Jacek
Doroszenko: Soundreaming (Audiobulb)

Jacek
Doroszenko has worked as one half of Mammoth Ulthana, and
Soundreaming marks his first release as a solo artist. As its title
suggests, the album weaves a fantastical sprawl of sound design that
feels often dreamlike in its weird juxtapositions and contrasts.
Doroszenko’s goal with Soundreaming is to treat sound as a
manipulatable palette much in the way that photography or visual art
can abstract and alter perceptions of its origins. “Aberrationmaker”
starts the album off in a dreamy fashion, but it’s a red herring of
sorts. While it may emphasize preconceptions of what “dreaming”
sounds like relative to the album name, this is a far more out-there
affair than those pastoral prolonged tones would initially suggest.
Chirping birds and field recordings creep to the surface with more
subtle manipulation, but the subsequent nine tracks veer into more
dizzying explorations. Soundreaming was produced through Doroszenko’s
residency at Hangar in Barcelona, wherein Doroszenko aims to use
soundscapes to replace photography as the main documentary element of
his craft. With its sometimes overt nods to source material and
obfuscations elsewhere, Soundreaming presents environmental sound as
a means of shaping perception and letting its audience bring their
own interpretations to the table. “Gothic Passage” layers
tinkering acoustic sounds over looping and reversed music recordings
and tiny bells, while “Fiestamachine” feels like a skipping
gramophone, a jaunty piano ditty betrayed by sweeping orchestral
arrangements in the background, sort of an otherworldly oompah.

Soundreaming by Jacek Doroszenko

In
“MACBA Skaters,” Doroszenko presumably captures the contact
sounds of skaters in front of the Museum for Art Contemporary
Barcelona, a popular hangout for skaters in the city. The location
and source are not always so clear; “Passion Passion” is a swirl
of disembodied handclaps, guitar strums, and human voice that build
to a dizzying climax, an almost full tilt wall of sound. Doroszenko
is wise in his sequencing of these pieces of sound art, with “Silent
Souvenirs” and “Gone and Faded” providing some respite after
their frenetic predecessor. The latter is the longest piece on the
album, and it seems to suggest the very nature of how ephemeral
associations of time and place can be after the fact. By the time its
drones are distilled into repetitive, tiny sequences, I’ve lost track
of whatever assumptions I may have brought to the track in the first
place. The remaining tracks continue to push the envelope as far as
source manipulations go, with “Urban Folk” working as a
percolating bubbler of sound that in some ways mirrors the hard-drive
chatter implied by closer “HDD Ensemble.” The typographic and
photographic manipulations that accompany the project and its
wonderful online supplement feel like the natural complement, with
its sources highly distorted and manipulated into fascinating
abstractions of their own. Ultimately, whatever dreams Soundreaming
conjures up in the minds of its listeners will be equal parts the
result of the sound itself and the perceptions, memory, and
assumptions of those listeners, and that’s really at the core of what
sound art is all about. I find it an engaging and wonderfully strange
set of sounds from start to finish. Recommended.

Buy it: Audiobulb Site