Jacek Doroszenko — Sounddreaming

Jacek Doroszenko is an artist active in the area of visual and sound arts. The core of his practice is to treat sound phenomena as a legitimate material of a field of visual art. Soundreaming has been produced through a framework of Artist-in-Residence program at Hangarin Barcelona, Spain. Inspired by location, experience and memory and motivated by the inversion of the traditional roles of photography and sound in the media and art worlds.

Therefore, Soundreaming tries to emphasize the importance of the acoustic environment on our memory and perception of place. This album contains a selection of compositions from the audio-visual project with the same title. Soundscapes replacing photography as the dominant documentary element at the core of the artistic practice.

Sometimes I think soundscape artists, field recording artists and those involved in the areas of putting sound into an art installation do feel the need to over-intellectualise their actual creative output. Soundreaming… am I really doing this or am I just listening to some ambient music that purports to make me visualise some area somewhere that I don’t recognise but sounds nice?

Now, I enjoy a good field recording album. I like ambient music. I find (some) sound installations and audio-visual installations fascinating, but I do not need to be spoonfed the doctrine / theory that goes with it? I can be trusted to understand and be left to enjoy the sound / music for what it is. Surely if the sound is so good, and so resonant of a specific atmosphere or area then I shouldn’t need to be informed of it in the first place, should I?

And this is my problem with this album: I do not care where the tracks where recorded, what they are aiming to achieve during that recording and that it’s required, prior to hearing it, that I be aware of this. Over-intellectualising a sound recording that is designed by it’s nature to be ambient seems to me like over-thinking a wall-paper once it’s been pasted upon a wall.

Soundreaming is a ten track soundtrack album for images I can not (but probably need to) see. It’s filled with sweeping drones and tones, and then occasional avant garde sounds, that try to jar their way through each and every piece. I don’t think it stands alone as an audio document of an audio-visual installation, in the same way I doubt just the visuals would either. This is music to be heard in concert with its images and as such I feel cutting one from the other leaves the music totally disconnected. So in conclusion hearing this in situ would be far more entertaining and enlightening.