21/12/2025
De Larumse Heide, a walk
Listen on Bandcamp https://archaictapes.bandcamp.com/album/out-now-tape-for-harmony-korine
There are many ways to perceive, interpret, and record our environment. Nature offers an abundance of possibilities and receptors for acquiring a sense of reality.
Since the early 1990s, Michel Helsen has been exploring various ways to capture this reality. By evoking vague memories and visualizing this twilight zone, by wrenching objects from their historical context and giving them new form and meaning, by documenting coincidences in time and space.
In the "Larumse Heide" series, Helsen takes us on an exploration of nature, placing a canvas on a meadow full of flowers, rolling through fallen leaves under a tree, or venturing into a large anthill. He literally samples nature on a large canvas that takes up almost your entire field of vision. An almost random patch of land becomes a powerful image.
In another series, 'Above and Below,' canvases are exposed to a single location in nature for weeks to months. Everything that happened above and in that location will leave its mark on that canvas. What happened below is also captured on another canvas. By combining these two canvases, an image emerges of what transpired in time and space, above and below.
About this sound recording, 'De Larumse Heide'
This recording is a simultaneous acoustic representation of two nearly identical walks through the 'Larumse Heide' that took place in the spring and autumn of 2025.
During each of these walks, a microphone was attached to his lower leg, and we hear both what happened above and the sounds of his steps over various soil compositions.
In spring, we hear the fresh sounds so typical of this season: the song of excited birds, and beneath our feet, nature creaks with new life.
The autumn walk is quieter in the trees, and you hear the sounds of nature preparing for winter: creaking branches and rustling dry leaves. Other incidental sounds come from clothing, the rubber strap used to attach the microphone, and here and there you can hear a voice.
These two natural rhythms together form an interpretation of a place in nature called 'De Larumse Heide'.
