Original work by Steloolive
Story clouds
This is an extract. The full piece is 9'49".
Field recordings of raindrops mutate into seemingly electric crackle. Made around the artist's home in Accra, Ghana and in the tiny remote coastal town of Elmina, the weather sounds and the sing-song nature of children's games extract a musicality of tone and pitch from rain splashing off a veranda roof. The children's stories recall his own childhood, when kids gathered in the evenings on the beach to tell and act out stories, but the urban kids no longer gather like that – it's only in remote parts that the tradition still exists.
The piece evokes Marshall McLuhan's notions of ‘acoustic imagination’ and ‘acoustic space’: two halves of a concept of ‘ear culture’ in which space is experienced by the listener as ‘discontinuous and non-homogenous... with centres everywhere and boundaries nowhere’.
The voices break the soporific atmosphere. The work is intentionally sparse, offering a partially blank audio canvas to merge with whatever space it is later transmitted into.