ABOUT EDITIONS

“A soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen.” – R. Murray Schafer

Soundwalk Editions features artists and composers who use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work.  By recording sounds outside of the conventional studio you are in the act field recording, audibly engaged with ears that gradually refine a sonic experience, like the eye looking through a camera lens.  Field recording  is often synonymous with phonography, in which sound takes the place of image in documenting a location, physical act, or a natural occurrence.  Drawing attention to the quality and experiential nature that can exist in the soundscapes of our environment, these works allow the viewer to have an intimate experience with the various compositional approaches practiced by each individual artist.  Through listening to these recordings we have the opportunity to become aware of the various dialects that can exist in the language of field recording compositions.

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Artist:         Olivia Block
Title:           Cattle Guard  | ©
Date:          2010
Duration:    5′22

photo by: Olivia Block

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THE SOUND

I made these field recordings by threading small microphones into the rusted pipes of an old cattleguard in the Texas hill country. The pipes were different lengths, filtering the sound into different frequencies.  I like to record situations which draw attention to the way air moves—wind, cars driving by, etc. The pitches created by the pipes create an interesting  framing device for the air sounds, making them more “visible” to the ear by “coloring” them with the filter. While I used to try and avoid obvious “human” sounds like cars, I am now attracted to the paradox of car and airplane sounds in seemingly isolated natural settings.

THE ARTIST

Olivia Block is a contemporary composer and sound artist who combines field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments, and electronically generated sound. Block works with recorded media, chamber ensembles, video, and site-specific sound installations.

She has performed throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours and festivals including Sonic Light, Dissonanze, Archipel, Angelica, Sunoni per il Popolo, Outer Ear, and many others.  Her works have premiered at La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, and she has completed residencies and premiered works at Mills College of Music and The Berklee College of Music. She has taught master classes at several additional universities.

Block has created sound installations for public sites and exhibition spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the library at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the Lincoln Conservatory Fern Room in Chicago, and at the “Echoes Through the Mountains” exhibit at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy.  Her 2008 DVD release with video artists Sandra Leah Gibson and Luis Recoder, Untitled, on SOS editions, has been screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Expanded Cinema symposium at the Tate Modern in London. Her release Mobius Fuse was voted one of the best albums of the decade by Pitchfork.  Block has published recordings through Sedimental, either/OAR, and Cut, among other labels.

She is currently teaching part-time in the sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

links: http://www.oliviablock.net/index.htm

Artist:         Aaron Ximm | Quiet American
Title:           Lassitude  | ©
Date:          2010
Duration:    10′12

photo by: Aaron Ximm

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THE SOUND

If in the city of Kashi all things are sanctified; to drown in the city of light one is to walk home upon the water. Take care what you drink, we heard, for the chai is made of river water, and the river is veiled in light but full of death. Take care for the lassi is full of bhang, and the bhang is full of light and darkness in unknown measure. Drop off the ghats and into the river if you dare. The afternoon is gone and the ears are full of night.

On our honeymoon my wife and I spent several weeks in Varanasi, India.  As a city sacred to Shiva one may, even as a western tourist, partake, with discretion, of bhang in many preparations, including the moderately infamous bhang lassi. Opium from the government bhang shop amplified a gold and pastel afternoon; but denser in the memory is the city I entered through the trapdoor of bhang: the plunge into deep water where the sacred city of ritual and the filthy city of junkies became indistinguishable.

Lassitude was constructed with field recordings made during those few weeks, including a long nightwalk home along the ghats, during which we witnessed the idle torment of a scavenging dog; the snuffling of a sacred cow in a private courtyard; the chant of “Ram’s name is truth” as a passing body is taken down to the river to be cremated; and devotional music echoing in the atrium of New Vishwanatha chapel at Banares Hindu University.

Best heard with headphones.

THE ARTIST

Aaron Ximm is a San Francisco-based field recordist and sound artist.  He is best known for his composition, installation, and performance work as Quiet American. From 2001 to 2005, Aaron curated and hosted the Field Effects concert series, which, like his own work, sought to showcase the quiet, fragile, and lovely side of sound art, particularly that working with found sound and field recordings. Recently he has become increasingly interested in taking as his subject the problems and limitations of documentation itself.

links: http://quietamerican.org |  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Quiet-American/134809495529

Artist:         Jacob Kirkegaard
Title:           Rewind  | ©
Date:          2007 – 2010
Duration:    8′40

photos by: Jacob Kirkegaard

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THE SOUND

Some years ago I started to collect the tape that I pick up in the streets and sidewalks around the world. I walk a lot wherever I visit, and every now and then I come across one of these crumbled old pieces of brown tape that somehow managed to escape its music cassette and is about to end its days as an abandoned and long-forgotten little piece of sound. I regard each string of tape as a secret witness that might tell a story, sing a song, provide a random and unexpected information about its habitat. So I pick it up, put it in a little plastic bag and note down the date, hour and location. If I happen to have brought a camera, I will also take a picture of the place. At home, I wrap up my find into a cassette, play it back and make a recording of the sound, or the fragments of sound, that are left on the tape.
This work consists of two pieces of tape that I collected on two different trips to Havana, Cuba. The first 4 minutes of the track are the A and B sides of a string of tape that I found last month. The tape was stretched out in the middle of a street in the center of the city. It was moving slowly down the hill towards the famous Malecón promenade as the cars drove by. (See picture) The second part of the track, 4.5 minutes long, consists of the A and B sides of another piece of tape that I picked up from the gutter in Habana Vieja, near the Malecón as well, in December 2007. It was curled up in a messy lump next to a garbage can.

THE ARTIST

Jacob Kirkegaard is a Danish artist who focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Using unorthodox recording tools, including accelerometers, hydrophones and home-built electromagnetic receivers, Kirkegaard captures and contextualizes hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments : a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself.

Now based in Berlin, Kirkegaard is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. Over the last fifteen years, Kirkegaard has presented his works at exhibitions and at festivals and conferences throughout the world. He has released five albums (mostly on the British label Touch). Among his numerous collaborators are JG Thirlwell, Philip Jeck and Lydia Lunch. Kirkegaard is also a member of the sound art collective freq-out.

links: http://fonik.dk/ |   http://touchmusic.org.uk/

Artist:        Richard Garet
Title:          Huskies Camp  | ©
Date:         2005-09
Duration:   7’51

photo by: Richard Garet

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THE SOUND

In August of 2005 while visiting Juneau, Alaska, I ventured on a helicopter ride to the top of one of the local glaciers, Mendenhall Glacier, where there was known to be a sled camp of Alaskan Huskies. The moment the helicopter landed, over 270 dogs began barking overwhelming everything with their sounds. Inside of that habitat there was no other life besides the huskies and their trainers. The glacier, dogs, people, helicopters, and sleds created the only sound in this area. It was really fascinating and saddening at the same time to witness such an environment of sublime beauty being used for artificiality and confinement. There was beauty in the sounds generated by these several hundred dogs creating a perfect orchestration in contrast to the pure white area that offered an arena without distractions for it. The reality behind the beauty was that the animals barked out of excitement knowing that from one moment to the next they would be untied and attached to a sled to push tourists around the glacier. While I was there I recorded sound and image. Although I was unprepared equipment wise I managed to collect several great moments of raw data. This piece was comprised from sounds collected during this excursion, processed and unprocessed, somewhat constructing by memory, an interpretation of the location, sensations, and experiences from that day at the Huskies camp.

THE ARTIST

Richard Garet (born in 1972, Montevideo, Uruguay) is a sound and visual artist that currently lives and works in New York, USA. He is interested in the phenomena found and produced in aural and visual time-based media, in nature’s processes, and human beings’ relationship with both artificial and natural environments. Garet explores the it-referential, communicational, and sensory characteristics of the various media he utilizes. Additionally, he focuses on the investigation of aural and visual spatial-contexts, relational structures, process, materiality, function, and form. Even though Garet’s work suits the standard gallery setting, many of his other activities as an artist explore the various practices of experimental sound and video performance. All of these modes are additional ways in which Garet’s work exposes the audience to visual and physical-acoustic sensory perception.  His interdisciplinary media work has been showed in the USA and internationally and his sound work has been released by the sound-art labels And-Oar, Non Visual Objects, Winds Measure Recordings, Unframed Recordings, Con-V, Leerraum, White_Line Editions, and Contour Editions.

links: www.richardgaret.com | www.contoureditions.com