The Sounds of José Val del Omar

The sounds of José Val del Omar. Invisible Auto Sacramental: The Message from Granada.

Tags: Mystic, Musique concrète, Audio art, Family archive, Sound installation

Javier Viver: author of the dissertation "Laboratorio Val del Omar": I think that the importance of sound for Val del Omar is related to the concept of ‘total show’.

We also have a fragment from Invisible Auto Sacramental, which is a very interesting piece because it links what would later be his two great works: Granada Watermirror and Fire in Castile.

Val del Omar: (Inaudible)….I think it has to be alright, of course it has to be alright, let’s see, let’s see, how these two sounds are, and there, now…

Fragment from Granada Watermirror: He who gives the most, has the most, God’s mathematics, he who gives the most, has the most, he who gives the most, has the most…the most.

Llorenç Barber, audio artist: He was a man who, like all good avant-garde artists, conceived of art as a total revolutionary act, without boundaries, limits or formats, without separations. It flowed over the walls and became electronic, with a plural focus and an expansion of sound. Just like the images slipped away from him through the walls, he didn’t see sound as mono-channel, or bi-channel or octagonal, but multi-channel.

Javier Viver: Many utterances in these films, especially in Granada Watermirror, had their origin in Invisible Auto Sacramental.

Fragment from Granada’s Watermirror: Here is suspense, suspense, suspense, stagnant, stagnant.

Javier Viver: He proposed doing a broadcast with fourteen independent channels arranged spherically in a room.

Val del Omar set up an installation and did a fragment from the finished script of Invisible Auto Sacramental, which is preserved today with the notes, with many specifications about the work.

Val del Omar: You have to show how to look at God straight on, through what is elemental.

Rafael Alberti reciting a poem by Federico García Lorca: “The two rivers of Granada descend from snow to wheat. The two rivers of Granada: one of tears, the other of blood.”

Javier Viver: Val del Omar was from Granada and friends with Lorca. He participated in the ‘regenerationism’ movement by re-evaluating this typically Spanish genre, the auto sacramental, which had been banned. In this piece, he takes on a huge challenge because of its novelty: creating an auto sacramental without staging anything. Instead, the listener constructs the staging when they hear the audio.

Fragment from Fire in Castile: “Bells touching fire, leave the sky without air, a ceiling of white fish, turn it into…”

Fragment from Granada Watermirror: “Death is only a word that is left behind when one loves, he who loves burns and he who burns, flies at the speed of light, because to love is to be what is loved.”

Javier Viver: There are different voices from characters, often with some degree of abstraction. The characters are ethereal and form part of different realities that are not associated with a specific subjective character, in terms of constructing a personality, but rather are phenomena like light or water. Many of the aspects are later found in Fire in Castile and Granada Watermirror. So the piece requires some interpretation.

Fragment of a recreation of Invisible Auto Sacramental: The Message from Granada, including the voice of José Val del Omar, edited by the group Voluble.net

Tribune (from minute 7): "Comrades, comrades, you all have what is fair and you can know more than what you…" (unintelligible voices mixing with a military march).

Val del Omar: They grow in you, they grow in our children, they grow in the children of our children, the forbidden fruit, the unnecessary food, the sterile energy, the force of gravity is a curse that man liberates himself from, burning, human, warning that the first step is death.

Woman: Oh my! Where am I?

/ /

Audio Credits:
Collage by José Val del Omar belonging to the "María José Val del Omar and Gonzaleo Sáenz de Buruaga Archive" identified as R1461a and fragments of phrases from the soundtrack of Granada Watermirror and Fire in Castile provided by the audio archive digitalised by Javier Viver for his dissertation, Laboratorio Val del Omar; interview with Llorenç Barber done by FAAQ.info for the Centro José Guerrero on the occasion of the inauguration of the exhibition: Desbordamiento de Val del Omar in Granada with licence CC Reconocimiento-NoComercial-CompartirIgual; fragments from the Ballad of the Three Rivers by Federico García Lorca with the voice of Rafael Alberti published on book-CD by Visor Libros. Madrid 2006; recreation of Invisible Auto Sacramental: The Message from Granada, published by voluble.net with voices from the home archive of José Val del Omar; Egyptians from Tahrir Square, the Gdem Izdik assaults in the Western Sahara and the voice of Beatriz Rodríguez. El sonido es similar a las cenizas… by Chiu Longina in Código Fuente: La remezcla published by ZEMOS98.