VANISHING POINTS (2023)
Matilde Meireles
Vanishing Points is a documental drift that explores how everyday urban flows intersect with our own personal rhythms as we move through urban environments. The album was released by the experimental music label Crónica in August 2023.
Sound is everywhere. It exists on so many scales that at times it is difficult to grasp. Its energies intertwine with the wider systems of a city, bleeding beyond borders and passing through our perceived boundaries. Many of these intersecting energies are imperceptible to humans. Even spaces we consider quiet are, in fact, extremely busy, full of action and energy.
For this album, Matilde Meireles interchanged between her smartphone and a small hi-spec field recorder connected to an electromagnetic sensor and stereo microphones to record her movements through different spaces. These included the quiet space of her home; the old railway line where she often runs; the busy trains as she commutes; the crowded London tube lines; and the flows of people and traffic in the dense urban environments of London and Bristol. As she traverses these spaces, it becomes clear how everyday scenarios brim with life, energy and activity. These flows are a consequence of our participation in contemporary societies. Such an intense sonic abundance highlights the unsustainable future of urban environments. But what we can learn from these movements and how can we contribute to alternative futures?
PERFORMANCES
Handmade Music, Belfast
3rd August 2023
Matilde Meireles performed at Handmade Music, a monthly night at Accidental Theatre dedicated to experimental music. The nights are curated by Moving on Music (MOM) and the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) from Queen’s University Belfast.
To situate the concert, during the short residency at SARC, Matilde did a few field recording sessions where she recorded familiar places and retraced some of her usual steps when living in Belfast. In the live performance, these recordings were set alongside her movements between London and Bristol, bending time and creating an organic ever-growing work.
Lisboa Soa Festival, Lisbon
27th August 2023
Lisboa Soa is a sound arts festival with no fixed abode. For each iteration, the festival invites participants to engage with different spaces in the city and explore the city creatively through sound, while thinking critically about sound and its social, political and ecological meanings.
For her performance at Lisboa Soa, Matilde followed a similar strategy to the Handmade Music concert and in the days preceding the festival, she recorded her movements, this time in the city where she comes from. In the live performance, these cumulative processes and moments, both situated and distributed, were intertwined to create a loose ghostly map of Matilde’s everyday.
Photos by Vera Marmelo
Vanishing Points is part of Matilde’s larger artistic research on interconnectivity and extended critical listening methodologies for listening with, through and for, which includes various live performance iterations of the album Sunnyside released by Crónica in 2020; Multiple Perceptions of the Everyday Unfolded: The Case Study of Sunnyside, an academic journal article published on the Journal of Sonic Studies in January 2022; Echoes, a wandering concert for the European night of museums at Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, a collaboration between SONCITIES and Eric de Visscher; critical listening workshops led by the SONCITIES research team; and this album, which combines traces of her movements in various urban spaces and their dialogue with the electromagnetic pulses around.