Soundwalk Collective

INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES - WEDNESDAY, SEP. 12 2012, 2025

feat. Jim Jarmusch, Willem Dafoe, Anika, Natalia Lafourcade (2025)

For the 2nd edition of the Biennale Son, the Soundwalk Collective presents Invisible Landscapes, an ambitious sound installation designed specifically for the main hall and control room of the Chandoline power station - a veritable electrical cathedral frozen in the time of its construction. This new creation is part of the collective's ongoing exploration of the invisible and inaudible dimensions of our environment, inviting the public to penetrate the hidden strata of reality through listening.

Presented at the second edition of the Biennale Son à Sion (August 30-November 30, 2025), curated by Jean-Paul Felley and Maxime Guitton, Soundwalk Collective's Invisible Landscapes finds a site of particular resonance at La Centrale de Chandoline - a former hydroelectric power station built to harness the glacial waters flowing down from the surrounding Alps. Once a symbol of modern energy infrastructure, the plant was decommissioned as the glaciers that fed it retreated. Today, its silent turbines resonate with the very absence the work seeks to evoke.

In this new composition, the listener is plunged into a sonic passage between glacial collapse and global drying. The piece opens on the ice fields of Greenland, where the melting of the glaciers - recorded by Stephan Crasneanscki in the summer of 2024 - becomes both subject and sound material. In this fragile environment, filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch brings pure guitar feedback - resonating like a ghostly tone in a "melting glass church". These spectral sounds mingle with the natural cacophony of cracking ice, echoing the slow erosion of ecosystems under climatic pressure.

From the vanishing ice, the journey continues to Chile's Atacama Desert - the driest place on earth, imagined here as the last mirror of ecological collapse. Willem Dafoe reads excerpts from the index to the writings of ecology pioneer Rachel Carson, transforming taxonomy into elegy. His voice, neutral and bare, becomes a litany for what remains. The piece ends with a song of mourning sung by Natalia Lafourcade, invoking the ancestral wisdom of native cultures - a tribute to the Earth as mother, wound and memory. Throughout, fragments of T. S. Eliot, read by Anika Henderson, weave a poetic resistance to the pain of the world.

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Concept and direction: Stephan Crasneanscki
Production: Simone Merli
Field recording: Stephan Crasneanscki, Carlota Marques
Electronic soundscape: Simone Merli, Benjamin Flesser
Modular electronics and operatic voice processing: Radu Cilinca
Additional production: Sofia Sanseverino
Studio recording: Erik Breuer at Analogue Foundation Berlin, Thibaut Javoy at Red Bull Music Studios Paris, and Carlota Marques
Mixing: Francesco Donadello, Lorenzo Setti

Special thanks to: Jean-Paul Felley, Chloé Siganos, Arielle de Saint Phalle, Juan Pablo López-Fonseca, Aleph Molinari, Björk, Marcus Gammel, Robert Henriques, Deutschlandfunk Kultur

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INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES - JLG, 2025

an installation based on the 1955 film Opération Béton by Jean-Luc Godard

Made in 1955, Opération Béton is Jean-Luc Godard's first film. Shot on the site of the Grande Dixence dam, where Godard briefly worked as a laborer, this short documentary blends powerful industrial images with ironic commentary. Beyond the technical chronicle, the film already outlines the contours of critical thinking, where editing, rhythm and voice become tools for deconstructing reality.

In 2025, Soundwalk Collective revisits this seminal work with a two-part installation, conceived as a posthumous dialogue with Godard. On the one hand, Opération Béton is projected in its entirety, accompanied by an original mix of Jean-Luc Godard's voice, reworked from his own sound archives. This vocal weave - fragmentary, spectral - injects a new poetic and political tension into the film, revealing its prophetic depth.

As a counterpoint, an immersive sound composition envelops the space. It is based on field recordings made in Rolle by Stephan Crasneanscki during the last days of Godard's life: the sound of wind on the lake, the sounds of the harbor, fragments of a suspended daily life. These soundscapes, at once intimate and open, evoke the last breaths of a man who questioned memory, language and modernity.

The installation thus creates a back-and-forth between two temporalities: that of the young filmmaker observing the mechanical force of progress, and that, almost silent, of the last hours spent on the shores of Lake Geneva. Between monumental construction and discreet disappearance, À partir de Opération Béton questions what it means to build, think and hear - with the tools of film, voice and sound.

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Soundwalk Collective

Soundwalk Collective is an artistic collective founded in New York by Stephan Crasneanscki in 2000, joined by Simone Merli in 2008 and then by Kamran Sadeghi. Soundwalk is a nomad of sound, tirelessly undertaking improbable journeys from the wastelands of Bessarabia to the desert of Rub al-Khali. By exploring and sampling the sounds of the world around us, Soundwalk captures fragments of a shifting reality to form singular sound compositions. Soundwalk received the Audie Award for its collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa in the Bronx, and the Dalton Pen Award for the Sonic Memorial Soundwalk with Paul Auster at Ground Zero, New York. Soundwalk has multiplied its interdisciplinary collaborations with Patti Smith, Mulatu Astatke, Nan Goldin, Jean-Luc Godard and Sasha Waltz.

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Stephan Crasneanscki

Born in 1966
Based in Berlin

Stephan Crasneanscki, a multidisciplinary artist and creator, is the founder, along with producer Simone Merli, of the Soundwalk Collective , a sound art collective whose works take us on auditory journeys through diverse landscapes and cultural narratives. His approach often blends field recordings with music, lyrics, and other artistic elements. The Soundwalk Collective explores themes such as memory, geography, and the intersection of sound and the environment. His projects have included artists such as Patti Smith, Philip Glass, and Nan Goldin.

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Simone Merli

Born in 1978
Based in Berlin
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A member of the experimental group Soundwalk Collective, he is also co-founder of the independent label Concentric Records, dedicated to ambient music and genre crossovers.

His work spans sound installations, conceptual albums and selected live performances. With Soundwalk Collective, he has released music on several international labels, including Bella Union, Sacred Bones Records, The Vinyl Factory and Apollo.