Composition, 2013
Angélica Castelló
With “sonic blue”, the musician Angelica Castello creates her own imaginary underwater world that immerses the audience into the great sea of sound, a composition woven by accoustic material collected in fieldrecordings and sounds produced by her subgreatbass recorder, Castelló’s main instrument. The composition process of this piece is an examination of the profound in yet another respect, for to Angélica Castelló the sea also symbolizes the subconscious.
The field recordings for Sonic Blue were collected in the waters around the Lofoten islands. They were made possible by a cooperation of Angelica Castello, Susanna Niedermayr (co-curator musikprotokoll Graz) and the biologist and bioacoustics researcher Heike Vester, who founded the organization Ocean Sounds in a fishing village named Henningsvær in 2005.
Under the Banner of Environmental Protection Ocean Sounds is dedicated to the research of marine mammals and the protection of the marine environment. At the mouth of Vestfjord the oil industry continues to expand. During seismic surveys undertaken to find new oil and gas fields, underwater detonations of compressed air create shockwaves. The vibrations that are reflected back provide information to map the location, density, shape and composition of the rock layers, but they are also a massive intervention in the natural soundworld of aquatic life.