DOG IN THE CAVE

Dog in Cave is the first edition of a series that fits within the author's project of field recordings under the title “Limits and Derives”. The acousmatic experience in the Canary Islands can be frustrating if we expect to encounter perfect, clean situations. The way in which common spaces are experienced get more complex because of the structuring of property. From the sound perspective, the bubbles are difficult to isolate on these islands where the plots of land come one after another, constantly leaving warning and power-over-boundaries signals behind.
Traditional paths are the ancient footprints of communication in between towns. The first settlers traced these paths while shepherding over the centuries, in the strictest sense of Machado's conception "the path is made by walking". Most of them were invaded by a ravenous practice of occupation and construction, only to be consigned to oblivion by the generation of various town councils and the street asphalt. There are some traces left, especially in the least accessible lands, including those that became "Royal Roads" thanks to a crown warrant around the 17th century, intended to guarantee the transport of population and goods. Those roads had to be of a certain width and zigzag in order to favor the hardest places to access.
Nowadays, the owners of plots gradually occupy paths and prevent and set boundaries with fences, together with other warning and separating signs. Therefore, sound drift is not easy owing to pervasive noise pollution, as well as unevenness in the continuity in attentive walking. Traffic noise, airplanes, barking of powerful mastiff watchdogs, waylaying tenant farmers, etc. Traditional paving remains a thing from the past, with its characteristic wearing out and flavour of stories that transcend time. There is no other way in which patrimony may be claimed, either legally o by a few socially aware inhabitants. One of the paths, the one that gives its name to this album, is called "The King's Path", as legend points it out as the access to the cave that used to be one of the last residences of the last Mencey (king) before the final invasion by the Kingdom of Castile. Today, a dog watches the cave as part of an abandoned farmyard full of debris. Here, as in all dérives, HI-FI sounds from nature mix with those from unexpected incidents.
There are genuine tradition redoubts where the influence of human activity, very often unconscious and invading, is superimposed. At other times the register is the spontaneous expression of the memory when faced with the fact that marks a landscape and its memory. The sources where water springs from are the same. Change in those signs that remain or are in danger of extinction: a dead rabbit full of greenbottle flies, the watchman of one of the farms discusses his passivity facing the hunters' breaking of the fences, the tenant farmer's wife fatal accident with a bull from his own herd thirty years ago… Just the day before a hydro helicopter was extinguishing some small fire in the same mountain. Finally, each route is an exercise of acceptance of reality within chaos and breaks from sound landscapes, complex in the interest of conscious listening and composition.