Emilie Mouchous & AJ Cornell - Ederlezi

EMITTERS : Andrea-Jane Cornell and Emilie Mouchous We got inspired by the women’s songs, cooking traditions, and Ederlezi-specific rituals (such as purification bathes) while gathering sound material for our environment. The whole piece was made from our very own field recordings and soundwalks, and diffused through 5 cassette tape players and 5 radio receivers. There were 5 different soundtracks for each room/part of the house (bedroom, living-room, bathroom, kitchen, terrasse), each of them being a subtle and discrete background sound that was to be experienced by moving from room to room. The system was the frame for Andrea and I to diffuse two complementary soundtracks as a mobile intervention through the house. The transmitters were so worn by us as to keep a ritualistic aspect but also to encourage more motion and involvement from the public. By multiplicating simple, contextual sound sources as well as presenting ourselves as part of an installation in a space rather than performers of a piece, we aimed to develop an sound ecosystem inspired by the intimacy of a regular 2-bedroom house and the preparation of a family ritual. Andrea-Jane : I have been making "legal" radio on the FM dial for 5 years, music programming, live performances, improvisation, sound art, mixing and mashing..... broadcasting on a frequency whose terrestrial range is a hundred mile radius. The master control / live-to-air broadcast studio is a closed space surrounded by walls and stocked with broadcasting equipment. It is a private space where radio is produced, hosted, performed. It is an invisible space that the listener does not necessarily take in to consideration. Radio-waves are sent out to the transmitter and picked up by receivers located in a wide variety of spaces and contexts that the radio producer does not necessarily take into consideration. Establishing a connection with the world outside of the studio is challenging, and it's so difficult to gauge who is listening. To what extent are they listening? Is the radio transmission background noise? Are the listeners alone? Are they mobile? What are they doing? Where are they? What kind of system are they listening on? Is the signal clear? Do they know what they are listening to? Do they care? Are they enjoying it? Are they connecting to it? Interacting with it? As a radio host in a traditional studio you sit and transmit but you do not concern yourself with more than making a smooth mix, creating an ambience, what happens once it fades from your ears is unknown. Taking radio transmission into a semi-private space of an apartment transformed into a performance venue altered the way Emilie and I, (who were broadcasting/ presenting a sound piece) interacted with the listeners/audience. The transmission piece Ederlezi is the second low watt transmission that I have been involved with, and it is always so difficult to imagine how it is going to play out. This is the first piece where we had to navigate and "perform" the diffusion in the same space as the listening audience. But rather than performing, we were diffusing the sound from room to room throughout the apartment space, creating echoes and doubling of ritualistic sounds of church oration, celebration, knives, chives, and bells, field recordings, and composed sound events. Holding the transmitters on our bodies, we ambulated around the apartment, weaving in and around the audience who walked about, and stood in place. Through the low watt transmission there was the idea of probing - the range of the transmitters, and the interactions between space, people, and sounds. Emilie : With Ederlezi we created an intimate situation that immersed people in a constantly evolving omni-directional space. At the core of the celebration was the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-inclusive event niched in the contiguity of the rooms and rooted in the personal collaboration between artists and attendees. A green-themed chromatic diner of 20 friends started the evening which also featured a projection room, performance art and concrete sounds by two lovers-from-another-life, and the sound environment that AJ and I proposed. The night felt unique and successful because we worked on creating a moment 'together' instead of presenting a succession of performances. While Ederlezi was framed inside a 35 minute timeline, its diffusion involved everybody and every sound device and object in the apartment : cassette players, radios, people, cars passing down the street, parasites, all integrated as unobtrusive contributions. We played with the nature of the different soundtracks diffused in each room (roommate singing in the shower in the bathroom, sparse and dramatic environments in the dark living-room, chimes and birds on the terrasse) and the interaction between all the sounds as people walked around the apartment. In complement to mixing fixed and mobile soundtracks, acoustic/live sounds and recorded ones, we also played with the diffusion (radios at ear level, on the ground, on a chair...). Some field recordings featured occasional traffic sounds, which resonated with the actual street noises… All of this contributed to make us feel like we were ourselves listeners. Diffusing rather than performing, it felt like we were, along with the public, two of the subjects walking around a talking space. Our choice of diffusing through systems that are usually used to listen to sounds in a private manner (alarm clocks, portable cassette players, boomboxes, kid’s dictaphones) dictated a proximity to the people that the low volume of the devices also enhanced. It was also very fun to walk around the rooms wearing the transmitters to change the sound textures picked up by the five radios