Hacking Your Ears
Technological advances and new sensory-perceptual acquisitions change our understanding of time and space as the global economy collapses and nature transforms its behaviour.
I explore how we perceive this change and the impact it has on our language, rhythm, and analysis of our environment.
I tell stories that question the construction of a social reality that is simultaneously tangible and virtual.
Through electronic compositions, spatial audio techniques, and digital storytelling, I develop immersive and interactive experiences that move between science fiction, psychoacoustics, and technology.
— Sol Rezza
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.
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.
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.
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.