These recordings are a result of a sound performance in public space by Michael Akstaller, Simone Körner and Alexandru Șalariu in 2019. We visited an ancient cellar vault in Cividale del Friuli in Italy. Historians believe that shamanic rituals were held in these cellars because of the resonance of the vaults. We resonated this special place with a feedback technique inspired by Alvin Lucier. Everyone of us chose an impulse sound to activate a resonance feedback loop resulting in a ten minute long, room filling resonance drone. The recordings are recommended to be listened through headphones in a meditative manner. You can also read some text below describing our journey and some thoughts and feelings while listening.

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Text by Simone:

You saw a specific site on the internet: Under the earth, beneath the surface there is a cavern system, shaped by human hands in a past I can’t even imagine. We talk about it, getting excited about human hands shaping places and materials and sounds and life.

What lifes produced this shape of a cavern which gives a deep frequency resonance? I think about how I for sure, can never feel how this place felt, because my life is shaped by capitalism and my subjectivity works under the categories of modernity. But we are not just I. We are he, you and me. We could also be her, me and you. Anyways we want to know how our lifes, also shaped by digital technologies and materials like cold glass on our smartphone screens, feel in that cavern which seems to be a carrier bag of stories we are not able to think. So, we find our ways through the tiny city, open the door of a house for which we got a key in a museum for ancient cultural stuff and art. Feeling kind of obscure with our microphone and battery speaker and interface and laptop, discussing if this is now a very aggressive mode of appropriation of a specific site, which is not ours, and of a specific technique which was rather that of Alvin Lucier.

Are we rather penetrating the cavern with our modes of action, or does the resonance of it, filtered through our technologies seep into our bodies, deform our souls that we don’t even quite believe in?
How long are the echoes of the past and how long are ours going to be?
How can we activate a conscious listening for other stories than ours?

We are very late. Three hours until we have to return the key. We go down the stairs, entering a womblike, moisty system. The walls are covered with a braid, which reflects blueish white from our headlamps. Symbolic death as faces is carved in the walls, embayment and ordering structures. The technology we are working with is quite simple. An impulse sound (e.g., clapping the hands) is recorded and directly played by the battery speaker and recorded again and played again and so on. Impulse becomes more and more resonance, alienated by materiality. Every little shape and form of the cave becomes its very own resonance You are recording this very different resonances, he is measuring frequencies, I am photographing with a pinhole camera and filming with a smartphone. Technologies become bodily tools to set us in an environment. I do not feel connected to human past in and off itself, but I feel very connected to my body, which becomes an echo chamber by its own. Doing movements, I don’t think about.

Body and I are mediate facts contained in resonance.

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Text by Alexandru:

Having read about ancient resonance chambers, I started to research. The beamer threw the internet on the wall showing Italian archeologists doing a bad presentation of their work in a hypogeum in North Italy. It felt like a digital treasure having barely a hundred views. They praised the sound and theorized of an ancient mother cult that might have practiced their spiritual ceremonies in the cellars with shamanic drums amped up by the deep bass resonance of the stony architecture. it showed only a few pictures and sounds from inside the cavern so it was left to our imagination to tell us what awaits us there.

I went there with my fresh love and an older one. Coming from the mountains, where we stuck for too long, we barely had time. We got the key to the hypogeum in a monastery that also was a museum, looking ridiculous with our backpack akku speaker and microphones in between the old stuff that was showcased there. But that was just the beginning of absurdness. when we finally came to the cavern it was a very strange feeling to carry all that high tech gear into a cellar with hand carved walls. We were intruders of our times and states of minds.

First, we tried to activate the vaults with our voices, singing and shouting, trying to hit the room resonances. A skill we did not possess. When we succeeded, it gave the voice a powerful reverberation. Then we used our gear. I was really inspired by a technique of Alvin Lucier and asked my friend to build a digital machine that used that technique slightly modified and automated. My other friend started filming us and taking photos. The technique is a kind of controlled feedback. Every one of us made a sound impulse which was send through the cavern again and again. With each cycle the room resonances started to come out more and more, washing out the original impulse, leading to a space filling drone.

It felt like being in the belly of a giant organic instrument. It was quite the bodily experience. Sound swept through us, forces were pulling and pushing. I fell into a trancelike state unable to stop moving and discovering the different tones of the architecture’s multiple chambers and cavities, each having a different resonance frequency. Now and then some Italians came down to us giving us a weird look.One was rather angry and wanted to know if we had a permission to sonify this ancient place.

For me it was the only right way to acquire a feeling for this place.

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RIP Alvin Lucier