Vággi Várri – tundra soundwalk

This record has been born out of a sense of dazzlement - although the word itself has more in common with sight rather than hearing. More or less on the second day of trekking through Lapland, I heard the exact same thing I had read about several month earlier while I had been working on an article on acoustic ecology: certain sound patterns of longer duration, interweaving sequences of birdsongs, the sound of wind and raindrops. Such a discovery would not have been possible without a microphone - this way, one listens by way of a technological intermediary which does not necessary entail a digital interference in the source material; rather, it involves a specific configuration of space, equipment and people. A stream has a different sound when we use a stone as an amplifier and a sound effect at the same time; the same spot sounds entirely different depending on whether the recording is made in the 4-channel surround system, the narrow-band directionally oriented technology or a wide-band; what matters is the placement of the microphone and the movement. Anyone who has ever tried to record environment sounds is familiar with these things. To me however, this practice has initially become an attempt to capture the sound landscape and later a form of communication with the surroundings, which is often commented by Barry Truax, the author of the concept of acoustic communication, inspired by the approaches typical of the Toronto school and R. Murray Schaffer. When you are camping out in a tent and spending ten days out in the open air, in an entirely natural sound landscape - one of the rarest luxuries on the Earth of today - you become a part of it yourself. Several days without any sounds of electric engines, without any electrosmog or masking tones and you are slowly beginning to notice and feel the different architecture of the audiosphere. You become more adept at distinguishing the signs of a language in which we could communicate with the surroundings had only we had the conditions and readiness to listen carefully.

There has been no interference with the material presented in these recordings, with the exception of whatever has been done during the making of them - in a way, this record has been composed by events and sequences happening on the site. One could perhaps write down in a form of notation or a pattern the successive flights of insects and the moment when they would sit on the microphone, still, they can be neither expected nor planned. It is, therefore - as it is usually the case with our projects - one more aspect of improvisation/meditation. Such an idea affected other decisions which influenced the character of the record - sound extracts are not ‘cleaned' ; I did not want to pretend that I had not been there at all. The recording is never just the recording; it is always an action in which revealed were both the sound landscape as well as the person and the randomness of conditions which listeners may perceive as ‘dirt', a technical error or contamination. I did not want an aseptic recording of the sound landscape of the Sápmi land, I wanted to evoke a particular experience of a complete immersion if the space. That audiosphere is saturated with the element of water, as we have been able to hear from the very beginning. The polyrhythmic structures of raindrops of varying intensity, the complex harmonies of numerous brooks and streams we crossed, the persistence of the song of the common redshank - all this carries a landslide of information the full meaning of which will perhaps remain elusive to us forever, since communication always entails such a potential of contamination, redundancy and excess. After ten days in the tundra I have learned to listen without thinking about what I would eventually hear/grasp/understand. Without waiting for the ultimate result, a closed shape or form. Vággi Várri (two words in the Saam language which mean, respectively, the Mountain and the Valley - that is the two ways of our being on the route) is a full of acceptance, complete immersion in the space and a slightly diverse physicality/materiality of the sound landscape, based on fluidity and surfacing.
Anna Nacher, Kraków, Winter Solstice.