CD - Gruenrekorder
Eisuke Yanagisawa, an audio-artist interested in field recordings and researching ethnographic matrices (the latter also explored through interesting cinematic experiments), has been studying the linguistic and cultural characteristics of rural Vietnamese since 2006. The results of these studies have helped create an ethnographic movie about gong culture and three experimental films about specific acoustic environments in Kyoto. "Ultrasonic Scapes" is basically a documentary investigation, but it is oriented towards the universe of the non-audible; the sounds beyond the range of human hearing, the frequencies that the human ear barely perceives and cannot process. The intense sounds that we can hear in the ten recordings - hums of cicadas, machinic drones, beating bat wings, field recordings in the street - have been captured and converted in real time with a bat detector, a device that converts ultrasonic signals into audible sounds. The sounds are intense and continuous demonstrations of perception, even though they are translations of the original data, transcending any specific natural or inorganic origin. None of the tracks have been processed in any way (excluding small amplification of volume). The recording is presented in a very nicely designed metal case.
Aurelio Cianciotta