12 Jun 2011

Fake Murano

Murano

Ever since I saw the cabinet of glassware in the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery through the different eyes of someone who was no longer just visiting, I thought of Murano.


I have never been to Murano but believed I knew it: an island in the Venice lagoon renowned for its artisanal glass-making. Even though I had a sense of the island’s pre-eminence – wasn’t it once the only place in Europe where mirrors were made? didn’t its citizens accrue special privileges yet could never leave? – my imagination refused to cross the borders of the small scale. In my imaginary Murano, there were narrow alleys, open shutters spilling light, a lone voice bouncing of the walls, the occasional dog bark, lapping water, creaking wooden quays, a sea bird’s cry, a fog bank drawing in over the swamp just before the rude diesel of a barge swung past.

Talking about my ideas to the Soundwaves Festival director, Claudia Molitor, she presented a very different Murano. The island she spoke of was much, much bigger in scope, a finished town of wide canals, painted houses, bridges and churches, everywhere bustling with tourists, catered to shop after shop. The wooden quays were still there, though.

Returning home, I looked at my copy of Jan Morris’ “Venice” which I assumed must have been one of the sources of my fantasy Murano. Leafing through the pages highlighted in the Index, it became clear quite how far into whimsy I had drifted, perhaps tugged in that direction by some of Morris’ discussion of the smaller islands out in the lagoon.

“… For the rest, Murano is a clutter of small glass factories, rambling, messy, uncoordinated places, built of red or dingy stonework, with tall blackened chimneys and wooden landing-stages … The important thing to know about the Murano glass-makers is that almost everything they make is, at least to my taste, perfectly hideous. This has always been so”.

I find intriguing some of the kitschest excesses that emerged from the furnaces of Murano. I’m not sure I’d want any of them on my desk, but I’m glad that other people find a space in their taste for them and can do that without having recourse to ‘irony’. And of course, not all glassware that comes from Murano has the bilious colours and grotesques shapes that invoke such horrible fascination for Morris. Foscarini, for example, is based in Murano and theirs is understood to constitute a rather more refined aesthetic. I saved up and bought my wife a red Rodolfo Dordoni “Lumiere XX” lamp. And, through the strange way that objects move round houses, that has ended up on the table I’m using as a desk.

Even after Morris, I just couldn’t rid myself of the whole atmosphere of the fog-bound island, silted canals, wrecks, distant sea-birds and footsteps on stonework. Searching through my hard-drives, I began to find recordings that I’d previously made that could work together to fake the Murano of my dreams. Here were some scratching cicadas, distant voices and domestic sounds of a village evening in Crete; here was a wooden harbour creaking above a lake in Eastern Finland; here were some frogs in a rice paddy in Japan; here in a box I took down from the attic was a DAT tape of a barge chugging past on the river Cam that I recorded eight years ago while my daughter was asleep in her pram.

Shaping these recordings a little by raising or lowering their frequencies or shifting the distribution of energy (=volume) they contained and then layering them on top of one another, I’ve managed to create something whose acoustic contours approximated the fake Murano. In the four days that remain, I just need to find the right bugling call of a herring gull and decide just where to put it.

Diana_desk