Jacob Kirkegaard - Arc (2016)

Holotype Editions is pleased to present a new work by acclaimed sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard. Arc was originally commissioned for INMUTE ’14 as a soundtrack to Carl Th. Dreyer’s silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). In this new edit, running to just under 36 minutes, Kirkegaard’s refined mastery of tone unfolds in two arc-shaped tracks dedicated to the LP format.

In his score, Kirkegaard fragments and stretches music from Joan’s time, aiming to expose the mystically charged atmosphere that could simultaneously declare Joan of Arc a visionary and a heretic. The outcome is an immersive score of prolonged choral-like harmonies that evolve slowly, constantly shifting between darkness and light. Arc lives in moments of transition, embracing the subtle ambiguities that were so difficult for the English clerics to understand and yet so pliable in Joan’s flexible mind. Perhaps it is what shade sounds like, or perhaps it is a meditative resonance on the brilliance and terror of thought. Arc is an unfolding of nebulous sound that emerges to the surface when time is suspended.

Jacob Kirkegaard is an artist and composer who works in carefully selected environments to generate recordings that are used in compositions, or combined with video imagery in visual, spatial installations. His works reveal unheard sonic phenomena and present listening as a means of experiencing the world. Kirkegaard has recorded sonic environments as different as subterranean geyser vibrations, empty rooms in Chernobyl, Arctic calving glaciers and tones generated by the human inner ear itself.