Additional Information
Founder of the Center for Immersive Media Art, Music, and Technology (ZiMMT—the German equivalent of our SAT) in Leipzig, Felix Deufel is a sound artist and acoustic ecologist with a particular interest in environmental issues and the impact of human activities on the biosphere.
For the work presented on Thursday, October 22, at Akousma, Lost in Liquid Noise, he traveled to Greenland twice to make field recordings, which were then organized into a striking suite that immerses the listener in a unique soundscape of unheard-of richness.
On the eve of his performance at Usine C, Felix kindly agreed to answer a few of our questions in writing.
Genres and styles: experimental / field recordings / soundscapes
PAN M 360 : How did your fascination for the Arctic start?
Felix Deufel : I’m fascinated by mountains and glaciers since my childhood, as we went a lot in the Alps in Germany, where my family comes from. I was in Iceland for field recordings of melting processes and on different glaciers in Europe. The Arctic and especially Greenland is in many ways very fascinating for me, the geopolitical dimension, the uncertainty about what’s under the ice and then a lot of scientific practices on how the ice stems and different movements of the ice shield are observed, as well as the crazy historical data and the time travels which can be made though ice core analysis.
But what finally inspired me to do the expeditions there, was when I read an article that said that Greenland loses 600 million tons of ice everyday. This was an info I could not process and I had no idea how to imagine this fact. Very often this happens with crucial and very heavy scientific facts on climate change and different topics that are very hard to conceive. And that’s what drove me initially to the Artic trips, from which my composition Lost in Liquid Noise was created.
PAN M 360 : What were your first impressions of the Arctic when you first got there?
Felix Deufel : I was very excited and a bit nervous before the upcoming days, as I went with a good friend of mine, and it was only the two of us in the first expedition. It was a big coincidence that we were able to meet directly three scientists from different teams which I was in contact with before the trip to exchange and learn how to plan it. They were all closing down their camps exactly that day and were all in the same town. That was super nice and they supported us so great with equipment and also with information and routes.
The second trip was on the frozen sea and this was something very crazy special! The very first night out on the ice we had the most crazy whale concert and so many unexpected and undefended sounds underwater I ever heard and I couldn’t imagine and didn’t expect this at all.
PAN M 360 : What are the difficulties inherent to recording sound in such an environment?
Felix Deufel : Temperature is of course an issue for the batteries. Other than that I had already some experience from different field recording trips in the cold and I have my equipment which I know works under those conditions.
Then its the beauty of these trips, which I love, that you’re out in an overwhelming nature, do long hikes and set up the microphones, hydrophones, geophones and the different sensors and explore what they capture live for a bit, but then leave the equipment there so we don’t disturb the recordings and capture longer periods, of day and night for example. In the end you just need to find your equipment again. 🙂
PAN M 360 : How did you compose/assemble all the sounds that you had gathered into Lost in Liquid Noise?
Felix Deufel : In Lost in Liquid Noise I use sounds from this expeditions, which were captured with all kinds of different sensors and mics, as I mentioned. I had a dramaturgy in mind, a travel into a glacier mill and under the ice shield into the ocean, under the frozen sea, as a travel I was imagining, while exploring different places there.
I’m using the sounds as they are, I don’t do any major modification, except filtering, so I isolate certain sounds or cut certain frequencies from a recording and I transpose very deep sounds into a frequency range where they can be reproduced by subwoofers or transducers.
What we are listening to is a composition where I use layering those recordings to represent how I felt and what I experienced there. I also created an audiovisual version of the piece in collaboration with Lucas Gutierrez, where we used all the photographs and videos I took on those fieldtrips to create a world of textures and sculptures and landscapes. The audiovisual work is now about to be released as fulsome format for dome projection and 360 degree projection version, and we’re also working on an VR version.
PAN M 360 : What were your goals in creating that piece?
Felix Deufel : There is no specific goal but my approach in general with the installations and listening experiences I create and what I experience from presenting those formats is that natural soundscapes have a very strong effect on the visitors. It can be calming, perception of time changes and people can switch off. That’s what I experience myself on my fieldtrips and what the environments and soundscapes are doing to me, and I try to convey this into the pieces I create.
