Donkere kamer by Martijn Hohmann

Field recordings made in Rotterdam, Breda, and Antwerp early 2022 and Groot Ammers summer 2021
Additional processing, editing, (soft)synths and mixing may-august 2022.

Little over a month after I was asked by Frans to do a piece for his new NDWICM label I got news that photographer Mark Rietveld had passed on by choice. The piece, which by then was more than halfway finished, already contained recordings from underneath de Schelde river in Antwerp made a few months earlier, on the very night I met up with Mark for the last time. The piece turned into a kind of homage.

Donkere kamer is a single sixty minute piece divided into five parts.

1. De man met de Zeiss
The Dutch equivalent of the Grim Reaper and also the man with the (Leica) camera. He who takes life and he who captures life. Death and the photographer converge.

2. De trein der traagheid
The title was taken from the wonderful book by Johan Daisne with the same name. A man wakes up in a train and finds himself, alongside two other passengers, the only ones awake. The three passengers leave the train and continue their nightly journey by foot. Slowly they come to realize they must have been in a train accident and are no longer walking the world of the living.

3. Sint-Anna onder de Schelde
Recordings made in the pedestrian tunnel that runs under the Schelde river in Antwerp. Crossing the river, a Styx Belgica.

4. Markdal
Frogs recorded in Het Markdal, a nature reserve in Breda. The Japanese word for frog is "kaeru", which also means "returning home".

5. Rietveld
Processed strings and recordings inside a reedfield in the Ammersche Boezem. The ancient Egyptians believed that the soul resides in the heart and so, upon death, the Weighing of the Heart occurred. Each human heart is weighed on a giant scale against an ostrich feather. Those souls which balance the scales are allowed to enter into A'Aru “The Field of Reeds”, where they will exist in pleasure for all eternity.

Martijn Hohmann

www.universaal.nl