Matt Choboter - And Then There Were The Sounds Of Birds (2026) [Hi-Res]

'And Then There Were The Sounds Of Birds' is an interdisciplinary work - originally commissioned and premiered at the 2023 Organ Sound Art Festival - weaving together entangled dream worlds and subconscious spaces. Throughout the ongoing process the motif of birds has been a bridge between conscious and subconscious terrains in various site-specific places.

At the surface it’s an eight-month documentation process of liminal states informed by the regularity of early morning bird monologues, dialogues and collective songs. The bird sounds are markers within Hypnagogic (from relative wakefulness into dreaming) and Hypnopompic states (from dreaming to relative wakefulness). They bookmark certain subliminal feelings, intuitions, emotions and premonitions.

Matt Choboter describes the inspiration behind the compositions: “The dreams seemed to be about unfolding personal as well as archetypal aspects of self. In one recurring dream, I would explore subterranean spaces, like holes, deep maze-like caves that often felt like psychic wombs. In one instance I literally curled up in fetal position at the dead-end of a cave, deep in the earth. I still remember the feeling in my body of warmth and equanimity while being completely isolated from the world in a vast vacuum of “self”.

As a subconscious abstraction - a kind of over-arching parable - the long and winding journey through the cave and arriving in this fetal position informed the process to which I carried out the musical aspects of the work. Reliving many times the visceral experiences within the subterranean space helped me establish an aesthetic for melding microtonality with rhythm, melody and timbre.”