Hellsö by Charles Harding released on Patient Records
Happy new sounds day TO ME!! I'm proud to share some etudes (released through Patient Records) from a little island in the Baltic Sea called Kökar! It's a solo sonic memory collage reflecting on my time spent at a sound art residency in October with Trajectories! The entire length is 21 minutes, meant to represent the 21 days that we spent there!
This collection of compositions called Hellsö is a solo reflection on select key moments from my time at the Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence on the island of Kökar, Åland, Finland in October 2023, with two fellow collaborators from Trajectories, a group of electroacoustic composers based in Montréal. The collection’s title of Hellsö, refers to the place that I was living throughout the three weeks I spent on the island, serving as my point of reference while becoming familiar with the geography, history, community, and sensory experience of the place. These pieces of music reflect on three particular areas of Kökar, a mythical island called Källskär that was pushed up during the ice age, a sheep pen housed among residential ruins of franciscan monks from the 1600s, and the wind-weathered top of a rocky hill in Hellsö looking north-west into the Baltic Sea.
At their core, these pieces are built upon pipe-organ improvisations performed and recorded at the Kökar museum, a place adorned with many objects, photos and texts displaying the island community’s recent history and traditions. The organ itself was like an old sea beast, hissing air into its pipes, a song of deep weathering, a witness to time and many performers, all submerged in the curated memory of Kökar. The improvisations were subsequently altered and processed, then positioned among field recordings from the respective locations featured in these works. Following my return to home on the east coast of Canada I began to construct synth textures to represent my emotional memory of the space, as if to map the essence of my personal experience and put it on display like a little museum of my own.
The sonic textures of these pieces are meant to reflect upon and highlight the reverent vulnerability of the humans and nature that occupy this collection of rocks in the middle of the sea. Throughout its settled history the island has seen many cycles of abundance and scarcity connected to the amount of energy it takes to sustain human populations. Through connecting with the current community of Kökar I was privileged to learn about their commitments to sustainability and ecological awareness, taking many actions to reduce impact and extractive methods of living. I felt especially inspired to highlight wind in these compositions as the majority of the island’s energy is sustained by wind power. The piece titled Hellsö is referencing a record windstorm that occurred while we were staying on the island. It was quite vicious and arrived without much warning. During high winds such as these, at the peak sustained around 106 km/h, the wind turbines are disabled to reduce the risk of damage. During these periods energy is not collected. Witnessing this storm left me with reinforced lessons about the power of climate and its impact on all things.
released January 26, 2024
Composed, mixed, and mastered by Charles Harding.
Thanks to Trajectories members Malte Leander and Connor Cook for helping record the pipe-organ improvisations and for the use of field recordings collected on Kökar throughout Oct. 2023.
Thank you to the Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence and to Kökar Hembygdsmuseum.
I would like to thank and acknowledge the support of SOCAN Foundation for helping to make this project possible.
Artwork by Charles Harding, original photo sourced from Kökar Hembygdsmuseum.
Watch this video of a live performance of the piece Hellsö recorded live on Kökar last October! This structured improv performance formed the basis of for the development of the whole EP.
Patient Records
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