Original work by Jorge Haro
C-NOISE [radial]
This is an extract. The full piece is 7'57".
This composition employs field recordings from Olula del Río, a small town where the artist’s grandfather lived in Andalusia, Spain, studio recordings of an Almirez (a metal mortar and pestle also used in that region as a musical instrument), and digital synthesis.
At the entrance to the village is an enormous circular saw which is used to quarry limestone and marble. When struck by the artist, it sounds like gong, clanging metal, harbinger of its own potential which Haro extracts from its function, reaffirming its place within the village community as part of the soundscape. Juxtaposed with the noise of children playing in the street and the sound of the almirez, the work came naturally, composed, as the artist puts it, ‘in a kind of narcotic and chaotic state where the process is not completely conscious or rational but part of the magma that is inherent in creation.’
Haro's work, while inherently personal and micro-local, also echoes an important turn in the history of experimental music. David Prior describes this in “The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art”: “where Pierre Schaeffer would focus the attention of musique concrète upon the immanent features in the textuality of sound, John Cage would derive a newfound sense of the importance of ‘sound-in-itself’.”