★★★★☆
Daphne and Darcy have recently moved to a remote farmhouse in Wales. Daphne is an experimental musician. She’s struggling to complete a new album (using a living room full of old analog electronic music gear). While she works, Darcy wanders the surrounding landscape making field recordings. When Darcy records something strange, Daphne builds upon it. The music they create together draws an unusual child into their home.
With your eyes…you enter the world.
With your ears…the world enters you.
When it’s time, trauma will overflow the the artificial boundaries reason enforces. Trying to fight it is one option…
- Official trailer
- Where to stream
- Sounding the Otherworld: On Bryn Chainey’s ‘Rabbit Trap
Discussion of the film on the Weird Studies podcast.
Rabbit holes
I Revisited Three Soundscapes Recorded in 1975
Alice Boyd traveled to three locations where Martyn Stewart created field recordings 50 years ago. Around 12 minutes in Alice shows off a shotgun mic and modular windshield setup similar to what Darcy uses in the film.
A playlist of 50 plus videos from Hainbach.
Sound?? (1966) - John Cage and Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Although Rahsaan Roland Kirk and John Cage never actually meet in this film (Cage’s enigmatic questions about sound are intercut with some of Kirk’s more ambitious experiments with it) these two very different musical iconoclasts share a similar vision of the boundless possibilities of music. Kirk plays three saxes at once, switches to flute, incorporates tapes of birds played backwards, and finally hands out whistles to his audience and encourages them to accompany him, “in the key of W, if you please.” Cage, on the other hand, is preparing a work for musical bicycle with David Tudor and Merce Cunningham at the Seville Theatre in London. Cage meets Rahsaan’s music in an echo chamber, and he ends his search for the sound of silence in his favorite spot - the anechoic chamber - where it turns out to be the uproar of “your nervous system in operation.” — Martin Williams, Jazz Times