In April 2021 an article was published in Sul Ponticello, a Spanish-language online music and sound art magazine, entitled “Apego Aural”, in which composer Carlos Eldelmiro tells us about his project on the influence of our mothers’ voices on our interpersonal relationships. The artist, along with the collaboration of Diego Amozoo and Hackerspace Mty, has created a software that measures and compares the frequencies of two voice recordings: one corresponding to the voice of one’s mother and the other of another person you care about. “I would like to get out of the antagonism that is sometimes created between the technological and the organic,” Eldelmiro points out. Although he makes use of the technological, he approaches the recording not as a mere sound record, or at least not in the case of all recordings. “In my opinion, the dislocation of time that a recording creates gives it an added value in a direct relationship with whoever listens to the material,” he concludes. I instantly connected with this feeling of the author, who relies on the recording as a living and mutating entity in relation to space, perception, and time.

I cannot deny that there is a certain attachment to the sound materials that I have recorded over time while walking and travelling. When the time comes to open that trunk of audio-affective traces, listening becomes an experience in which all timeshappen at the very same time. Everything takes on new meanings and new states. The time of non-time. Perhaps detaching from some sound recordings is also a form of attachment, a healthy attachment so that the ephemeral remains, somehow, alive in its physical-spatial absence. The recording as a living thing. And the living as something in constant transmutation.

At this moment, I live between two countries (Spain and France), in a sort of nomadic or mobile life. In March 2025, I had the chance to travel to Japan. It was my first trip to such a distant place, in a year full of uncertainty. During the trip I wondered about the next steps I would take in my life’s journey. I felt an eternal inner voice in my mind to ask: “What’s next, Laura?”
When I was little, I started collecting subway maps from around the world. Whenever I heard that someone I knew was traveling, I’d always ask them to bring me a metro map. I still keep them today. I used to dream that the subway line in my city connected to the metro of another city in another country. That the next stop was far, far away. And that I was always somewhere else. Or in many places at once.

In Japanese, “Tsugi wa” means “the next one…” These were the words I heard repeatedly at train stations, where these “hidden speakers” appeared constantly. There is a double meaning for the word “speakers” in both English and Japanese but not in Spanish (oradores/altavoces). The hidden voices informed me of the next train on each track, at each station… The constant information was incessant. Even recorded sounds simulating birdsong indicated the correct platform, the exit door, or the road to take… This is a measure in Japan both for blind people and to help citizens navigate more easily and quickly within the labyrinth of train and subway stations. You can hear this birdsong in the audio piece and also in this little video I uploaded on Youtube.

My walk concludes near a “suikinkutsu” in Kyoto, where the drops of water bring me closer, perhaps, to the source of some path yet to be traveled… Drops of water that return me to the acoustics of the present space-time, far from the incessant acousmatics of the recordings at the stations. In a certain way, I myself live trapped between recordings… Kidnapped by different space-times that never correspond to the moment.

I recommend listening to this piece with headphones in order to appreciate the immersive binaural technique.