Wired in Sound: A Conversation with Daniela Cascella
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The artist’s contact mics pick up the material surfaces and depths of urban bridges as well as the expansive landscapes of the U.S. west: By wearing better tuned eyes and ears, we may become both consumers and creators of the world we inhabit… he suggests. And, oh, how these mechanical drones, warbled creaks and metallic clangs reveal lush external-internals (or internal-externals)—and, aurally so, to line the body of our conversation like a former ocean of sound: metal meets water across a dreamscape. Listen to a conversation between Daniela Cascella and Earlid’s Joan Schuman. [sonic portrait produced by Joan Schuman, 2015; please listen through headphones] In F.M.R.L. Cascella recollects how Edison was remembered by mystic writer, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s in his 1886 Tomorrow’s Eve. And I run to the bookshelf to read anew …  … the phonograph can’t record an eloquent silence, or the sound of rumors. As far as voices go, it is helpless to represent the voice of conscience. Can it record the voice of the blood? …These seem like expanses of another sort of mind/body/watery entwining into a new recording, a new space of sounding and listening to Cascella’s vocal/verbal/written re-wiring of words. Sonic palimpsests are written and muted and they infiltrate perceptions and dissolve in them; they move. Sounds of both outward and inward compasses are palpable. Reading calls for a sounding of sorts… Cascella remembers. Rikki Ducornet says the writer’s task is to make audible a sound of warning, which is also the sound of awakening. Breathe and re-write. Create your own book (Cascella begs us to listen, to caress the texture of the page, to arrive at something new). She calls it ‘resounday.’ … Converse with your absent ones; hear a thread running murmuring beneath all this; write in response to an unresolved urge to address the most fleeting yet persistent sense of a dark unspoken tension and a nearly occult texture of togetherness that will tie sounds and words inside a book together. …
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