Description:
Connect the ride with the elements and life forces in flux.
Recirculate blood and oxygen, exchanging at pulsed speeds.
Moving in alignment, your kinetic mindfulness.
Building a new body of steel and wind.
Riding was born upstream in January 2011, at the SCANZ residency in New Zealand. Artists, scientists, Maori scholars and water people gathered together to exchange and actualize their views and ideas about the re-imagining of relationships with nature. Stéphane Claude, along with Gisèle Trudel stayed in a traditional long house at Waitara Marae for 3 days. Here they began a 2 week research and creation residency, meeting amazing people and co-creating new contexts for artistic practices. The residency culminated for them in a one night performance at the Fernery House 1 of the Pukekura Park botanical gardens. They performed during the evening, in the dark, with a multi-speakers arrangement (studio monitors, battery operated speakers) and video projected onto the fern’s room.
Riding is comprised of field recordings, synthesizer sequences and binaural beating oscillating sine waves gathered in an uninterrupted ride. Sparse processing was done to the original field recordings: volume movements, EQ and soundfield manipulations. The recordings were collected in a trance-like posture, when listening becomes the musical unfolding of a conversation between phenomena. Blending, giving and opening up to transduction, physically.
www.intercreate.org
Reviews:
This agreeable and varied collection of four soundscapes, combines field recordings, drone and wistful synth loops, emerged from two weeks in New Zealand exploring relationships to the natural world with Maori scholars. Ælab’s Stéphane Claude (electroacoustic composer) and Gisèle Trudel (multimedia artist) have been using electronic music to investigate the intersection of human agency and natural ecologies since 1996. Each piece on Riding conjures a strong sense of place, whether it be on misty hillsides and oceans on in the humming crawlspaces of modern metal boxes. The opening of the title track is barely there for an entire minute, slowly giving way to gentle wind and rain, followed by stone-circle synths. “Force Tranquille” takes us on an endoscopic journey through refrigeration technology; “Whale Tail” offers an essay in the movement of water through almost imaginary drones; and ‘Steel Spaces” is comprised of subtle metallic reverberation.
– The Wire
Riding presents four electro-acoustic sound art portraits by Ælab duo Stéphane Claude and Gisèle Trudel in a limited-edition CD-R release of 200 copies. Ælab was born in 1996 as an art research unit involving Claude and Trudel, with room allowed for the participation of other collaborators and the group’s focus on the complicated relations between technology and ecology. This particular recording came into being as a result of a 2011 two-week research-and-creation residency in New Zealand that found the pair interacting with artists and scientists and pondering humanity’s relationships with nature. The residency not only culminated in the performance Ælab gave at the Pukekura Park botanical gardens but also allowed for the creation of an oft trance-inducing, thirty-nine-minute recording assembled from field recordings, synthesizer, and oscillating sine waves.
Characteristic of Riding, the title track is a seamless interweave that merges multiple strands into a soothing whole. Threaded together, the setting sees the balance shift between three primary elements: gentle streams of natural outdoor sounds (flowing water, faint bird chirps), the industrial thrum of human-created phenomena, and the melodic presence of a synthesizer motif. Unspooling at a low-level pitch suggestive of a sleep state, “Force Tranquille” exhales softly, its field recording elements almost buried under an industrial drone and the whole resembling the amplified sound of a breathing apparatus connected to an unconscious patient in a hospital bed. In keeping with the “Whale Tail” title, loud water splashes appear during the seventeen-minute piece, with the abrupt punctuations generated by the creatures’ aggressive movements augmented by another simple synthesizer pattern and a reverberant backdrop of seaside field elements (water, wind, bird calls), the material rather like something Scanner might produce. “Steel Spaces” inhabits a more internal meditative space in its echo-drenched bell strikes and tinklings. Time seems to stand still when its time-stretched sounds bleed into nothingness, leaving behind nothing more than the quiet ebb and flow of a single droning tone that ever-so-slowly dies out. Clearly, close listening is necessary if one wishes to reap the maximum benefit from Ælab’s fine-detailed settings. Ideally, Riding would be played at a loud volume in a surround-sound presentation in order for it to be experienced in its most fully immersive form.
– Textura
This is the final release of this version of Dragon’s Eye Recordings – Yann Novak has announced that he will suspend further new releases indefinitely as he focuses on his own artistic output in L.A. and Seattle. As such, Ælab’s Riding is an appropriately reflective final outing (though it’s not strictly final for the label). Ælab mostly consists of sound artist and engineer Stéphane Claude, joined at this juncture by Gisèle Trudel at an ambitious art residency in New Zealand. This recording was made from a one-night installation, played in the dark in a botanical garden to cap the residency. The rhetoric here links the physical act of making a field recording – observing the environment, shedding expectations, being still and quiet – with meditation on one’s relationship with nature.
These are made up mostly of serene, lightly processed field recordings, beating sine wave oscillations, and simple synth lines. The field recordings move seamlessly and beautifully between zones, and the almost-nothingness of the sine waves on “Steel Spaces” is extraordinary. But the timbre of the synth at the beginning of “Whale Tail” is puzzling and initially distracting for me – rather ‘80s, to put it crudely. Through repetition, the synth attempts to dissolve into the rest of the environment, but its imposition only reminds us of the sad thought that humans by nature aren’t fully able to do this. I wonder if Claude and Trudel would disagree based on their experience.
– Foxy Digitalis
I was already familiar with ÆLAB(alias of the electronic acoustic sound composer Stéphane Claude) walking into this and having always been impressed with the depth of the work, knew I was going to like this. I try my best not to read too much into the scientific processes behind an album before the initial listening, as it feels like I’m skipping to the last chapter of a mystery novel without first consuming the body of work. ÆLAB’s latest release titled RIDING(de5037) on Yann Novak’s Dragon’s Eye Recordings label, merges a sophisticated collage of field recordings with repetitive, deep synthetics to create a work that is challenging, yet somewhat accessible to someone that is only moderately initiated into experimental sound sculptures. Your ears will have no trouble deciphering the multiple uses of water throughout the tracks, most notably on track 3 “Whale Tail.” Once the listener allows themselves to be truly absorbed without distraction, you realize how well the album is mapped out as a whole. By the time I made it well into the third of the album I suddenly became aware just how immersed I was in the environment. At no time does any of the synthetic elements pull me away from my center of audible gravity. If you are the least bit interested in purchasing this I would suggest you do so without hesitating. Certain DER releases tend sell out within weeks, and this definitely has the potential to be one of them.
– [sound] localization report
Ælab was founded in 1996 by Stéphane Claude an electroacoustic composer and sound engineer and Gisèle Trudel, media artist. Both live and work in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
‘Riding’ contains four tracks of 39 minutes long and consists of a trip the pair made to New Zealand where they investigate the relation between the natural world with Maori students. This work is based on the duo’s interest to study human agency and ecology.
The music combined field recordings: bird songs, water streams, drones, oscillating tones and synth loops. These produce a mysterious soundscape while nature provides sounds that reveal a real world and less enigmatic.
– Loop
