Every year in Ocotepec (back then a small town, in the center of the country), the community stages the Passion of Christ across nearly four square kilometers of streets, hills, and vacant lots. Everyone plays a role: neighbors become soldiers, one neighbor is chosen as Jesus, a young woman becomes Mary, and, with complete conviction, the whole town performs its own myth. The communal tradition inhabits a story that everyone believes in and nobody mistakes for “reality.”
For my part, I sent three recording technicians into this celebration with few instructions: “Move freely, no predetermined paths, no fixed positions. If you run into each other, no problem, but don’t stay together for long.” Jesus moved through the space along the planned route of the Via Crucis: a gravitational presence, sometimes surrounded by all three microphones, sometimes approached by none.
GPT-PROMPTED: REAL ROCKET TRAVEL AND MULTICHANNEL SOUND PERSPECTIVE IN SYNC.
The three resulting DAT tracks were synchronized and mixed into a single stereo track for use on stage and on the CD. In the edit, I shifted the relative volumes of the three simultaneous recordings, altering the listener’s perceived spatial relationship to the sound sources. This allowed me to construct listening trajectories that no one could have traveled physically.
For example: one microphone, A, captures the launch of a firework by a man whispering a prayer, and another, B, captures its explosion 500 meters away, along with a person also quietly praying; simply by controlling the volume of the two already synchronized recordings, the final listener can “travel” 500 meters in seconds, from the launch to the explosion at that distance, realizing at the same time that two people were praying all along. Although the rocket and the prayers share a sound perspective, the rocket is pure acoustics; the prayers, simultaneous yet far apart, also share semantic weight.
