If women have historically operated as conduits for the dreams of machines, then noise too has a peculiarly female quality…
— | Nina Power
Hacking Your Ears
Sol Rezza is an Argentinean composer, sound designer, and audio engineer.
She specializes in spatial audio and digital storytelling. The analysis of rhythm, time, and space is a fundamental part of the core of her work.
Her practice incorporates experimental electronics with spatial audio to create immersive experiences for virtual ecosystems and live performances.
In her work, she combines multilingual voice samples, granular synthesis, sequencers, and other compositional methods to produce narratives, charged with a minimalist imprint, that moves between science fiction, psychoacoustics, and technology.
Since she was a child, Sol Rezza has found a place of inspiration in listening to shortwave radio. In Argentina, she studied radio production and worked on various radio programs. In 2006, she embarked on a journey with an itinerant radio project throughout Latin America, where she collaborated with community radio stations, giving audio editing workshops and field recordings. Technical limitations force her to experiment with alternative forms of audio editing and mixing. This is how she discovered radio art and incorporated some elements into her first practices.
The journey through Latin America takes her to Mexico. Captivated by the stories of the aboriginal world, she lived there for twelve years, exploring the sounds and narratives of those lands.
In Mexico, she studied audio engineering, and sound design and finally developed experimental sound productions for radio, video games, installations, and live performances.
In the analysis of space through sound, Rezza discovers a fundamental aspect that will define all her work.
She studies acoustics, multichannel audio, and immersive audio and begins to develop works and writings around spatial audio.
In 2011, she released his album SPIT on the Acustronica net label. On this album, she fuses experimental electronics with noise. This work gets recognition in several North American media, and the artist Steve Heimbecker presents it in the first concert series for 64 channels.
2015 is a key year in Sol’s career. She presents her work In the Darkness of the World commissioned by the CTM Festival co-commissioned with Deutschland Radio Kultur. Inspired by Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, this work combines hydrophone recordings, experimental music, and multichannel audio. After a residency at the Technische Universität Berlin, she performs at the HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU2) during the CTM festival.
“In The Darkness Of The World, is a radio play of sorts conceived by Sol Rezza. Combining the alien, otherworldly sounds of the deep ocean with snatches of spoken word and rich, womblike swathes of ambience, the overall effect is something like slipping in and out of anesthesia disorientating, but undeniably pleasant.” – Crack Magazine
In early 2018, Radio Corax and Goethe-Institut Germany invited Sol to take part in the first Radio Art Residency. For three months, she develops a sound map of the city of Halle in Germany. The map comprises twenty sound works, among them Estamos Mediendo el Río (We are Measuring the River) and Opening. Opening includes an interview with the English theoretical physicist Julian Barbour and his theory of timeless physics.
2019 is a significant year for Rezza. She returns to her homeland, Argentina. Her work Rooms in your Mind takes part in the centenary of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. The Festival Tsonami de Arte Sonoro (Chile) and Kunstradio (Austria) commissioned her to work on the piece POOL – Die Möglichkeiten des Wassers, a generative composition made from loops of recordings of fragments of water and conventional household appliances.
In 2020, the Cantera space of the Centro Cultural Kirchner and the Centro de Arte Sonoro (CASo) invite Sol to participate in the project De Cerca Nadie es Normal, together with artists Agustina Wetzel and Cecilia Castro, for the sound reinterpretation of the 1929 documentary «Por Tierras Argentinas» by Federico Valle.
This year, 2020, she is part of the MUTEK Festival with the audiovisual work All is Waves. She also joined the Amplify DAI initiative.
The following year, in 2021, she created the work Finite Infinite for the virtual exhibition Para 80000, curated and directed by Anja Lekavski, Kalas Liebfried, and Jakob Braito.
That same year, she presented her performance Inundare at the MUTEK AR/ES Festival. She also took part in the panel Does Volume Equal Power?, introducing collaborative research with artists Analucía Roeder and Gabrielle Harnois-blouin on the use of intensity in electronic music and digital visual art.
In collaboration with the artist Analucía Roeder, she presents the work Filaments of a Circle at the In/Out Festival.
At the end of this year, Rezza takes part in the artistic residency Binaural Nodar in Portugal in collaboration with the artist Franco Falistoco. During the residency, she developed the work Sentronium. An early approach to artificial intelligence through storytelling.
In November 2021, she presents in England her audiovisual work, for 25 audio channels, entitled Catastrophic Forgetting. A work that explores the development of artificial intelligence. For the realization of the performance, she uses the open source multichannel audio plug-in SoundSquares, designed by the developer Daz Disley.