quasi-folk forms, vocalisations and snippets of recordings. It also shows the potential and possibilities that sound offers. This album was created almost entirely without leaving home. Imaginary folk, futuristic folk, freak folk, weird folk – these labels evoke specific connotations, and I mention them to show how vast a conceptual and associative resource music can have when it is not assigned to a specific place or tradition.
These sounds are sliced, sampled, and sculpted; micro scale – big world. Lying on the carpet, I can immerse myself in woozy phrases, metallic beats looping with delicate electronic tones. Camilla Nebbia’s saxophone in ‘Sporo’ spins seductive phrases, sounding as if someone were playing in the next room. Everything here is very intimate, close, kind of 21st-century bedroom music that evokes worlds at the ends of continents. Fourth World Music on the sofa. Sometimes acoustic buzzes intertwine with synthetic synthesizer bands. Pointed beats, a soundtrack to the surroundings, or perhaps a sound installation for the world in a bubble. That is why this music resonates so strongly. Like an apartment whose scenography transports me to another reality, Vic Bang’s Oda generates a range of sensations from different worlds. It is delicate and intimate, even when a gentle beat appears, as in ‘Filut’.
It reminds me of Josiahino’s achievements on Meshes: music in the spirit of Dadaism, on handmade instruments that do not scream but invite you into their world with delicate, subtle melodies. Or Syphon by Wojciech Rusin, an artist who speculates on the way music from different worlds, created acoustically and synthetically, might sound. Or the unique Ballads by Ekkehard Ehlers & Paul Wirkus, featuring mysterious electroacoustic compositions full of murmurs, disturbances, and processed samples, creating an unsettling, gloomy atmosphere. Ambient collages devoid of regular rhythm and harmony.
Vic Bang has made an ode to small things – sounds and their properties: tones, colours, rhythms, resonances, which can be seen in the titles. There is a bit of melancholy and tenderness in them. We often marvel at the monumentality of recordings, the overwhelming walls of sound, and forget how clearly something small and unobvious can stimulate us. The palette of sounds on Oda is infinitely absorbing, drawing you in with its humming, lack of explosion, and smouldering somewhere in the corner of your flat. Delicately drawn, improvised, smouldering in infinity. A small box of sounds for different worlds.
