Dalot & Sound Awakener - Little Things (2018)

‘Little Things’ is the first full length collaboration between Vietnamese sound artist Nhung Nguyen (Sound Awakener) and Greek sound artist Maria Papadomanolaki (Dalot). The album marks the completion of a 1,5 year-long exploration of common threads and interests between the two artists most notably the quotidian, the minute and the unnoticed often found in the fringes of big cities, busy landscapes and trajectories. It starts from ground-level interactions, field recordings of soundwalks in parks, on the streets, hydrophones in rivers and contact microphones on bridges and delicately moves to the ethereal; building up atmospheres of dreamsequences that differ from track to track.

‘Little things’ was created by a process of exchange and extraction of draft ideas between the two artists. The creative and personal connection was deep which results in a sense of intuition and mystery throughout the album. Each track has undergone iterative transformations till its final stage, with each artist peeling off layers and sculpting textures and moods prompted by words, memories and places. While, ‘Strangers in the city’ places the listeners in an urban junction, still with their eyes closed, ‘all that fall’ contemplates on the beauty of fallen leaves, autumnal afternoons and the smell of rain. In pieces like ‘a good day to be alone’ the two artists create feather-like motions resembling invisible drizzles of emotions, solitude and dreams filling up an empty, quiet room on a sunny morning. Elsewhere in the album, as in ‘sailing’, darkness supersedes lightness in a long dive into unknown waters.

The album creates a journey for the listener; a journey of changes between the two artists’ lives; the changes in seasons, life-events, ordinary moments and creative processes that affected the perspectives and emotional states within which this album was produced. Rainer Maria Rilke has written that ‘the only journey is the one within’. In ‘Little Things’ the two artists offer an adventurous exploration of internal landscapes through sound and memory, the light and shadow encountered within. Nguyen and Papadomanolaki embark in a musical dialogue in an effort to create a new common dialect between them, a place where they can feel both familiar and lost.