pierce warnecke: deafened by the noise of time

Pierce Warnecke's work springs forth from the nexus of sound and vision. With Deafened By The Noise Of Time, he undertakes a deep interrogation of sound, which mirrors many of his approaches to visual materials. Seeking to test how elements of music are altered through interference and deterioration, he uses a range of methods to reveal new densities, timbres, and melodies from within his original source materials. Rather than becoming fragmented or overtly degraded though, Warknecke's work on Deafened By The Noise Of Time suggests new textures and harmonic relationships. As one musical gesture is transformed a new set of possibilities opens outward, creating a sense of perpetual unfolding. From Pierce Warnecke: "Deafened By The Noise Of Time is a speculative take on how sound might decay and disappear; a reflection on the unavoidable entropy and dislocation of all things over time through four compositions, one with video . . . I first started working on the material for this album for a performance at Eglise Saint-Merry in Paris in 2017. Following the concert, I sat down to edit the music but struggled with the pieces, every time finding new flaws, unable to follow through with the original compositional ideas. Somewhat frustrated, I decided to strip down the musical content to form more bare-bone structures and look for a different principle or process to tie everything together. For this, I shifted focus to a long running part of my video practice: the deterioration of things over time, where I use my camera with simple lighting and slow movements to focus on rusty, dirty, burned or broken found objects. I like the idea of these things being both recent and ancient, contemporary artefacts of a world in constant decay. I like the idea of being able to still sense memory on objects even when they've become almost entirely unrecognizable. I like how this pushes back against the inevitability of impermanence. I like the act of scavenging and reusing discarded objects to put them in new but uncertain light. I like to think of it as a kind of ritualistic transformation of 'trash-to-treasure', a conjuring of a thing's entire past through imperceptible clues left on it's surface. For Deafened By The Noise Of Time I wanted to apply these ideas to sound, and consider how a musical idea might disappear under an accumulation of interferences, as a kind of sonic sedimentation and erosion..."