A Closer Listen
With The Weiertal EP, Martina Lussi has performed the highly unlikely feat of extracting singles from a soundwalk. The Swiss artist, known for her music, field recordings and installations, has combined all three, offering the original piece as a bonus track.
The first piece is a succinct ambient-drone nugget, featuring a growing sense of tension that builds to footsteps and breath, foreboding in nature, as if the woman breathing is being chased. The second piece, which was slightly edited, is an aggressive electronic number, which flirts with static, hum and distortion, then quickly recedes. And the third offers water and flow that recede to reveal keyboards, breath again, and the sense of being lost in a forest. Together these pieces total eight minutes, less than a third of the full work, and amazingly operate as separate animals, revealing only portions but not the whole. One recalls the blind men and the elephant, one touching the trunk, another the leg, another the tail.
The secrets are revealed in the bonus track, which we prefer to call the original track, composed for a soundwalk from the Wülflingen train station to the Zürich Biennale. We learn that the artist used microphones, hydrophones and even a broadband receiver, capturing the hidden sounds of electromagnetic fields, which we received as drone when encountering the extracts. Given such information, it becomes difficult to untangle the field recordings from the music and the “pure” audio from the enhanced, but this is part of the allure; as the liner notes invite, “slow down and tune in.” Should one follow the invitation to listen while walking, one will also incorporate new layers of sound, the environment of one’s own adventure.
“Soundwalk Weiertal Full Version” is clearly more soundscape than musical medley, although it includes all three extracts listed above. This uninterrupted piece begins with crisp water sounds, metallic noises and sub-rumble. One can hear traffic passing, effectively traveling from speaker to speaker. When the ambient undercurrents begin to develop, one wonders, “are these the sounds beneath the sounds I hear every day?” – although at one point they turn clearly musical. Because the field recordings arrive first in the full version, this section no longer seems foreboding, but magical; the breath seems more like exertion.
As birdsong proliferates, the breath slows, the heart rate lowers. A cold wind blows and the sound artist’s attention turns to electromagnetic frequencies. One imagines these as channels from wires, sparks from telephone poles, even radio waves and cell tower communications. The electronic accompaniment acts as a serenade, a counter-balance to the harsher tones. After this segment the birdsong will return, but face a different set of challenges, the most intrusive being the unnatural sound of landscapers, demanding aural attention, teaching a different lesson. In a city, there is no geophony or biophony without anthropophony. To hear children and chainsaws in proximity is to make frightening associations that can also be applied to land. Kindly, Lussi drowns the chainsaws in a waterfall as the piece ends, as if proclaiming that nature will have her way. (Richard Allen)
Fri May 16 00:01:23 GMT 2025