Valley of the Subconscious

This soundscape was created for NinaLovina’s Valley of the Subconscious exhition. I took inspiration from the consistent colour pallette that Nina uses throughout these works, combined with the ethereal dream-like nature the paintings, to create a looping soundscape that immerses the listener in the sounds that I hear when I view these amazing works of art.

Nina’s work explores our thoughts, patterns, and the way we move through this life form. She invites us to reflect on the parts of life we often overlook… the repetition, the performance, the surface patterns that define our days. Beneath that surface, her paintings reveal the truth …stillness, remembering and return to your truth. The Valley of the Subconscious becomes both a visual and emotional journey inward, through dreamlike landscapes that mirror the hidden rhythms shaping our human story.

The soundscape is a 20-minute loopable track that consists of an underlying and evolving drone, with three distinct melodic sections that emerge and fade away again. These three melodic sections are presented as separate tracks in the album: “The Journey”, “When Shadows Dissolve”, and “Soul Mirage” — named after the paintings that inspired each of the tracks. The evolving drone is included in the album as a separate track for blissful background listening.

The drone was created in a modular system from two sound sources layered on top of each other. The bass note is from a Makenoise Spectraphon being processed through a QPAS and then two Bruxa modules to create wide stereo field. Layered on top of this is the same fundamental note, but produced from the DPO complex oscillator run through a Frap Tools Fumana spectral processor to create the high-end fizz, with reverb from a Meris Mercury X. The three melodic sections contain only one sound source each: The Journey is a single wavetable synthesizer, When Shadows Dissolve is an electric guitar (Fender Jaguar), and Soul Mirage is a Wurlizer electronic piano. A Torso S-4 sculpting (granular) sampler was used to turn these simple sounds into the dream-like rendition that sounds familiar and simultaneously surreal.