Augmented Aural Collective has been formed in spring 2020 as a result of the confinement, where three sound artists Zoya Zerkalski, Edvina Fahlqvist and Charly Roussel challenged the idea of isolation and the space a musician finds oneself confined within. 

Exploring empty vacated sites in East Berlin, the trio found their creative recluse in a military hangar built in 1918, an architectural heritage, protected but left to decay, where a sequence of dome-like structures provide a stage and an instrument at once. High concrete ceilings swirling upwards and hollow, porous flooring below embody psychoacoustic phenomena through natural resonances. 

The trio took an improvisational approach, using found objects inside the hangar – pieces of wood, rock, glass and metal, together with other acoustic instruments brought by the musicians – double bass, accordion, cello, turkish cymbal, tibetan bowl, bells, and the voice as an omnipresent tool. An artistic intervention gave a new purpose to a building, and a new significance to the practice of spatial sound focusing on site-specificity. 

The supernatural echo of the building, almost sinister at times but hauntingly transient depending on the position of the sound source allowed the musicians to experiment with textural elements of their instruments and the impulse responses of the building.

Using portable recording devices the musical performance was recorded on site taking in the entirety of the sound-world around, including the acoustics of the space and the incidental sounds such as birds, insects, children in the playground, or rain dropping from the indented ceiling of the ruins.