Sándor Szabó
Performing artist, Composer, Music researcher
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Echolocation Trilogy Echolocation I - Sacred Spaces Echolocation I was born as a result of extended musical and acoustic experiments between 1997 and 1999. This period coincided with my software developing works at TC Electronic. In my experiments, I intended to apply the psycho-acoustic specialties of human hearing for artistic creation. The experiments extended to the aural and spatial properties of sound in the context of working of consciousness. In this empiric cognition, new possibilities were available for artistic expression, so the original experimental recordings had been used for a new music album. The title of the album was inspired by an article about the orientation by sound called echolocation. According to the article, somewhere there is a tribe living in an incalculably intricate rocky place which utilizes sound for physical orientation. When at night they move to another place, they use percussion instruments to generate sound impulses for scanning the surrounding space. The returning reflections enable them to know where they are at that moment, just like the bats using ultrasonic waves for orientation. During studying the recordings made with experimental purposes, I had the idea to make a music album consciously applying a space simulator and other effect processors in the music. I invited Balázs Major, percussionist, and Zoltán Lantos, violinist, for a few tracks. I went on with the experiments but with the clear concept of creating an artistic music album utilizing the results of my experiments. The conception is based on two main elements: playing overdubbed layers on processed electric guitars, and illustrating the voices in different simulated space layers. From this point, the illustration in the sound space became an artistic sound-aesthetical question. The album Echolocation I was released in 1999 by Tandem Records in Hungary. Echolocation II - Hymn to the Earth Right after the release of Echolocation I, I started to work on the next
album in this series. I imagined music without grooves which completely
overwhelmed the modern electronic music. Instead always repeating grooves
and sounds with no function, I wanted to use silence as a canvas for the
sound to start to draw and paint with the sounds where everything can
be heard with a determined function. I imagined as the music takes off
its worn clothes and its bare beauty appears with previously unheard details.
On this album, I also used space simulators, harmonizers, and other effects
to make a sound which helps our consciousness to soar freely above the
unknown soundscapes through the inner time dimensions of the music. Echolocation III - Crossing Time In 2017, new ideas and possibilities made me to start the third part
of the Echolocation series. With this came the realization that I have
begun a series which can never be completed. The Echolocation series was
born with the demand of artistic illustration in the stereo sound field,
conveying the emotional content of music. Everything which can be illustrated
between two loudspeakers in the stereo field I tried to emphasize, while
recreating the sound of reality and to go farther each time. In this album,
I was contemplating the question of time, so I gave the album the subtitle
of Crossing Time. Since the physical manifestation of music is rooted
in time, and a piece of music has its own time, it is suitable to manipulate
the sense of time of a human.
The present age is such a transition when the CD as a medium is not economical anymore. The CD is slowly being replaced by the digital download album. The Echolocation Trilogy is being released as a digital download album to show how a sound aesthetic conception formed across the previous two decades. Echolocation Trilogy is released by the US-based Greydisc Records in 2018.
Sándor Szabó
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