Wire Recorder Piece (1944)Halim El-Dabh
In 1944, Egyptian...:
Wire Recorder Piece (1944)
Halim El-Dabh
In 1944, Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh attended a zar ceremony, in which music and chanting are used to cast out evil spirits and heal the sick. Because the zar is typically performed exclusively by women, El-Dabh wore women’s headdress in order to enter unnoticed. He also smuggled in a portable wire recorder (a predecessor to the magnetic tape machine) which he had borrowed from the Middle East Radio Station in Cairo. El-Dabh recorded the ceremony and later processed the sounds, filtering out the lower frequencies and adding reverberation by re-recording in a room with movable wall panels. The result was this brief but haunting piece of sonic art, in which ethnographic field recording merges seamlessly with the transformational editing practices of electronic music.
Source: Crossing into the Electric Magnetic (2000)
No comments:
Post a Comment