Chelsea Leventhal

An Immense World Still Heard It

17-channel sound installation commissioned by Kontraklang and premiered at Heimathafen Neukölln for MaerzMusik
2015
Shade-Haunted Space

Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is.
Certain shades especially, girding their loins one last time, make a desperate attempt to 'exist as a single unity.'
But they rue the day. I met one of them.
Destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderous noise.
An immense world still heard it, but it no longer existed,
having become simply and solely a noise, which was to rumble on for centuries longer,
but was fated to die out completely, as though it had never existed.

-Henri Michaux


An Immense World Still Heard It is a sound installation that occupies a territory between documentation, deconstruction, and resurrection. Sifting through impressions of a sonic intervention that took place in the summer of 2012, it is a re-examination of fluid lines and fleeting textures occupying a hostile sonic environment. Transposing the space mandates a change in dimension and perspective, as well as confrontation with the dichotomy of the interior and exterior. The new starting point is the environment as perceived from the interior of a metallic vessel, the enclosed perspective of which is then superimposed onto the concert hall. With this inversion, sounds that previously seemed to disappear into the wind are preserved, and the space is contained in all of its echoing instability.