ORACLE, LASZLO UMBREIT, MIRA SANDERS

READING THE CITY (LP)

Label: audioMER. ‎– audioMER.023.LP / oracle
Format: Vinyl, LP, Limited Edition
Country: Belgium
Released: 21 Jul 2021
Genre: Experimental, Field recordings, Vocal
Edition: 300 copies
Contributions: Laszlo Umbreit, Mira Sanders, Caroline Daish, Justine Maxelon, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Amélie Marneffe, Gaël Santisteva, Estelle Delcambre, Katja Dreyer, Heike Langsdorf, Anouk Llaurens, Tine Ringele
Mixing: Laszlo Umbreit
Mastering: Christophe Albertijn
Design: Marzia Dalfini
Producer: nadine vzw

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READING THE CITY

oracle and audioMER. are honoured to announce the release of a new LP; Reading the City with music by oracle, Laszlo Umbreit & Mira Sanders.

In 2019 oracle invited artist Mira Sanders to interact with their practice through her writing. Due to the corona crisis, their shared working time couldn’t happen in the planned way:

“The writing project was originally planned as an exchange while travelling together one week on the Buratinas boat, navigating on the canals and rivers starting from Brussels. Due to the sanitary conditions with the Covid19, the trip together could not be realised or at least was complicated.
Instead of seeing the situation as an obstacle, I saw it as an opportunity to travel with them from afar. Me, living outside the city and them, inside. My question was 'how, through their voices echoing with the urban spaces, will I imagine the city's everyday life?'. Because one of the things that oracle's practice does is to offer ways to perceive and encounter the city and its inhabitants.
For the texts I was inspired by the recordings oracle sent me every day during one week. Besides that, the book Invisible Cities written by Italo Calvino gave me a way of structuring my imagination.” – Mira Sanders

Following this artistic exchange and during a collaboration with sound artist Laszlo Umbreit, the idea of the record Reading the City was born. The existing recordings and the written sci-fi episodes by Mira Sanders functioned as a source of inspiration for the electronic sound composition Places, infiltrated by the original voices and city soundscapes. The recordings of the texts From Afar reflect oracle’s playful and spontaneous way of interacting with their given environment. From Afar is an invitation for the reader to immerse in the city while being in movement. Each track on this side has its own identity or colour, often in relation to what Mira’s text evoked, but this also happened in an empirical way, by trial and error.

Places is a composition in movement, following the idea of interaction with imaginary cities but regularly coming back to a presence of the workshop's raw documentary sound. While being a carefully edited piece, it tries to keep a certain sense of immediacy and improvisation through semi-random dropping of heterogeneous sound materials in the timeline. Accidents are welcome. The arc drawn by the journey through different "places" is an interpretation of what can happen inside (and outside) when experiencing the oracle practice: being around them, imagining what was felt at different moments in the street, from a distance, preparing the itinerary in the city beforehand, talking about what oracle could be as a record and if it can exist outside the moment it happens.

Score by Tine Ringele, 2020

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TRACKLIST

A. FROM AFAR

1. Attacca
2. Aerea
3. Pulmonis
4. Opera
5. Aurora

B. PLACES

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BIOGRAPHIES

oracle is an eyes-closed vocal improvisation practice reading diverse spaces; from the body interiority to the environment, private living spaces to public spaces; train stations, parks, institutions, forests and urban gardens. It interacts with these surroundings through instant sound and movement composition and expands the boundaries between individual emotional expressions and shared public space. Each practice session is unique to the moment and context.
The name oracle was chosen as it bridges an expansive notion of voice and ineffability. The name, oracle, encompasses agency, ambiguity, obscurity, divinity, communication, medium, utterance and wisdom.

Laszlo Umbreit (°1986) is a Belgian sound designer and musician based in Brussels. Laszlo’s work is anchored in sound research yet usually dialogues with the moving image, whether as present or absent. His musical practice mixes improvisation on electronic instruments, field recordings and a long meticulous editing and mixing process of sonic materials.

Mira Sanders (°1973) studied Fine Arts at Sint-Lukas Brussels and is lector/ researcher at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels/Ghent. Her oeuvre consists of video works, drawings and installations, in which a constant quest emerges for the places, people and stories they contain. Mira Sanders’ current work focuses on the positioning of objects, people or events in physical spaces and on the actual terrain. Her visual language consists of meticulous lines, markings, borders, routes, maps, plans and drawings that describe, read spaces, and outline imaginary journeys in an attempt to surpass the limits of language. In the grey zone between architecture and city planning she explores the notion of “public” space: its physical limits, narratives that contribute to its formation, or its configuration in time. In 2007 she was one of the laureates of the Young Belgian Painting Award. Her work has been shown, among other places, Galerie VidalCuglietta (Brussels), Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire (Paris), ARGOS centre for art and media (Brussels), MDAC Rochechouart (Rochechouart), BOZAR (Brussels), deSingel (Antwerp), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens (Deurle), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Huize Frankendael (Amsterdam) and CEAC (Xiamen).

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LINKS AND DOWNLOADS

SOUND

• Private playlist
• Track Excerpts
• Soundcloud Laszlo Umbreit

INFO

• Discogs page with detailed credits
• audioMER. website

ARTIST WEBSITES

• Projectpage Reading the city
• Webpage Laszlo Umbreit
• Webpage Mira Sanders

IMAGES

• Artwork as PDF
• Artwork as JPG (4000 x 4000 px)