Hatis Noit’s Aura was constructed almost completely from her own voice. She recorded the principal vocals in Berlin in only eight hours. Layers were then looped, edited and eventually re-amplified inside St John of Jerusalem Church in London so the recordings could absorb a real architectural ambience.
The exception is “Inori,” which includes a field recording of the sea made about one kilometre from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2017.
What interests me is the re-amping process. Digital production makes it possible to create almost any imagined acoustic space through convolution and reverb, yet the team chose to send the recorded voice back into an actual building and record what the room did to it.
The architecture became an effect processor.
There is something beautifully circular about that. A voice enters a microphone, becomes data, leaves a loudspeaker, touches stone and air, and becomes a recording again.
Sometimes the most interesting signal chain includes a building.
