Glinca - Tament

A Closer Listen

Tament is a personal translation, an audio diary of sounds created and heard.  Glinca calls it “the audio of the everyday.”  The timbre is warm and welcoming: the tenderness of thumb piano, music box and chime set against the click-clack of rail lines and the blur of unfocused conversation.  One walks through this life as if it is a dream, or as the cover photo suggests, the memory of a life.  On “Swoq,” one hears what seems to be a modified clock.  The gorgeous Fluid Audio packet includes survey maps, slides, prints and photos, travel tickets and reel-to-reel snippets.  The combination of material objects and collected sounds creates a hazy glow, suggesting that the pleasant feelings of the past can be recreated, or at least re-experienced, in the present.

“Miasm” expands on the intimations of time by integrating the chimes of a grandfather clock, modified and looped, as if time has come unmoored from its axis, and the mind, rather than the clock, is in control.  As the tempo speeds and then slows in the subsequent piece, one thinks of the ways in which time is experienced differently in varying situations.  Repeated sounds – the “audio of the everyday” – are no longer connected to specific days, but to all days, or to the breadth of a single human life.  When one lives near the train, one no longer hears the train, but the train still makes a sound.  Birdsong is noticed most when the birds reappear at the end of migration or the beginning of a day.

The intimations of work in “Clairpoor” – a light, shoveling sound that may be as innocuous as a scooper in coffee beans – serve as a reminder that even work gets integrated into the rhythm of a life.  Days blend together; only events stand out.  Glinca highlights the value of everyday sounds that form a sonic fabric: “These are the sounds that often fade into the background, yet they form the soundtrack of my existence.”  Highlighting “the sounds that normally slip past us,” the artist invites his listeners to appreciate their own audio environments, however humble: not just the waterfall, but the sink, not only the words of a conversation, but the simple beauty of a human voice.  The meditative chimes of the closing piece suggest a holy space in which the everyday becomes the divine.  (Richard Allen)