Cocorico bells

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By Paul Collins. "This sound piece uses a field recording from the tiny village of Brinay, Cher in the centre France, overlayed with church bells recorded on Museum Island (Museumsinsel) in Berlin.

On the weekends, we would go down to my wife’s family pile, le Chateau de Brinay, for what would invariably and against all hope and expectations, turn into an exhausting stay. Every morning in the early pre-dawn, the local rooster would begin crowing just below my window, setting all the other birds on the property to a-honking, cooing, chirping, squawking. I would lie in bed and wonder bitterly how my newly adopted country could have actually taken on the rooster as their national symbol and it’s grotesque crowing (cocorico!) as the onomatopoeic expression of their patriotic pride. I would finally fall back into a fitful sleep, dreaming of wringing its supercilious neck. And then the bells would start in, calling the ever -diminishing faithful to mass at the little 11th century church on the property; l’ Eglise St Aignan de Brinay.

Dada, a direct bi-product of the ridiculous horrors of the First World War, was a full frontal attack on nationalism and its symbols, and on the Church, which, on all sides, embraced the war as holy, despite its being a civil war amongst Christians (see Philip Jenkins; The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade. 2014).

My method in this sound piece is a direct reference to the paintings of Françis Picabia, where one pictorial element is overlayed, or superimposed on another element, thereby creating a more complex and somewhat jarring whole. Two elements has proven, in my own work as a practicing artist, to be the ideal combination for the creation of simple and cohesive pictures.

The first track of Cocorico Bells is a straight-up recording of domesticated birds wandering around the Chateau. The idyllic sound of water flowing under a foot bridge is interrupted by the hideous crowing and honking of fowl. "