Marc Behrens

Paiva Players

In response to Binaural’s call for work I proposed to produce a number of recordings of three to five selected volunteers who live in the section of the Paiva which was allocated to my residency period (I arrived September 30 and left October 11, 2010). These should be people who live near the river or whose activities would have a connection with the river, not necessarily professionals. I proposed to ask them to perform their daily activities, but unconventionally repeat some of their gestures in order to arrive at sound loops that were neither the same, nor entirely different from each other. But not only was it difficult to have people do anything without them talking. Even more so, the original concept was so much outside their scope that it was wiser to resign from trying to interfere with their activity or to impose a choreography on to what was dictated by necessity and often very much limited in time, too. It was necessary to find a different method to compose the material after wards in order to arrive at the desired outcome.The selected volunteers were locals who harvest and make wine, cut corn, work as shepherds, in a local bakery (padaria), a butchershop (talho), a slate quarry (pedreira) and a tourist oriented sports club (Clube do Paiva). During work it turned out that it was necessary to expand the field of recording interest in order to acknow ledge the roles of animals and spirits which are partners and counter balance for the people who live in the region. The resulting compositions would also be the basis for the installation on the actual river. The piece published on CD is a different arrangement of the same material.

(Installation)

My original plan was to construct floating sound players which would be anchored in the river, playing back results of the process described. Short compositions would bring the sound of the alternated daily activities back to the river itself, mix it with the ever-changing, yet see mingly repetitive and constant noise emitted by the Paiva, as it moves through and yet is geographically identified as a fixed part of the landscape. Not only have the recording sessions been different than imagined, also the composition would now be based on a different main idea (which after all, seems even more appropriate): originally I planned a number of short pieces, each dedicated to one of the volunteers. Now the variety of sounds is arranged in a continuum of mostly unsynched tracks, each flowing their own way, from time to time locking into a loop of some or of all the tracks. Also, the shapes and qualities of what was to be sound players would become much more meaningful than had been possible to imagine before the residency; they would even hint to some non – European cultures. Initially the name “Paiva Players” was used as a working title for both soundpiece(s) and installation, and did not only relate to the actual sound players, but also to the volunteers to be recorded. The name is antagonistic to the term “global players”, and it points to an approach on a small scale, namely that of a specific river. Soon the name sounded more technical than philosophical to me, so I decided to rename the installation “Recurrent”.

Born in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1970. Marc Behrens works on several cerebral and physical levels. His works mainly consist of concrete electronic music, installations, the occasional photograph or video. Recent activities include field recording trips to remote western China and the Amazon rainforest, founding an incorporated company as a social artwork, and staging a rite of passage for an investment banker.

Behrens has performed and exhibited extensively across Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, North America, and East Asia, and developed collaborations with Achim Wollscheid, Bernhard Günter, Francisco López, Jeremy Bernstein, Nikolaus Heyduck and Paulo Raposo, among others.