Fact Mix: upsammy & Jonathan Castro

upsammy and Jonathan Castro present ‘Dwell,’ an AV mix mapping the emotional resonance of space through sound.

On Germ in a Population of Buildings, her second album and debut for PAN, Thessa Torsing, the Amsterdam-based artist known as upsammy, delves even further into her careful engagement with space through sound, casting intricate sonic topologies through synthesis, sampling and field recoding. It is an album “rooted in her interest for ambiguous environments in constant shift,” an intricate exercise in mapping complex terrain in oscillation and in doing so uncovering the sound, to borrow the title of another of her projects, of ‘placeness produced.’ Her preoccupation with states of flux is shared by Peruvian multidisciplinary artist and collaborator Jonathan Castro.

“Rhythm is a medium of change,” he told It’s Nice That, “it constitutes a transition – from fear to joy, from ennui to awareness, from a simple movement to choreography or ritual movements, organic and inorganic, ranging from dance to breathing, prayer to meditation, drumming to the sound of a heartbeat.” When it came time to put together a live show in support of the album, Castro’s synthesis of digital and biological imagery, scraped and blurred together in pixellated layers, made visible the textures and terrain of Torsing’s productions. “This video is a continuation of the project,” explains Torsing of ‘Dwell,’ “where we explore different locations and their affectivity through sound and image.”

Showcasing four original upsammy tracks and a new iteration of Castro’s live visual system, which was developed in collaboration with Tharim Cornelisse, ‘Dwell’ is described by Castro as an “assemblage of our deep interest and affective bond with environment.” Drawing from the same well of organic sound design, accelerated licks of percussion, sun-dappled synthesis and pitch-shifted whisper that Torsing plumbed for Germ in a Population of Buildings, we are invited to revisit the sounds and emotional resonance of that space. “Sometimes these locations are very specific and recognizable, but they can also be a texture or represented by a symbol,” she explains. “Each location carries a meaning which is expressed by different materials or voices within the music. Archetypal sounds are used as points for localising and way-finding – restoring forgotten moments.”

You can find more information about Jonathan Castro and his work on his website, or by following him on Instagram.

You can find upsammy on Instagram and Bandcamp. Germ in a Population of Buildings is out now.