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Moulins Engloutis

by Alan Currall

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about

Moulins Engloutis is a sound piece I recorded for Guyan Porter's Tide Wave Radio, which is part of the Tide Mills Project.

A little background and context:

Looking at images and footage, and reading about the Tide Mills site, I was struck by a feeling of melancholy for this lost community. It's history seems to haunt the landscape in a way that is familiar to me through the similarity to the post industrial, remote, rural village where I live. The industry here used to be lead mining. When this became uneconomical, in the early to mid 20th Century, the village gradually became depopulated to the point of almost becoming a ghost village. At one point it was even suggested that the natural bowl of hills that the village lies in should be dammed and flooded to create a huge reservoir.

In musical terms, the immediate association I made was to Debussy's La Cathédrale Engloutie, (The Sunken Cathedral) and the Legend of Ys. [ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_cath%C3%A9drale_engloutie ]

For Moulins Engloutis I found a recording of Debussy's prelude, played by the Russian-British concert pianist Mark Hambourg, which was published in 1926. [ archive.org/details/78_preludes-bk1-la-cathedrale-engloutie-no10_hambourg-mark ] This was contemporary with the occupation of the village of Tide Mills, around ten years before it was condemned and evacuated.

I took this recording, which is from an old 78 record and has a fair deal of surface noise, into a Music Thing Modular Radio Music module. [ www.musicthing.co.uk/pages/radio.html ] This was then looped and electronically treated through a patch I created on a modular synthesiser. The final recording is a live improvisation of this modular synthesiser patch with accompanying improvisation on a ASM Hydrasynth keyboard synthesiser.

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released September 20, 2021

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Alan Currall Scotland, UK

Alan Currall (FkaThe National Database) is a music side-project of the visual artist Alan Currall. www.alancurrall.com

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