https://youtu.be/AtsW1u5Yj0E

True than Nature encourages active listening. There is sound that exists seemingly for its own sake – a continuing drone that slowly evolves, sound of nature – and there are sounds that refer to a momentary action, and sudden intrusions of sound. BJ Nilsen triggers shifts in the perception for the listener that alter how you perceive and experience the world through sound, and how you think about sound.

Listening to True than Nature is full of moments of instability. The shifts between sound spaces refocus your listening, or throw you out of a world you were imagining. You recognize sounds, wind, rain, metal bending, a hammer on stone, the background noise of a city, but often there is an unfamiliarity about these sounds. You think you recognize them, but often you are not sure, because you are not there, and different worlds clash or coexist at the same time.

True than Nature makes you wonder about how sounds exist, how they are brought forward, how they are made by objects, how they are perceived and how they are changed by the attention given to it. And all the time, you might ask yourself: What is that world that I am listening to? How does it exist?

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The title True than Nature comes from Jean-Paul Sartre. BJ Nilsen’s previous release Irreal was also accompanied by a reference to Sartre: his idea that in order to imagine, a consciousness must be able to posit an object as irreal. Sartre is not mentioned often in sound studies, but his early book L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination is a meticulous analysis of what happens when we imagine something. In the chapter on hypnagogic images – the images that appear in our mind just before we fall asleep – Sartre writes ‘Thus the image is given as “truer than nature”, in the sense in which one could say of a particularly suggestive portrait that it is truer than its model.......
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