Contraluz is a journey in three parts - a voyage through the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and a few places that may have been on the map once before but certainly aren’t on any reputable ones now. A major new work from Émile Zener, recorded in his Barcelona studio in early 2023, Contraluz spends three engrossing hours submerged in the acrid soil, salty water, speculative financial markets, and submarine consciousness of Earth as it finds itself in the 2020s.
Zener, also known as Gunnar Haslam, established the label Critique of Everyday Life with his label partner William Selman in 2020 as a platform for sound art and contemporary musique concrète. As bourgeois society embraced an inward focus on the self as palliative care in response to continually escalating societal crises, Selman and Zener’s work directly engages with themes of global capital flow, collectivity, and environmental collapse.
Contraluz grew out of experiments done by Zener attempting to recreate economic models on his synthesizer - experiments he detailed in a series of videos he called “La Synthèse Humaine.” Looking at his Serge modular synthesizer as an analog computer, musical themes and passages began to emerge from imitations of economic systems, marine ecosystems, and weather patterns - textures and sound objects which form the backbone of all three parts of Contraluz.
Throughout its three distinct parts - further subdivided into seven Cantos - Contraluz threads these synthetic maps of maritime and terrestrial economic flow with field recordings taken across the Caribbean and Mediterranean. From the captured underground electrical currents of Contraluz I to the otherworldly hallucination of the Isola Degli Specchi (“Island of Mirrors”) in Contraluz III, Contraluz is a dense labyrinth of intertwined geographic locations and abstract spaces.
Down the stairs and the light vanishes, deeper down into the bedrock, surrounded by hydrocarbons just begging to be extracted. A light pierces the black void of the tunnel and a train arrives, all searing high frequencies and guttural rumbles, electrical currents coursing through the rock of the earth, igniting trash on its way. Seconds now until the train arrives but another hour until he gets to where he’s trying to go. The night dilates and compresses in this instant, an instant full of countless future trajectories of which history has already chosen one.
A warm subterranean train breeze brushes his skin and summons memories from years ago, somewhere in the Mediterranean. He watches as on the boat they gather to eat - soup served in thin metal bowls and smelling slightly of petrol, gulls swooping down on deck to pick at the fish bones, late morning sun streaming down through the sails and nets. An intimate moment shared between a few people, the kind that has blessedly resisted commodification. Yet something about it seems familiar… he’s seen it before, in a film just last week.
In his mind cut to a new scene - a sea of people in the streets above lit only by the moon, the feeling of sweat and sticky summer night air, the smell of turkish tobacco and hash mixing with the steam and exhaust from a factory next door, crowds dancing on into the endless night, to music without a single word, not a single semantic message….
credits
released May 17, 2023
mastered by Stephan Mathieu
design by Common Name
photo by Maya Rossignac-Milon
recorded in Barcelona, 2022-2023
Critique of Everyday Life is a record label for contemporary music and sound art. Topics for engagement: cybernetics, embodiment, atmosphere, dialectics, operaismo, non-places, interstitial spaces, boundarylessness.
Written in response to the climate crisis, “Leviathan” is a brooding and beautifully unsettling batch of dark ambient songs. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 16, 2023
St Celfer returns with tracks culled from a series of live shows, each one a showcase for his inventive experimentalism. Bandcamp New & Notable Jun 26, 2023
