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2LP
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IDL 001LP
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2017 release. Institute For Danish Sound Archaeology present a reissue that documents Knud Viktor's only two releases on record -- Images and Ambiances -- both released in 1972 on the French label L'Oiseau Musicien. These records have long been out of print and are hereby made available again, gathering the two separate albums on this double-release. The utmost care has gone into creating a reproduction that is as faithful as possible to the original works. These have been transferred from the original analog master tapes and have not been remastered to any other extent than to prepare them for the vinyl reproduction. Thus, Knud Viktor's pieces appear with the same degree of tape hiss, hum, and other "artifacts" related to his aesthetics, compositional process, and tools. Knud Viktor (1924-2013, born in Copenhagen) was a Danish recordist and sound artist. Viktor was a pioneer of phonography and sound ecology. Formerly a painter but also a photographer and a film maker, Viktor wanted to picture the landscape by capturing the impact of the intense light and sounds upon animals. He spent most of his life trying to capture the tiny sound of animals and the sound of erosion on the rocks of Régalon (Lubéron, France) where he lived for almost 40 years. Viktor considered the rural landscape of Lubéron as an open territory with its own idiosyncratic acoustic signature. Viktor's methodology of work involved long periods of deep listening before placing his microphones at the right point of ear. Knud on his process: "I don't pretend to make music, even if what I hear in nature is produced by forces that seek harmony. I see what I do as a continuation of the painting, surveying sounds that organizes sonic intensities most unattendedly, contrastingly, modulated, and dissonant. I try to create an enhanced sensation via the sounds, the air, the light, the wind, the rain, the rocks, the vegetation, the smells of Lubéron." Transfer from analog master tapes by Jean C. Roché.
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7"
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IDL 012EP
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"Le Petit Duc" (The Little Scops Owl) is a sound work by Danish artist Knud Viktor, made between 1978 and 1983. Viktor was classically trained as a painter at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s. In 1961 he moved to France to live and work, but was overwhelmed by the sounds of the wildlife in Provence, and instead of painting began listening to and recording his surroundings. With these recordings, he composed what he called sound images -- images sonores -- and throughout the rest of his career, sound was his main medium. "Le Petit Duc" is primarily composed of recordings Viktor made of an owl's nest in the spring and summer of 1978. Narrated by Viktor himself and put together from recordings throughout a whole nesting season, "Le Petit Duc" tells the story of an owl family. The piece speaks to children and adults alike. Knud Viktor originally made the piece to fit on a 7" record, but it has not been released before. The booklet includes Danish and English translations of Knud Viktor's original spoken text in French, and it is illustrated with a series of Viktor's own photographs of the owls. The download includes a dubbed version in Danish by Mei Bao.
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LP
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IDL 011LP
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2019 release. The lost masterpiece Les Éphémères by the self-labeled "sound painter" Knud Viktor (1924-2013). First ever release, 40 years after it was conceived. Viktor's pioneering work -- his "Images Sonores" -- are composed of field recordings of insects, animals, and his surroundings. A finished master tape and even a complete cover layout for Les Éphémères was found in Viktor's archives after he passed away in 2013. The phenomenal piece was originally commissioned by the French radio station France Musique in 1977. The twenty short "sound images" of Les Éphémères were originally broadcast as vignettes in-between other radio programs. From the middle of the 1970s Viktor began composing almost exclusively for four channels. He invented his own intuitive quadraphonic mixer -- the Tetramix -- to realize his spatial visions for his Image VI -- The Lubéron Symphony, and from then on worked with quadraphonic sound, thus making the release of his works difficult. Les Éphémères is close in time and also holds close ties to The Lubéron Symphony, which Viktor considered his magnum opus. Perhaps most strikingly is the shift in the way he uses the recordings of insects, birds and animals in both The Lubéron Symphony and Les Éphémères: Often untreated and clearly recognizable, the field recordings leave the inherent melody and rhythm of the animal sounds to sing for themselves, layering recordings to create simple and elegant sound images. In two of the twenty pieces Viktor's own voice blends with the animals, as he recites two poems. One about the singing vineyard populated by musical crickets, the other painting an autumn picture with wine bubbling in the barrels as we hear the wine flies humming. Viktor's work emanates with a tremendous love and fascination with his companion species and the landscape and geology that surrounded him. His works are devoted to depicting the life on the mountain where he lived for fifty years. Hearing how the ecology of the landscape changed as commercial farming and pesticides took effect, a larger perspective in his work became clear to him: "As it turns out, my work has actually set many things in motion; it touches upon something universal that I feel I have a duty to convey to others. A duty that I feel as a citizen of the earth. Not as a human citizen, but as a citizen of the earth. It may sound pretentious, but this is a question of generations to come."
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