This album is a companion to Royaume de lumière | Kingdom of light

"La durée poignardée" is a 19-minute soundscape composed by Matthew Houston of field recordings taken by Éireann Lorsung during summer 2018. The recordings were taken within a 30-mile radius of Lorsung's then-house in Flanders, Belgium, in locations she accessed on foot, by bicycle, and by train. It offers a radiant and overlapping sonic picture of a place that exists in part only as memory. The title plays with René Magritte's 1938 painting "La durée poignardée."

This recording is a mate of the one which was installed with Lorsung's composite painting Royaume de lumière x 144 in January-March 2020 as part of the exhibition Voyager: Migrational Narratives at Emery Community Arts Center in Farmington, ME (US).

For more information on Lorsung's work: makework.ohbara.com/royaume-de-lumiere/

Houston assembled Lorsung's recordings in Pure Data, an open source programming language for working with sound. He created a program that would loop and play and pause and play again these recordings at random intervals to achieve an ongoing and always-changing soundscape. This program can run indefinitely, always generating new moments and collisions of sensation and sound.

This recording is therefore one instantiation of the composition. There was minimal processing done to the sounds and there was no effort to hide how they were made: by someone, moving through spaces public and private, holding her phone, recording and listening.

This is a mono recording. Its only fidelity is to itself. Please listen with the volume as low as possible.