LR Friberg - Two question interview - for EFSPACM Festival

1) What sound makes you feel most connected - to another person, a place, or the world itself?

Electronic music that is calm and somehow carries the feeling of morning makes me feel most connected to the world. I often imagine a city skyline while listening: mostly empty streets, windows beginning to catch the light, and the sense that the day has not yet accumulated demands. Music like that makes me feel anchored without making me feel confined.

I am nearing the end of an academic period that has lasted about seven and a half years and is on track to result in three degrees and a regulated profession. At this stage, perhaps the final ten or fifteen percent, I often need to return mentally to the person I was at the beginning: hopeful, setting intentions, gathering energy and still able to imagine completion rather than only the remaining work.

A piece that reliably does this for me is “Birdman” by Solar Fields (https://youtu.be/cq6t2-uAOcw). It is short and understated, but something about its atmosphere resets me. It brings back that early-morning feeling of openness and reminds me that the world is larger than whatever task is immediately in front of me.

2) Please send a photograph of anything you choose that you want to share (a person - it can be you, an object, landscape, instrument, abstract detail, your sourrounding) and tell us about the place/thing/person/picture.

Believe it or not, this is a netlabel, or at least, a netlabel is one of the modes of a much larger project.

Aurora began as a compilation series called INTENT in 2020. The releases were initially scattered across several netlabels, which eventually created problems of preservation, metadata, continuity, and the relationship between historical releases and the project as it exists today. Consolidating the archive through Faircamp and Arweave solved part of this, but not the question of how the material should be presented.

A flat catalogue gives every release and contribution roughly equal visual weight. That did not suit a project that had developed incrementally over several years, particularly when participation in an old release does not necessarily imply current affiliation with Aurora. At the same time, the original concept of intention-setting had begun to feel limited, even though it still remains meaningful in my own musical practice. The project had also accumulated narrative material and several apparently separate works, some collaborative, some entirely my own, that needed a larger context.

The solution became a browser-based, fully interactive 3D city. Aurora still includes a conventional netlabel mode for convenient playback, but that mode will contain no more than about twenty percent of the material ultimately available. Visitors are encouraged to leave the catalogue interface and explore.

A virtual city can accommodate music, podcasts, field recordings, photos, stories, archives and other media, as long as there is a believable reason for them to exist in a particular location. The content may be encountered in coworking spaces, libraries, private apartments, or other parts of the city. The surrounding narrative is communicated diegetically through architecture, notes, tablets, emails, environmental details, and interactive objects rather than through a single block of exposition.

The project is also partly puzzle-like. Some material is protected by passwords, with clues distributed across different locations. I was strongly inspired by the exploratory approach of games such as Deus Ex; the visitor can investigate the environment, notice connections, miss things and gradually construct an understanding of what happened.

Most importantly, this structure creates the hierarchy I wanted. The music and other works remain independent creations, credited to their respective authors, but they exist within a larger explorable context. Historical material can be preserved without suggesting that every past contributor remains presently affiliated with the project. The city becomes both an archive and a way of explaining why that archive still exists.

https://spire.aurora-compilations.org