Kurodama - Intimate Spaces

Intimate Spaces is a musical exploration of non-inhabitable architectural spaces and their sounds, performed and produced using a mixture of field recording, sampling and synthesis.

It is an album about the dark, cold and claustrophobic interior of a concrete bridge, the sounds from the street heard through a 5-storey cavaedium and the dripping noise of a pool leaking into the service room below it.

The sounds of the outside become the sounds of the inside, but not before having been radically changed and shaped into something new.

Ultimately, this is an album about inhabiting the sounds of uninhabitable spaces.

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VIDEO

In the Press

The above video for "Bridge" was featured on Caesura Letter 122

The track "Tank" appeared in this episode of the podcast A Duck in a Tree

credits and aknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to: Elizabeth, Nicolaj, Ubumaic, Akirasrebirth, John Mitchell, Matthias Puech, Razvan Lazea-Postelnicu, Fabio Franz, Ryan Licata, Émilie Gillet, Agriturismo il Gonzeto, Rachele Malini, Barbara Nagl, Marc Weidenbaum, the local noise/experimental scene in South Tyrol, all the nice people at llllllll.co

Recorded and composed between 2015 and 2019 in Bolzano/Bozen, Montepulciano, Caldonazzo, Italy

Mastered by Ronin Mastering

Design and Risograph printing by Brave New Alps

Making-of and track notes

I've always had an obsession for spaces with unique sounds.

For Intimate Spaces I wanted to focus on non-inhabitable architectonic spaces and their sound. A sound which ironically I feel like I can very well inhabit.

There is some claustrophobia and ancestral fear that comes with these places. They are cold and often dark, not designed with the human body in mind. Yet, I feel deeply attracted to them, and sometimes I even grow very fond of them.

The relationship between the inside and the outside is particularly strong in these spaces. By themselves they would be completely silent, but they channel and amplify sounds from outside, turning them into their own.

Now that I have – like everybody else – spent several months of my life in isolation, these tracks take on a kind of new meaning.

Process

All the tracks – except for the intro, which is a pure, unedited field recording – were born out of the dialogue between field recording and synthesis. They are like duets between the spaces, with their sound and mood and various electronic instruments, like for example the modular synthesizer.

Most of the work was done on the computer. The recordings were layered, cut-up and edited in various ways to create a sense of narrative.

I did not want to alter the nature and identity of the sounds though. I tried to keep them as close as possible to the original recordings. Otherwise, they would have become something else.

The modular synthesizer was used for two distinct purposes:

Sometimes the musical material grew organically out of the recordings: I did for example use the dominant frequencies I could hear in the cavaedium recordings as a harmonic foundation for the drones and melody fragments in the track. Other times, like in "Bridge" I worked more towards enhancing a certain mood or emotion.

Along the way, I documented my thoughts and process through photos, notes and videos (Thanks to my kind wife Elizabeth’s help!). These can be found below!

1. Cavity Wall Colony

We lived for about a year in the attic apartment of an old house. The studio was in a small room, which was originally intended to be a child's room

The ceiling was planked with slim wooden boards and was basically just the underside of the roof, which was insulated on the inside with rock wool. One day I noticed that from time to time a wasp would fly around the room, even when all windows were closed. After closer investigation I noticed that the wasps were coming out of the tiny holes between the boards on the panelling and the wall. I thought to myself "they are coming outta the goddamn walls!"

Turns out, we had a large wasp nest inside the ceiling wall cavity. Of course, I immediately grabbed my contact mics and started to record.

Later, I combined one of these recordings with another one taken in the large basement of our previous flat. The idea was to make the wasps sound bigger, as if they were living in the basement of your house. I think I got inspired to do this by Dino Buzzati's surreal short story "I topi" (the mice), in which a house and its owners slowly end up under the control of a colony of "mutant" mice.

2. Bridge

There's a torrent close to where I grew up. It's mostly dry in summer, but carries a lot of water when the snow melts or when it rains a lot. The torrent bed is relatively large and mostly made of sand and rocks. I loved to play there when I was a kid.

The loud "thump" sound, which vehicles produce when transitioning from the street to the bridge, became the sonic foundation of the composition, resulting in this bass-drum-like pulse, which can be heard throughout the track. The sounds I recorded in the metal funnel were then used to add further percussive elements.

The same "thump" sound was also used as an impulse response inside a convolution-based reverb plugin (Liquidsonics Reverberate). This enabled me to apply the same spatial quality found inside of the bridge to synthesized sounds.

To create more pitched materials and to add harmonic elements to the composition, I used a modal resonator module (Rings from Mutable Instruments) to process the percussive sounds from the bridge and the funnel. The bass drone is just a simple patch made with Ableton Live's Analog synth.

3. Cavædium

Years ago, while still living in a tiny apartment in the city of Bolzano (northen Italy, on the border with Austria) I became fascinated with the sound of the building's cavaedium. The cavaedium is a tall rectangular pit-like structure usually found on the inside of a large building. It serves the purpose of bringing light and air to the rooms that would otherwise not get any. Our cavaedium was 5 stories tall and had a large roof window on top.

This track is made with recordings from this cavaedium.

The cavaedium had a very peculiar and strong sound, and worked as a resonator and amplifier for the city's noises, melding these into a constant drone, which was audible especially during the summer. When keeping the windows open, you could hear all sorts of things: music, voices and sounds from the adjacent flats, trains passing by, car noises, etc.

The cavaedium was also colouring and shaping the sound in a very specific way, through resonance and perhaps comb filtering. It created this constant drone, which you could hear all the time. Here's an unprocessed recording, to give you an idea:

This drone had a very specific and clearly audible root frequency around 150Hz.

Most of the sounds you can hear in the track, even the ones that sound like a slightly noisy synth, are actually field recordings.

This track defined my process for the whole album. Initially I only wanted to work with field recordings, but I was not very satisfied with the result, so I started to experiment with the modular, adding things here and there. I decided to make all synth sounds revolve around the fundamental frequency of the cavaedium's drone, in some parts blending the two together, making it harder to distinguish the synthetic sounds from the ones I had recorded.

I don't usually spend much time taking patch notes, but I somehow liked the idea of being able to reproduce this one live, so I did actually make some detailed notes about my patch and later cleaned them up on the computer.

Similarly to "bridge" I wanted synthetic sounds to have the same reverb quality as the recordings, so I created some custom impulse responses (by popping a balloon and recording the thus produced noise).

Here's an early recording of just the synth lines:

4. Service Room

My process here was a little different from the other tracks in that I used a simple, homebrew Puredata patch to come up with a first musical sketch. Short loops taken from the recordings were pitched down, layered and sometimes reversed. I was mainly after the implicit rhythmic quality of the sounds, which emerges in the second part of the track.

Later, I recreated this sound collage in the DAW and combined it with rhythmic patterns made using a granular processor (Mutable Instruments Clouds) and several layers of drones made on the modular synth.

The main sonic element here is the drip sounds coming from the service room. I really liked them, and due to the strong reverb, and the added resonance of the room, they were even more interesting when pitched down and/or reversed.

Like all the tracks, this one underwent several changes over the years. An initial version featured a drum part, made from the drip sounds, which later was removed. Here's an early version in which the watery sounds were a lot more present. Later, also thanks to some valuable feedback from a couple of friends and fellow musicians, I turned these sounds down a bit, moving them more towards the background.

Some of the modular sounds provide hints to the knowledgeable listener that while working on this track I was testing – a then still to be released – module from Mutable Instruments: Tides v2. I really liked the "different frequencies" output mode, which quantises the output to just intonation intervals, and I used it extensively.

As in all of these tracks, not everything that sounds like a synth really is one. Often, it's just the recording that was heavily processed and mangled. For example, the dark drone sound that can be heard from 3:20 until the end is mostly just the noise floor, from the service room itself.

4 years after making the original recording, I went back to the service room. Interestingly, I could hear completely different sounds this time. The highlight was a plane passing by, resonating in the pipes and creating this wonderful roaring drone.

5. Tank

Not far from the pool (see the video for the track "Service Room") there was an abandoned water tank. Water tanks are a bit of an obvious choice when it comes to recording foley sounds, I guess, but I liked the conceptual contrast between the water-filled pool and the unused – and hence empty – tank. I guess I am also a sucker for reverberating metal sounds.

My initial idea was to use this material for "service room", but since the sounds had very distinct identities, I later decided to make separate tracks out of it.

Most of the recordings ended up creating the rhythmic elements in the track.

Hitting the tank produced many tuned sounds (with a fundamental frequency around 134Hz), which I used to create the melodic elements in the track. Time-stretched versions of these were used to create the high-pitched drone bed. Synthesised pads, which used the same frequency or intervals derived from this frequency, were then added to further develop the track.

Field recordings taken in proximity to the tank were processed using some of the hits through convolution reverb.

6. Dome

This track is very simple in structure and came about very quickly. Not far from here, there's a contemporary/modern art museum called Mart. The structure was designed by Mario Botta and features a giant glass dome. Underneath it lies a generously spaced square which leads to the entrance of the museum itself.

I was captivated by the peculiar sound of that space. The way the structure is built makes it reverberate very strongly, but it's also completely open on one side, so sounds from the adjacent street can enter it.

It's an interesting space to close the EP, because it sits in the intersection between the inside and the outside, between the closed interior and the open exterior space.

I was there with my 2-year old son, and he kept banging a metal bottle on the floor. This sound then became the rhythmic foundation of the piece.

Due to the fact that I layered multiple copies of the same recording, the noise floor of the space became amplified, revealing some of its characteristic frequencies and resonances.

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