Michel Redolfi: Jungle

Here's another Michel Redolfi CD, "Jungle", from the dawn of the new computer era, way back in the second half of the 90s. The so-called "interactive CD-ROM" was featured in many projects coming from the fields of music, art, cultural history and education. In his 1995 diary "A Year with Swollen Appendices", Brian Eno frowns at the serious limitations of the CD-ROM medium and muses about what chould be possible with it. 10+ years later, these early applications seem like primitive stone-age relics, and Mr. Eno got most of his wishes granted.

The French multi-media project "Jungle" from 1997 is a package containing a book with colourful and flashy-looking illustrations by Herve di Rosa, an audio CD by Michel Redolfi, and an "Interactive CD-ROM" combining di Rosa's and Redolfi's work in a sequence of scenes that represent a day in a jungle.

Without doubt, the real gem in this project is the audio CD, which I am posting here: 80 tracks of music miniatures, environmental recordings, sound effects (human, animals, electronic) and sounds of ethnic instruments.

The natural ambiences of birds, insects and frogs have been recorded in the heart of rain forests in Amazonia and Australia. Thanks to special microphones (Artificial Head) Michel Redolfi recorded sounds the way they strike your ears when you're actually there. No studio effect has been added.

The disc should be played using the random (shuffle) function or with any pre-programmed track sequence.

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