An Attempt on Poplars

 

I love poplars. Poplars roar loudly. Poplars exaggerate when they reproduce the wind. They are by far the noisiest trees. That is why they have always found my unreserved admiration as acoustic amplifiers of leaf movement. This imagination of a sound space, an acoustic expansion of many individual sounds and the idea of something extremely large from a human size perspective. The largest poplars I have ever seen (and I have followed them) are located on the Lower Rhine. Huge trees as high as churches and incredibly audible from afar.

The expansion of a draft, immaterial and invisible, becomes very noisily perceptible. And this is exactly how I approached the phenomenon of these trees. The rustling of the leaves as an image of wind and movement. Stronger or weaker and composed of an seemingly infinite number of individual sounds. As a summation and polyphony of thousands of moving leaves on a tree and as its listening field carried by the movement of the air. In the moment of musicalization, the possibility of listening to the constantly changing sound opens up - never static, always in constant modulation. It is like entering a space made up of many individual sounds and their presence as a cloud that carries itself independently and ever further in its acoustic addition.

Norderheistedt, May 2011