Tunnel

Tracklist

1

Tunnel

48:26

Credits

• Design – Sandra Kosorotova
• Performer – Savva Terentyev
• Producer – Artyom Astrov

Notes

Recorded in Tallinn Freedom Square Underground Tunnel, December 2015.

Contains USB-stick with WAV audio and short documentary, transcribed notation, interview & extras.

The negative space, the ambience, or simply said the very surrounding of a busker’s routine captured by a pair of microphones is both the method of and what you hear on ‘Tunnel’. The three components – the underground, the passersby and the melodica player – form an ambient portrait, manifesting itself as a free play of social and aesthethical hierarchies.

In the tunnel, twenty to thirty seconds is what you have as a street performer to catch the attention of the unintended listener. Unsentimental setting, where for most only clear message matters.

But what really matters? If all this is about entertainment worth some coins, then it’s like squeezing out whatever hasn’t been squeezed out already by the black hole of consumerist inertia. But also this kind of rhetoric feels flat in it’s moralistic light; fortunately enough, it doesn’t make us into a dedicated spectator of every non-profit-oriented event.

One part of it is the unintended listener, trapped in the bardo (intermediate state) of travel, with one way in and one way out. The other part is the constanta-like presence of the street artist; although perceived as an object himself, he’s the one with an overview of what is happening. One can tell it by his gaze and body posture. But even the artist’s presence is relative in it’s scope. The tunnel regulates itself day and night, effortlessly and without judgement.