Foldable Sounds

Featured on Soho Radio, NTS, Netil Radio , Balamii and Monthly residents on Narr Radio and Resonance Extra

Selected artists for SHAPE Platform 2021 Cohort

Foldable Sounds Collective formed during the lockdown of April 2020 - initiated by Daniela Maria Geraci, and co-curated by Isabelle Pead and Lucy Cunningham. Following the rise of Zoom calls and Facetime windows, once a less prevalent means of communication, three artists in Berlin, Leeds and London began considering how one's own daily sound might feel isolating.

But, when woven into tracks with other’s recordings, these sounds gained the potential to sonically transport the imagination outside one’s four walls, drawing on a global need for freedom of movement. These sounds became tracks, and the tracks into archives of the times.

Foldable Sounds draws on the simultaneously collaborative and independent nature of the child’s drawing game Exquisite Corpse. Placed into groups participants shared sounds, layering and editing the groups recordings together to form a track. The project has so far invited 116 participants to listen to and record site-specific sounds and audible gestures within their inhabited spaces - sonically and verbally. Used as material, one sound/sentence is folded into the next to create a series of interwoven tracks/paragraphs documenting their time and location of making, according to the instructions:

4 people per track, maximum 4 minutes of recording, 2 days to pass it on.

Once grouped each participant was ordered 1-4 and placed into a collaborative email chain.

Every ‘track’ was a product of 4 strangers digitally sharing, mixing, distorting and layering spatiotemporally unique soundscapes; interrogating the psyches of contributors as they curated each recording, and ultimately questioning how the exposure to varied soundscapes could change our experiences of a seemingly impermeable quarantine. The collective process, the tracks themselves and a sense of collective intense listening felt like an active resistance to a time when solitude was legally forced.

Participants: Alexey Kokhanov (Opera singer, Russia/Berlin), Daniela Maria Geraci (Artist, Berlin), Charlie Tilley (Drum and Bass producer, Leeds), Jerome Sklorz (Electronic music producer, Hamburg/Berlin)

Foldable Sounds Round 1 Group 5 was created using the monotonous and consistently present sound of the dishwasher weaving in and out of the track while literally everything else stood uncharacteristically still over lockdown in Berlin. Its dizzying low frequency persistent, that gyrating moan reminded me of some dismal, grey, lacklustre fairground ride - a cyclical one that made you feel sick and that for some reason you'd decided to get on in the rain. Pretty much what lockdown felt like at the time.

Giro giro tondo is a children's song sharing the same tune as ring-a ring-a rosies in Italian. The verse 'casca la terra, tutti giù per terra' means the world is falling, everyone falls to the floor. Seemed apt.

Participants: Elena Lo Presti (Artist, Rome/London), Daniela Maria Geraci (Artist, Berlin), Ollie Getley (Artist, Leeds/London)

- Hi, i'm calling with regards to my insurance because I'm no longer employed
- Yeah, er

- mietti sali, pipi - chiddu ca ha (put salt, pepper - whatever you've got)

Foldable sounds Round 2 Group 10 was created with a mixture of voices and conversations that both gave me strength and degraded me. My grandmother giving me recipes for a traditional Sicilian dish (m'banati) in dialect over the phone, Nina Simone - 'Power' being played on a Berlin bridge on May 1st (international day of the worker) and a conversation with my health insurance informing them of my recent disoccupation due to the pandemic. The electronic drop sounds were those of the remains of a storm trickling into the gutter on my tiny balcony - they sounded so obnoxiously loud to me at the time.

Other sounds in this track by other contributors include brushing teeth and digging a big hole.

Daniela Maria Geraci (Artist, Berlin), Natalia Franklin Pierce (Label producer), Madalena Pequito (Artist, Lisbon), Jenny Handley (Artist, Leeds)

~Hark Back~
verb.
intransitive verb. 1 : to turn back to an earlier topic or circumstance. 2 : to go back to something as an origin or source.

Foldable Sounds Round 3 Group 7 was created with an excerpt of a conversation with my father about his childhood trips to 'u shoppitieddu' - a 'sicilianisation' of the word 'shop'. This was the name given by my grandmother to a very specific corner shop, for which he'd occasionally be given a penny for a sweet by his father, both Sicilian immigrants from the 50's. Lockdown for many was a time of remembrance of things past. Perhaps a chance to idealise memories of normalcy or simplicity, even if the reality was that a penny was luxurious spending. A migrant family in the midst of a migrant area of london, 'sicilianising' english words for the sake of feeling at home? or for want of assimilation? but a sweet can feel like Christmas in any language.

Full albums on Bandcamp.

100% of proceeds from all albums continue to go towards charities including Minnesota Freedom Fund, UK Black Pride, Women Asylum Seekers Together, The UN Refugee Agency, MAWFWA Theatre and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People).

@foldablesounds_collective

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