Alma Laprida - Pitch Dark and Trembling

A Closer Listen

Excitement can be felt as an uncanny event. Excitement is a form of expanding the bodily self beyond its own limits. Excitement becomes vibration and thrill through space. Argentinian Improviser Alma Laprida’s latest work titled Pitch Dark and Trembling experiments with the limits of excitement as a purely vibrational event where sound occupies space on multiple levels and often in a confrontational manner. 

Set up as a fully improvised experiment, the work places at the center of its action a rare instrument of medieval origins, the Tromba Marina and excites it through a network of devices (subwoofers, exciters inside containers), susceptible to vibration and low frequencies, emulating the feel and discomfort of naturally driven vibrational events such as earthquakes, thunders and passing trains.

The space that the work creates is an uneasy one and yet it elicits a quite detailed choreography of the event itself. Τhrough listening to the album it becomes clear that what we hear is not a staged or pre-recorded event. In “Trust Me” for instance we hear Alma’s fingers as they glide through the strings of the tromba marina. This environment of improvised suspense and excitement guides us throughout the album and we listen transparently to the interfacing between the artist’s actions and how they affect and are excited through the space, its cavities, objects and depth. In pieces like “Trembling”  and “Vibra” we hear the space through the vibrational excitements of the instrument and its connected devices. The opening piece titled “The Thick Event” demonstrates the physical properties of Laprida’s experiment as the sounds flow and build-up through the environment they gradually envelop and engulf. 

More than a listening experience, Pitch Dark and Trembling becomes an observatory of how improvisation can be come a balancing act between a perhaps fixed idea of how an instrument or technology may or can work and its dynamic and unforeseen metamorphosis through the vibrational spell that sound casts on space, time, matter and everything in between. (Maria Papadomanolaki)