This album is a companion to La durée poignardée | Fixed duration

"Royaume de lumière" is a 28-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 series of paintings titled "L'Empire des lumières."

The recording 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 the 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. A little computer was built to run this program and continuously generate the ever-fresh soundscape throughout the duration of the exhibit.

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.