Two Rooms From The Memory Palace [CD]

“Two Rooms from the Memory Palace"" re-imagines and captures the live, visceral impact of Andrea Parkins’ immersive eight-channel fixed-media composition “by the same name. The work highlights Parkins’ ongoing exploration of poetic interrelationships between site and time, and gestural trace and acoustical space, “Two Rooms” was initially developed as a spatial audio work, designed for diffusion through adjacent acoustical spaces that sonically respond in real-time interaction, thus enabling shifting and sometimes startling sonic juxtapositions to take place. “Two Rooms from the Memory Palace” premiered in 2015 at the New York Electronic Art Festival on NYC’s Governor’s Island and was later site-adapted for Akousma Festival in Montreal as a performance/installation for 40 loudspeakers in a single listening space.

Later iterations of “Two Rooms from the Memory Palace” - with its multi-pitched and slowly churning layers of electronic feedback – have included “The Third Room”, an additional audio installation that acts as a sonic “disturbance” in relation to the lush and immersive sonic world of “Two Rooms.” “The Third Room” is a random playlist of fragmentary sonic snippets from the massive archive of audio recordings Parkins has been creating and collecting for the past several decades, focusing on the interplay of objects and idiosyncratic acoustic spaces. “The Third Room” is accessible to listeners via a weblink included in the CD package.