AUDITORIUM - QUARTET

Quartet is Auditorium's fourth album and consists of 4 long 3-dimensional sound compositions. Headphones are recommended.

jbrandtp's notes:
A considerable part of my previous work – Sonet – dealt with the sound of insects on a warm sunny afternoon, when the sun bakes down over the meadow and makes the horizon tremble.

In the Bronze Age, we worshipped the sun here in Scandinavia. We have, for example, the famous Solvognen (sun chariot), and the sun sign of the rock carvings – a circle with a cross.

It is interesting that at the same time, the world's first monotheistic religion was started in Egypt, which worshipped the sun disk, Aten. This period is called the Amarna period.

For Quartet, I built a virtual 3-dimensional soundscape, describing an imaginary sun-worshipping culture with some similarities with the Amarna period and Egypt. Inspired by the overall structure of Lawrence Durrell's four novels, which together form the Alexandria Quartet, all describing the same events but from different perspectives, I wanted to "record" four different routes into the Quartet soundscape to experience it from different perspectives.

The map below shows the structure of the Quartet landscape with the four routes drawn in. The first three routes start at the same time in the middle of the day, while the fourth route starts in the middle of the night.




The sun in the landscape has borrowed features from the Aten religion. During the day it wanders across the sky, and the gentle hands of its rays carry life down to the landscape. In the evening the sun dies and is swallowed up by the earth. During the night it moves through the earth and absorbs souls of the deads, after which it is reborn strengthened in the sky the next morning. The illustration below shows the sun in the sky during the day and in the earth at night.



In route 1, the listener starts in the sun itself, after which he/she is carried down to the earth and placed on the edge of the Quartet. In the last part of route 4, the listener moves through the earth down to the night-sun, where the Quartet work ends, ready for a new day! :)

The climax of the work is in the last half of route 4. In the rest of the work, the sound level is therefore lower.
To get a suitable sound level through the work, I recommend adjusting the volume, so that the sound level in the wasteland approx. 5 min. into route 1 is slightly higher than the level that would normally be experienced in a remote wasteland.