Memories are louder than images (2022)

Memories are louder than images is a hybrid work that exists somewhere between installation and performance. The project began with a sound archive I had been building for years: an ever-growing collection of recordings that naturally fell into four distinct categories. In practice, they were simply four folders on my hard drive, each with its own name: Room, Karreveld, Guitar, and Speech.

Room contained all my ‘near-field’ recordings: intimate, close-up sounds, the subtle details of ordinary objects.

Karreveld held the opposite: wide, expansive field recordings that captured entire spaces. The name comes from the very first field recording I made at the park surrounding Château Karreveld in Molenbeek, a moment that unintentionally started this whole archival habit.

Guitar was home to anything musical: instrumental recordings, vocal fragments, or any sound with tonal qualities. It’s named after the first recordings that entered this category, simple experiments with my acoustic guitar.

Speech is self-explanatory: recordings containing text; monologues, conversations, and many diary-like voice notes collected throughout the years.

I kept these four categories because I noticed something curious: when I played one recording from each folder at the same time, the result often felt balanced; almost like an improvised band with its own recurring roles. The combination consistently produced a rich, structured, and surprisingly musical texture.

The first piece I developed from this archive was a self-generating soundscape system created in SuperCollider. It randomly selected and layered sounds from the four folders, producing unexpected combinations that gave the recordings new artistic meaning. Sounds captured in completely different contexts began to “speak” to one another, forming chance dialogues.

A later version of the work introduced a performance element. I let the generative soundscape play live while I reacted to it in real time, speaking/singing into a microphone about what I was hearing. This created a simple improvisational exchange between me and the system; a way of listening, responding, and shaping the piece together as it unfolded.

Ultimately, Memories Are Louder Than Images is a meditation on time and the way it bends and distorts what we remember, but also on how we each construct our own small timelines; our personal histories. In a way, it’s also quietly existential: an acknowledgment that the whole project is, at its core, a somewhat futile attempt to document my own life; an effort that is always incomplete, always slipping away, and perhaps a little pathetic in the vastness of the universe. Yet it isn’t entirely bleak. Beneath it all is a desire to be heard, to be understood, to connect; even with an audience that might also be unsure why they’re there, listening, and, in a broader sense, unsure what they’re doing in life at all.