»Umwelt Vol. 1« encompasses a wide span of seasons, places, times of day and aggregate states. Chirping birds are disrupted by jet fighter trainings while kids play in the nearby playground. The wind of the Moroccan dessert excites harmonicas while thousands of fleas devour a jellyfish at a French beach. Recordings were captured on Austrian land, Scottish rivers and at the Croatian sea at 3 a.m., just a blink before somebody got woken up by a bird in the early rites of spring.
Coined at the beginning of the 20th century, the term Umwelt carries an additional meaning to the widely known German translation signifying environment or certain surroundings in a spatial context. Umwelt further describes the sensory reality of living species as subjects within their own limited perception – assuming it to be general as most creatures besides human beings are not able to deliberately become aware of their Umwelt let alone transcending it.
The 23 contributions to the compilation »Umwelt Vol. 1« seek to break down this protective wall of senses to surpass structuralist boundaries by discerning diverse realities from a human perspective emphatically widened to a multitude of different sensory and imagined realities. In opposition to the humanocentric view of the world and its complex ecosystems »Umwelt Vol. 1« is an effort to unlearn habits of thought, attempting to divert the focus by scoping in on raw and mostly unedited Field Recordings to center different species' Umwelts and how they are determined, ignored, and disrupted by humanity.
- S. Nicolussi