Culatra by Luís Fernandes + Pierce Warnecke

A Note from Pierce

The Island
In 2021, with certain pandemic measures still in place, Luis Fernandes and I were invited by the municipal theater of Faro to participate in an artistic residency on an island off the Algarve coast in Portugal. Culatra (which translates as ‘breach’) is a historic fishing island, although this activity is slowly disappearing. There are two main villages on the island, one more tourist and vacation oriented, and one more of a traditional fishing village, which is where we stayed. Between the two villages there is no road, one must either take a boat or walk through a large abandoned military zone that covered most of the island decades ago. There is an elementary school on the island, but from age 12, most of the inhabitants commute daily by boat to the mainland for work, school and even groceries.

The Recordings
Our time on the island was used to record mostly natural sounds, although there are faint hints of human activity hidden in the background. Our goal was not to focus on precise field recordings as a technical documentation, but was more about capturing an essence of the place. During our daylong walks all over the island we would stop periodically and record using sensitive omni mics (LOM micro Usi) for details, a hydrophone, and regular handheld recorders (with wind bonnets). In this sense, this project is not a field recording or acoustic ecology based endeavor. While field recordings make up 90% of the source material, we also used some modular oscillators for drone generation (but some of the drone material came from recorded boat motors). The main transformation of the material comes from simple audio effects (EQ, compression, gating and panning) which were used with extreme settings in order to pull out some of the inherent pitches, rhythms and harmonies hidden within the recordings.

The Compositions
The most striking thing about being on a flat island is the constant horizon. There is always a dividing line that cuts the visual (and to some extent the aural) field in front of you into two superimposed spaces: sky/sea, sky/land, land/sea…These contrasting milieus juxtapose sound, color, material, density, etc, and therefore made sense for us to consider the horizon as a point of departure for a means of arranging and composing the material gathered on Culatra during our residency. How could we capture these radically opposed yet coexisting spaces?How do you ‘hear’ the proximity of sand or sea on your feet, against the endlessness of the ocean or sky above? The roaring of waves with all the silence of the air above? The heat of the desert-like inlands with the coolness of the coves?

We decided to use this horizontal line as a point of departure for our compositions, by attaching different sounds (or processing of sounds) to either the space above, the space below, or the center horizon itself. For some of the pieces the approach will be quite clear: high frequency, close-miked textural foam against low rumbling filtered waves. Loud bubbling aquatic sounds compressed and gated with random cuts to silence. Some of the tracks use slow pans across the stereo field to try and draw an auditory horizon for the listener, as if they were slowly rotating their head around 360 degrees to view the entire island, changing the soundscape along with an imaginary head movement. Sometimes, we tried to fill the horizon space with a very narrowly filtered sound, as if one were looking at an island from far out in the sea only to see a sliver of brown land between two hues of blue.

This approach gave us a very illustrative and visual way of approaching composition. It’s hard to tell from our perspective if the idea has been clearly transmitted or if it is lost in translation, but the point is hopefully somehow still audible: that beyond the actual material gathered there, we would be able to hint at some of the island’s various environments by transforming visual memories into sonic forms.

Room40, a beacon of sound...ringing out from the deepest south. Also home to our sibling labels Someone Good and A Guide To Saints.

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