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It's night.
There are no precise coordinates, nor recognizable signs that can lead us back to a familiar place.
And yet those sounds remind us, almost pathetically, of a summer night scene, to which we listened countless times.
But that’s not what this is.
The slow and articulated flow of pulsating energy gradually takes a structure, enabling us to be part of
something very different.
The flow surrounds us, passes through us.
We can’t see it, nor touch it, but every particle interferes with our body, with our biological substrate.
Far away, a storm is coming, perhaps.
It’s neither natural, nor inoffensive. It deceives us with the variety of its harmony of timbres.
The structure suddenly changes, reorganizing itself while turning us into something new.
A breach made of light. It’s oscillating.
Then, silence.
The air stagnates, suspended and motionless.
An electrical impulse.
One more.
Others follow, one after another, fainter and more distant.
(Sounds), like petals made of ash.
F'Shima was designed and built around a series of recordings of electromagnetic fields generated by various electronic devices (Hard Drives, iPad, iPhone, Portable Game Consoles ...), recordings made by using old analog phone-captors.
The source material, sometimes fully recognizable, sometimes radically altered, has been digitally processed using the Kyma Sound Design environment.
The whole piece is literally the output of a composite Patch which consists of several parallel processing chains and an algorithmic mixing system (in space and time).
There are four Comb Filters, followed by a Lowpass Filter, a Granular Timeshifter, a tool for the Convolution with impulse response sampled in real time (at irregular intervals), made by a bank of sinusoidal oscillators, and finally, a filtering system that operates dynamically in the frequency domain (up to 128 band pass filters).
The Kyma Sound is not controlled "directly" by a computer operator, rather by a series of control functions, previously generated and stored as wave-tables.
In order to avoid a natural redundancy of the Output, different presets (discrete states of the system) were prepared and stored, by carefully listening to their peculiarities and significance in sonological terms.
Subsequently, the control functions used inside several interpolators, have rendered the musical work in time and space.
This piece consists of a selection of the most musically relevant material obtained during 3 different "RUNs" of the above Kyma Sound.