Sequences
Água Viva
USA ELEVATOR BATH eeaoa068 CD (2024)
Niels Geybels from Antwerp presents his field recordings with added droney instrumentation from synths, guitar, zither, and magnetophone. He’s inspired by the work of the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, who penned an experimental book of this title in 1973. Not just the title, but even the notion of structuring a musical composition in chapters seems to have rubbed off on our man, and his four opening tracks make diffuse and layered statements on the theme of water – recordings of oceans, rivers, lakes, dripping drainpipes in the rain and such like – treated as starting points for electro-acoustic treatments and musings. Latter half of disc proceeds to “deconstruct” these first four chapters to create even more rich content, via reprocessing and filtering and stratified bands of sound, until elements that were previously half-familiar become something almost terrifying and overpowering in their grand abstraction.
We enjoyed this fellow when he made a journey underground in the shape of Beneath The Earth in 2018, almost a multi-media presentation with its accompanying book of collages and photos. Água Viva somehow isn’t quite as powerful, but it does continue the same aura of mysteriousness and unknowability about the globe, celebrating natural forces, and making observations on the topographic details of the world which many of us may tend to take for granted. When we heard Beneath The Earth, I was convinced Niels Geybels was making an ambitious attempt to map the entire globe in sound, producing a universal model that could exist in recorded and replayable form. It is my guess that Água Viva represents another milestone in this grandiose project. (01/03/2025)