Guiseppe Cordaro (GC): How was the project The Seven Words born?
Paul Amlehn (PA): Across the sea of time and space. Along a thread of spirit and blood.

GC: How was the project developed?
PA: The project was developed according to its own laws, dictated to me in my various roles as servant, high priest, and receptacle, of the Magnum Opus.

GC: How did you both work on distance? How was the experience of working online, passing files over the net?
PA: Any distance was transcended with the inevitable convergence of affinities.

Paul Amlehn Image: Copyright Victoria Bell

GC: The declared goal of the artwork is to create a powerful synthesis between the soundscapes and the voice. How was for you Paul to work with sonic material?
PA: Anything I said in regards to this question would only be a finger pointing at the moon.

GC: According to you Robert, what is the positive value that the voice could give to your soundscapes.
PA: In Robert's absence, I'll take the liberty of fielding this question, and my response is:
A structure, configuration, or pattern of physical, biological, or psychological phenomena so integrated as to constitute a functional unit with properties not derivable by summation of its parts.

GC: How and who developed the idea to spread The Seven Words on the radio?
PA: Radio dissemination was one of the organic outgrowths of the project. The Seven Words will also be installed in galleries and museums; broadcast from an automobile mounted with bullhorn speakers driving through the streets of Yeosu in South Korea during the arts festival there; installed in sensory deprivation chambers and isolation pods in New York (at Blue Light Floatation) and London (at The Floatworks) so that individuals can experience the work in a theta brain-wave state, free of external sensory stimuli. I am also talking with scientists about transmitting the work off-world, several light years into interstellar space, an extreme gesture outwards as a counterpoint to the inner journey experienced in the isolation tanks.

GC: I find it amazing that you decided to donate the money you earn from the sale of your limited edition CD to benefit a charity. How and when did you develop this initiative?
PA: Its immensely gratifying to be able to contribute something, in a concrete sense, to allay the suffering of others, especially, in this case, children with AIDS. Hopefully the work raises some money for what is a very worthy cause. The idea of the donation arose much the way the work itself did, out of a humanistic impulse.

GC: Are you working on some future project together or separately?
PA: At the moment, two projects: the first, an experimental film work, titled: Traum und Trauma (Dream and Trauma), which consists of still images from my photographic work and one of Robert's soundscapes. There is another project which is in its embryonic stages, which I cannot speak of as yet.

Paul Amlehn Interviewed by Giuseppe Cordaro for Digimag 37, September/October, 2008. Commissioned by Director Marco Mancuso.

http://www.digicult.it/digimag/