Live-recorded at Ackermannshof, Basel, 27.01.2023
Mix by Leandro Gianini

Comment:
Three layers became relevant for this work: collaboration as the guiding principle of my musicianship, the creative work with the material from the workshops, and finally the magical.
For me, composing has become more and more synonymous with collaboration. I want to develop works for and with people. When composing, I want to think of a counterpart with his or her own voice, gestures and presence and let this influence my work. I recorded all the workshops that went into the development of "At night they listen to all creatures". From these I filtered those sequences in which Rafal Zolkos speaks, comments, sighs or breathes loudly in a way that only the noises remain. This resulted in sequences of different lengths whose sound material consists of very short fragments of noise. To a certain extent, these are the residual sounds of the filtering process. Often they are phonemes or single consonants.
I used this material in two different ways. On the one hand, as a rhythmic and temporal structure, which I sampled compositionally and put together as a "collage". On the other hand, I have stretched the short fragments of noise into whisper-like impulse responses or transformed them through analysis and resynthesis into coloured spectra with slow envelope curves. This is how Rafal Zolkos eventually resonates in the noises of his own voice.
In the magical I process above all personal experiences. Often I lie there for hours at night. All kinds of feelings arise and I experience a vast variety of sonic worlds. Little by little, a magical world emerges. In it, small noises become wild fluctuations, sporadic cracking sounds merge into complex rhythms, here and there a scratching or distant humming joins in until everything rushes and rattles, only to immediately change again into the greatest silence. The longer I lie, the more magical this world of sound becomes.
A magical creature with many shiny scales has emerged from these experiences. They clink and crack with every movement. The voice unites the noises of the earth and speaks the language of longing. By the tender hissing I am embraced and healed, tumble into sleep accompanied by the hissing, get covered by the softly rattling breath. They sleep, wake up, move and dance into the morning.