2025.08.18-25

The second week shifted the ground. We left the Humboldt Forum’s post-production suite and moved into the circular listening lab at TU Berlin. Smaller and darker than the Hörraum, it felt closer, almost like working inside the chamber of an ear. The intimacy of the space sharpened our experiments. What had been theory in Week One—imagined bubbles of sound, simultaneous voices—could now be tested in practice.

The structure of the piece began to settle. The sprawling thirty-minute draft folded inward. The introduction collapsed into Scene 1, the coda folded into Scene 4. What emerged was a four-part composition, not driven by chronology but by leaps across temporalities: prisoners of war counting in 1916, a chant from Kalinga in 1933, my father’s voice in 2025, and my own narration threaded between them. The piece began to sound less like a documentary, more like a fractured history of listening.

Jay’s arrival changed the rhythm of the work. He arrived from the Quezon City carrying Curly Tops chocolates, small sweets that carried childhood memories to Berlin. More importantly, he brought his dramaturgical eye and his sharp ear for my voice. Together we recorded new narrations at Humboldt Forum, with him sitting behind the console directing me. It was a shift in roles—I was no longer the engineer but the speaker, no longer holding the frame but inhabiting it. Jay knew my rhythms well enough to be precise, even strict: adjusting my octave, controlling my breath, pushing me to sustain energy when exhaustion set in. His direction gave the narration shape, but also reminded me how much of this project is carried not only by sound material but by trust and collaboration.

Nico drove the excitement of spatialization. He wanted to hear how the material would stretch across the speakers. My DAW sessions had swollen to eighty tracks, color-coded and spread wide for clarity. At TU, we began compressing them into stems, preparing for the translation into Reaper for the Hörraum. What had felt like excess in Week One—every repetition separated, every layer isolated—became resource here: grains of sound that could be split, scattered, and re-formed in space.

The imagined bubbles of sound took shape. Narrations, translations, and reflections could be positioned in different corners of the room. Walking through, one could step into a bubble of clarity while the rest blurred into a distant hum. Sometimes the voices overlapped into cacophony, and then suddenly thinned into one sharp thread. The experience revealed the essence of spatialization: not one fixed piece, but multiple possible pieces, each determined by the listener’s movement and position.

Narration began to loosen its hold. The long passages I had written and recorded in Neukölln explained too much. In stereo, narration was necessary to hold things together, but in spatial form, it weighed the piece down. With Jay’s arrival, I recorded new versions at Humboldt Forum, this time with him directing my delivery—controlling register, breath, pacing. It was a relief to step back from the engineer’s chair and simply voice the text. But the clearer the sound composition became, the less scaffolding it needed. Whole passages of narration could now be stripped away.

A single question reframed the work. Counting is not neutral—it is the grammar of chronos, of colonial time imposed. In using those recordings, was I repeating the violence of counting, or opening them toward another form of listening? Loops, fragments, and repetitions became more than compositional tools; they were ways of resisting the metric time that the archive tried to enforce. Over lunch, Maurice Mengel asked: “But did you also count?” You will have to listen to the piece to know my response.

By the end of the week, the frame was clear. We worked through to Monday, the 25th of August, cutting the draft below twenty minutes. This was both a technical requirement for the Hörraum’s listening cycle programming and an artistic decision to stay within the format. The composition no longer needed narration as scaffolding; it could stand on its own. At Humboldt Forum, in Week One, sound had seemed bound to chronology: narration following narration, track after track. But at the TU Electronic Sound Studio, spatialization shifted this entirely. Time could be unmoored from sequence. Past and present could coexist, layered as sonic bubbles. Soldiers of 1916, chanters of 1933, my father in 2024—all could sound together, not as a line, but as a space.

The piece became less about narrating history and more about inhabiting its simultaneity. Listeners will need to enter the work more than once, moving through its spaces, choosing different pathways. There will be no single experience of the piece—only multiple listenings, multiple openings.

Week Two was not a conclusion, but an opening. Sound broke free of linear time and entered into space. The task ahead was not only to refine the material, but to trust the composition to hold itself, without scaffolding, without excess narration, suspended between intimacy and expansiveness. ☐