INGOLD, TIM & CARMEN PARDO & MIKEL R. NIETO - A SOFT HISS OF THIS WORLD (BOOK & 7" FLEXI)

"The research project "A soft hiss of this world" is focused on the loss in many aspects such as the loss of language as a result of the Anthropocene through the absence of certain states and processes that occur naturally in the environment like different states of water, snow and ice. In Finnish there are more than forty terms* to refer to them and because of the loss of these states in the landscape, the loss is also displaced to the language, in this case, the Finnish. This research project took these words as a starting point to make hundreds of hours of recordings in the Finnish landscape. The sound of snow, ice and snowflakes are the reference and the sound material of this research project. And to obtain these sounds, as well as the possible sound differences between each snowflake, special and specific microphones were developed for this very specific and fragile recording process. This book contains texts by three authors: Tim Ingold, Carmen Pardo and Mikel R. Nieto, on the research carried out by Nieto in Finland during 2016. The text by Tim Ingold opens the book and introduces the reader to the main subjects of the research: language, landscape, sound and listening. This text is easy to read and aims to immerse us in the Finnish landscape and in the listening act to its sounds and silences. Carmen Pardo's text unfolds first, the way in which the gaze and listening of the snow constitute the experience of a disappearance, of a concentration in the void or nothingness of which A Soft Hiss of this World participates. The third text belongs to Mikel R. Nieto and is divided into four parts. The third part is a code that reflects the loss of most of the sound recordings made during his research with more than 600 hours of recordings. This code is the only thing that could be recovered from all recordings, except the only sound recording published in physical format as a transparent Flexi-disc. The fourth part is the result of silencing each and every word by John Cage in his "Lecture on Nothing," leaving only the punctuation marks, such as commas, periods, separators and the last sentence of the text of Cage. Every time the transparent flexi-disc is played, the player needle wears away the vinyl and making the sound of the recording disappear. Therefore, each listening destroys the sound." (label info)