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V - Pareidolia, or of the dreamt gardens - 14:06 (2014) *
8 channels piece composed in a residency at Miso Music's LEC between October 2013 and January 2014. premiered at the Música Viva 2014 Festival selected and presented at MUSLAB 2015 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and at the 41st I.C.M.C. - International Computer Music Conference 2015, in Denton,Texas | U.S.A. * [stereo reduction]
V - Pareidolia, or of the dreamt gardens - synopsis
Dedicated to Bernard Parmegiani
1 – Intro (falling asleep) 00:00 to 02:47
2 – Alektorophobia (despair) 02:48 to 04:53
3 – Exterior-Hortus (action-will) 04:54 to 7:12
4 – Interior-Hortus (tension) 07:13 to 09:33
5 – Trans-Hortus (distension-release) 09:34 to 14:06
Pareidolia (from the Greek, [παρά] – that which is alongside, or instead of; and Eidolon [εἴδωλον] - figure, image) denotes the psychological phenomenon of involuntary nature in which the subject assigns meaning to random sound and/or visual stimuli, which do not hold, in themselves, any significance (e.g.: interpreting figures in the clouds or other objects [man-made or natural origin]; to see anthropomorphic forms where there are none).
The experience of Pareidolia happens during wakefulness but it is in the sleep state and, in particular, during the act of dreaming, which reveals its most problematic dimensions. During the dream, the "misleading" character of the pareidolia may have unusual meanings, allowing polysemous interpretations, often experienced more emotionally than mentally, more trans-rationally than rationally. Hence, significant cleavages burst between the represented sound images and its potential or virtual meanings. At stake here is the mystery of the border between the real and the imaginal planes, between meanings that can participate and / or pervade both levels, implying contradictions of ontological nature. The conceptual purpose of this piece is to musically narrate a series of recurring dreams that illustrate the search for meaning, portrayed through an erratic wandering through an enigmatic garden (Hortus), a place with no defined borders, an utopian garden where the physical laws of the world which we inhabit do not verify, resulting thus more of in a psychic-sonic garden (full of potential pareidolias) than an actual garden. Used sounds include field recordings from the soundscape’s biophony, geophony and anthrophony (eg.: wind, water, earth, leaves, twigs and other natural origin debris, a lawn mower, the sweeping of the garden, the clucking of chickens and, finally, dozens of Christmas music boxes exposed a Christmas fair in Vienna, Austria). The piece is divided into 5 parts, corresponding to contrasting approaches of the contained pareidolias within the recurring dreams (see titles above for more information).
Between appearance and apprehension, aesthetic experience and its significant implications are situated these sonic Pareidolias.
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Pareidolia, or of the dreamt gardens is part of Esofonia, which is an anthology of acousmatic pieces that illustrates part of the musical journey of João Castro Pinto (from 1999 to 2017), released by MISO RECORDS, on October 7th 2017.
Although they are referred to as acousmatic, the works that appear here are, more precisely, of a hybrid nature, i.e., they vary drastically, in terms of quantity and quality, between the maximally acousmatic and the totally referential.
More info @ https://www.misomusic.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=597:novos-lancamentos-miso-records&catid=70&Itemid=665&lang=en&iframe=1