Buoyant Figures by Luka Schuurman

This album is one about change. It came to be as a rainy soundtrack for a long and tough winter in the city followed by a bittersweet summer, in which people lose and get lost, find and get found, search and are searched for. There’s intimacy and distance, standing still and moving forward. Maybe it’s even about growing up, in a way. This album was unplanned, like mornings of melancholia, the death of a close one, spontaneously falling in love or the first sunny day of the year... it just sort of came to me with a sudden urgency.

The sounds are based on a true story. Well, it’s not really a story with a beginning and end, or something that should be told as a story, but rather just a piece of reality; a certain span of time (and space). The album resembles more an environment than a chronological story, in that it presents sculptures of sound that can be walked through as if they are streets or buildings in a city, rather than building blocks for a storyline. Still, all is based on events and encounters I have experienced in the months prior to and during the creation process of the album which were very real, although some felt more like a haze or a dream.

Like different aspects in life, the album contains both compositional and improvisational pieces, some of them actually having a clear beginning and end, and others being continuous and ever-flowing. It also contains many field recordings of city ambience and nature. The recording sessions took place on a couple of Sundays and one Thursday in Volta, with Geert van der Beek’s wonderful engineering. The project required a new approach that was built mostly around loose compositions and overdubs, different from the improvised albums I recorded before. Some pieces are excerpts of improvisations I did on my own or with other musicians, either with or without additional overdubs. Some pieces are parts of recordings edited into collages of layered loops. More thoughts went into sounds and specific parts, and more thoughts went into the mixing afterwards. Still, I wanted to capture the unpolished sounds of the feelings I had in that period, resulting in the use of a detuned piano and uncontrolled guitar feedback as well as chance combinations created by desynchronised ambient tracks.

The interesting thing about the continuous and desynchronised pieces on this album is that, while the listener clearly hears what is there, they only hear so much of what there used to be and they may notice how much actually is not heard. Which is: beginnings and endings for the continuous pieces, and recurring harmony for the desynchronised pieces. There is a sense of movement in these works, like listening to something that just keeps going without ever being complete, which makes them start living a life of their own. It makes them complete in their own right, ironically enough. It resembles how people fade in and out of each other’s presence during a lifetime in constant change of form, without always beginning or ending, and it creates a complex structure of sounds relating to each other on different levels. Similar to how people can be strongly connected on a deep level, or only just know each other’s names.

As much as this album is about change and movement, though, it is not about the future or the past. Nor is it about the present, even. Because some feelings just don’t connect with any frame of time, and lean more towards timelessness or spacelessness instead. This music is not about changing into something or moving towards a destination, but instead it is about change within the current state of being. Rather than where time goes, it is about where it is as it goes. I attempted to put the listener on a ledge balancing between timeliness and timelessness, to freeze the moment and snap out of existence for a seemingly small notion. But that notion, then, can be as small or big as they like, because they are not tied to the concept of time anymore. And the same goes for space, naturally. It should be possible, but I didn’t prove it yet, to stay within this music forever and ever and ever. This is a risk that should be taken into account when one decides to give this album a listen. This is a disclaimer, and it is also a joke, but please be careful still.

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Playlist by Arjan van Sorge for the Free Radicals program on Concertzender Nederland, featuring ‘Buoyant Figures in the Dark’ along with some other really cool stuff:
https://www.concertzender.nl/programma/free_radicals_541169/

“Met ‘Buoyant Figures’ heeft de Amsterdamse gitarist Luka Schuurman de vrije improvisatie . . . voor een belangrijk deel verruild voor de filmische geluidssculpturen. Daarmee ontvouwt hij zijn vaardigheden als componist en beperkt zich tevens niet langer tot de gitaar. Sterke composities vinden we hier, afgewisseld met het terloopse van de improvisatie.”
- Ben Taffijn (Nieuwe Noten)
https://www.nieuwenoten.nl/?p=8113

Guitarist, composer of experimental music, improviser and graphic designer from Amsterdam. Guitarist in Halli Crigi:
https://keroxenlabel.bandcamp.com/album/shinedown

open.spotify.com