The 13th Samarbeta residency was with New York based artist Sarah Van Buren (SVB).

 

SVB’s Samarbeta residency was split into two parts; first, a trip to the ancestral homelands of central Ireland to visit Gnod Farm to do some extensive digital and analog field recordings of the surrounding environs. Close attention was paid to locations of energetic / supernatural significance. The second part took place within the refrigeration unit in the Unit 2 warehouse on Regents Trading Estate. SVB reworked and recontextualised the recordings as musical pieces, which culminated in a final performance on Friday 14 December and the 6th release on the label; The Stone Tape. Available to buy on from the Samarbeta Bandcamp. 

 

SVB explores a collage-style, site-specific and analog approach to making music, developed from recording and broadcasting projects throughout her life. She is interested in building song structures upon these aural relics, mining them for the deeper inherent sounds, that, taken out of context, can be reappropriated within ambient music and outsider / experimental pop songs.  

 

The darker, ghostly aspect of the project is of particular note; esoteric ideas, the supernatural, contact with multi-dimensional beings and portals to other dimensions are a theme in SVB’s life since she began making recordings at age eight. Relatedly, she is inspired by the “stone tape theory,” which holds that an environment energetically absorbs and replays intense emotional or traumatic events which have transpired within it, essentially claiming that hauntings are, in a sense, a type of tape playback. Hence: could it be possible to make a sonic analog of paranormal experience?