Travelogue by Kaarlo Herden & IT904

Travelogue
Kaarlo Herden & IT904

Kaarlo Herden & IT904 are long-time associated individuals who
have shared a path of unconventional music in various forms.
Fascinated by the aesthetic of geographical and anthropological
expeditions that took place in the late 19th century and the pre–
World War II era, they started to create soundscapes with the aim
of providing soundtracks for imagery and footage coming from the
extraordinary achievements of those adventurers.

A box of sand draws inspiration from the Italo-Turkish War
between the Italian and Ottoman forces. In September 1911,
Italy declared war on the once-mighty, transcontinental Ottoman
Empire. Ambitious Italy decided to expand its growing African
empire by attacking Ottoman-ruled Tripolitania (Libya).
The Italo-Ottoman War was the first three-dimensional war with
aerial reconnaissance and bombing, and the first use of armoured
vehicles, deployed alongside conventional ground and naval
forces.
Thirty thousand men would die in a struggle for what was described
as little more than “uno scatolone di sabbia”, a box of sand.

Ain Zara is the name of an oasis located in the Libyan desert
where an important battle was fought in December 1911 during the
Italo-Turkish War between the Italian and Ottoman forces. Ain Zara
is also known for being the place of the first aerial bombardment
ever recorded, which was carried out by Italian aviator Giulio
Gavotti.

Taklamakan takes its inspiration from Sven Hedin’s first
expedition towards the end of the 19th century through an immense
and hostile desert in Central Asia.
The Taklamakan Desert in China is known as the “Sea of Death”
(or Takla Makan in Uyghur, meaning “you can enter but not leave”)
due to its vast, shifting sand dunes, extreme temperatures, deadly
sandstorms, and harsh, arid conditions that historically swallowed
travelers and ancient Silk Road settlements, making escape nearly
impossible.
Hedin came close to dying of thirst, yet his journey led to the discovery
of lost ancient cities buried beneath the sand, as well as inland bodies
of water along the Silk Road.

The Wandering Lake is the title of a book published by Sven Hedin
in 1937. After forty years during which his destiny was inextricably
linked to that of this mysterious lake and the surrounding region, he
led a successful expedition to the area in the far eastern corner of
China’s Taklamakan Desert. The lake of Lop Nur, the “Heart of the
Heart of Asia,” was one of the world’s strangest phenomena. The
wandering lake no longer exists, but for millennia it was in a perpetual
state of flux, drifting from north to south, often by tens of kilometres
over just a few years. It was once the lifeblood of the great Silk Road
kingdom of Loulan, which flourished in this otherwise barren region
2,000 years ago.

The Desert concept:

It is evident that the desert serves as the background for these four
journeys.

The desert has been the source of inspiration for important musicians
and composers, such as Egisto Macchi (Il deserto) and Edgar Varèse
(Déserts) who have struggled with such a theme, that is the exploration
of a space, whose expressive context is both a physical place and a
metaphor for one’s existential and spiritual condition. This concept is
better explained by this quote from Varèse:
“… Déserts is a highly evocative word. It suggests space, solitude,
detachment. To me it means not only deserts of sand, sea, mountains
and snow, outer space, deserted city streets, not only stripped aspects
of nature that evoke nudity and distance, but also that remote inner
space of the mind that no telescope can reach, a world of mystery
and essential loneliness…”

... life, years, months, weeks, days, hours, moments... are tunnels in which you enter, change and exit... ready to enter the next... sometimes you enter because necessary, sometimes sometimes because you have to… this is the raw cycle of consciousness.