In 2003, Dutch director Jiska Rickels won several awards with her critically acclaimed graduation film Untertage, about an old lignite mine in Germany. This film is now part of an ambitious four-part documentary on the primordial elements. In 4 Elements, Rickels shows how man lives and works in both struggle and symbiosis with fire, water, earth and air. She follows Russian forest fire-fighters, king crab fishermen on the Bering Sea, German mineworkers, and cosmonauts, from the darkest depths of the mine to the lift that transports space travellers to their shuttle. The precise and aesthetic images tell their story without words, and are accompanied by a musical score that often seamlessly merges or is…
THE PARAPHONY LABORATORY
In This compilation we hear the overtones by the singers of the so called Paraphony Laboratory. I took part in the process of this recording and every time I hear these magical tones they bring me in great excitement.
We can hear the bouncing and collisions of fundamental tones and their amplified overtones. They float through the acoustic space, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in dissonance, but always in a gradual process.
It is in this game of consonance and dissonance that the listener and spectator is invited to witness the course of the cosmonauts from preparation towards the rocket’s launch into space itself.
The fluctuation of overtones illustrate the excitement of this path. Once the rocket expands into space the sense of gravity disappears. Apart from the scene this is intensified by the tones from the choir.
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The Paraphony Laboratory is focused on sound phenomena that have been underexposed in western traditions for a long time, and which have come out of obscurity only in recent decades. Overtones and overtone singing are the most well-known examples of this and deserve our special attention.
Our intention is to explore primal principles of sound, movement, silence, noise.
The listener her/himself plays a role of considerable importance in the music of the Paraphony Laboratory. Time, space and the consciousness of the producers and the listeners are equally important as the musical result, and continually influence one another.
The Paraphony Laboratory questions the cultural conditioning of our senses and of the mind. It explores the boundaries of generally accepted dimensions in which sound, space and movement are produced and experienced.
The Paraphony Lab consists of independent artists working with sound, image and movement. It has been initiated by ethnomusicologist and singer Mark van Tongeren as part of a practice-based research project conducted at docARTES Institute in Gand (Belgium), the University of Leiden and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (the Netherlands).