Telharmonium is a multilayered audiovisual construction for voices, images, accoustic and electronic instuments. The effect of saturation with the audiosphere, created between the recollection of auditory memories, and the creation of sound imaginations. Between the rattling of a train, the bustle of an airport and the creaking of the floor, where inhuman voices speak their thoughts loudly. Silence is a categorial error. Something happens everywhere. Everything tells its own story and a free will to be heard.
The name of the project refers to the first electromechanical musical instument, built in the late nineteenth century in America. Telharmonium made it possible to create sounds yet unheard, where its frequencies were generated by electromagnetic currents.
Telharmonium is an open project with participation from various musicians and audiovisual creators. Since 2017 Krzysztof Pawlik, Wojciech Benicewicz, Jarosław Sobolewski, Małgorzata Dancewicz and Maciej Trybuchowski, took part in the project. Telharmonium’s audiovisual realisations are based on sound and video field recordings inspired by the moods of different places. Its first performance illustrated the southern beaches of England’s Dungeness headland, the site of Derek Jarman’s “Garden”. In Telharmonium’s another audiovisual performance, cameras and microphones record an hour-long process of melting Vatnajökull glacier fragments in Icelandic Jökulsárlón glacial lake.
The sounds of field recordings, natural sounds of ethnic, accoustic and electronic instruments are deconstructed so the boundary between the accoustic and the electronic is blurred. The range and intensity of visuals and sounds is built on the experience of the place.