Cardoso, Goncalo F.
Variations On Mass Tourism
Riffing hard on his surroundings and the friction that mass tourism imprints on everyday life, nature and the coastline he wakes up to every day. Released under the Tropic Brut moniker, Songs from the Modular Coast - Variations on Mass Tourism is a brutalist, tongue-in-cheek dispatch from the front line of one of Europe's most relentlessly touristed islands. Using an array of sensitive microphones contact mics, geophones and magnetic piezos these recordings were captured across several resort complexes on the island of Tenerife. The buildings themselves are treated as instruments, their raw vibrations amplified and processed: concrete under pressure, metal expanding in heat, the structural hum of machinery keeping the paradise running. These are not portraits of nature but portraits of interruption the friction that appears when concrete insists on coexisting with volcanic ground, when mass tourism repeats itself until it becomes a low, indistinct drone. Many of the captured tones are barely audible in daily life: micro-shifts in metal under heat, pressure waves from distant machinery, oceanic energy diffusing through foundations. Others are harsher, exposing the raw mechanisms beneath the surface.