Otto Willberg

https://ottowillberg.bandcamp.com

Otto WillbergResponsible low-end solutionsBarbaric Mystical Bored, released 02 March 20221. one2. two3. three4. four5. five6. six7. sevenA bootlegged record of a space and its echoes. Recorded on Grain Tower Battery, a Victorian fort on the Isle of Hoo only accessible at low tide which has led a life of repurposing and eventually decay. By the time it was completed in 1855, the original purpose and technology was outdated, and it has never really been in proper use since. A mysterious fate. The base material for the music was made from reverberations of spaces in the tower in a feedback loop, which was then re amplified back into the building, in a sense amplifying what was already there. Accompanying the record are two videos by Mio Ebisu, which can be seen here:https://vimeo.com/523737810https://vimeo.com/522052130Also a website called www.bootlegspatialrecall.net which is a open archive of impulse responses from public and common space."In the mid-19th century, fears of a French invasion by way of the River Thames motivated the construction of Grain Tower, an artillery fort on the Hoo peninsula in Kent. However, by the time the tower was completed, the guns which were installed had been rendered obsolete. It was half-heartedly repurposed in various ways until the 1950s, but is now a modern day ruin, only accessible at low tide. At the end of 2020, during the brief respite between pandemic waves, London based musician and composer Otto Willberg made recordings of Grain Tower’s acoustics, which he proceeded to process through a feedback system in order to create a series of concrete pieces. He then recorded the playback of these pieces in the building to create Barbaric Mystical Bored. The results are a far cry from an Alvin Lucier-esque conceptual exercise. Rather than a wall of indeterminate echo Barbaric Mystical Bored bears a distinct sense of place. Even when the concrete pieces stray close to ambient music, with almost melodic overtones, or when Willberg reveals his hand ore directly with stop-start manoeuvres, the swells of soaking reverb distinctly rebound from the walls of the tower and are intermittently accompanied by, among other things, footsteps, vocal croaks, indeterminate chatter, singing, the metallic burr of digital signals, and the distant sound of music.The fact that the listener experiences this hauntologically, through a thick fug, seems fitting. Grain Tower was built as a vantage point from which to unleash firepower, and this record is infused with the sense that it could erupt. But it never does. The entire run time is coloured by a coiled sense of restraint, as if we are hearing the efforts of a psyche to repress a lifetime of memories. "Daniel Neofetou, The Wire 2022This recording was part of Otto's project supported by Sound and Music's New Voices program 2019-2020.

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Country: United Kingdom (GB)

Currency : GBP

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Platform: Bandcamp

Technologies used: Fastly CDN

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