Artist:        murmer
Title:         4 spaces  | ©
Date:        2009
Duration:  15’00

photo by: Patrick McGinley

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THE SOUND

During a recent tour of the northeastern United States I made a collection of recordings inside the spaces in which I would perform.  The individual recordings were to be used as the starting point of the performance in the same location, a slow sonic zooming-in to the self-same space shared with an audience, and an experiment in natural resonant feedback caused by playing the sound of a space back into itself.  A handful of the spaces were particularly interesting, and I collect those here to highlight the notion of no space being neutral, and of each having it’s own living, breathing character.  The spaces we hear here are St Stephen’s Church in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the front lobby of the Baker Center for the Arts at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the gallery space at the Pyramid Atlantic in Washington DC.  At either end of this collection is a different kind of space, and one much closer to home: this is the sound of my mother’s backyard, on the edge of marshland in Abington, Massachusetts, with my personal favorite late-night sound of distant passing trains.

THE ARTIST

Patrick McGinley (aka murmer) is an American born sound, performance, and radio artist who has lived and worked in Europe since 1996.  In 2002 he co-founded framework, an organisation that produces a weekly radio show consecrated to field recording and phonography. His work concentrates on the framing of sounds from our environment which normally pass through our ears unnoticed and unremarked, but which out of context become unrecognisable, alien and extraordinary: crackling charcoal, a squeaking escalator, a buzzing insect, or one’s own breath. More recently McGinley has been giving presentations, workshops, and performances based on the exploration of site-specific sound and sound as definition of space.  In live performance his initial interest in field recording has developed into an attempt to integrate and resonate found sounds, found objects, specific spaces, and moments in time, in order to create a direct and visceral link with an audience and location.

Links: www.murmerings.com

Artist:        Steve Roden
Title:          trio (wonderful)  | ©
Date:         2009
Duration:   5’35

photo by: Steve Roden

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THE SOUND

The piece began with two field recordings made in new york city in march of 2009.  The first was recorded through an open window of my hotel room, and consists of a distant woman singing.  The only word in her song I can recognize is “wonderful”.  The second is a recording I made while walking across union square, listening to a guy playing a rock style drum kit, solo, on a small concrete island surrounded by people talking and cars whizzing by. Both were recorded with my phone.  Most of the field recordings I  make are of natural sounds or mechanical sounds – things that drone or repeat and are somewhat non-narrative, and more like fields of sound: rain, a freezer motor, someone raking leaves.  It is rare that I record humans making music, and perhaps that is why these two recordings suggested they be placed together.  I merged the woman singer with the drummer towards a “song”, and inserted myself as the third member of their “band”.  I manipulated their recordings, played a bit of melody on a small paia oz battery powered synthesizer, and I sang a tiny bit of background vocals.  The rhythmic drumbeat and the amount of movement in this piece are not really indicative of most of my work, which tends to be quiet and less active, but I was interested in allowing the source materials to suggest a path that I might not have discovered without them.

THE ARTIST

Steve Roden is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles. Since the mid 1980s, he has been exhibiting his visual and sound works at museums, festivals, and arts spaces internationally, including: Mercosur Biennial Porto Alegre Brazil, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, UCLA Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art EMST Athens, Singuhr-Horgalerie in Parochial, Berlin, Serpentine Gallery London, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, DCA Dundee Scotland, Susanne Vielmetter LA and Berlin Projects, and others.  He has created site-specific sound works for numerous significant architectural spaces such as the James Turrell Skyspace at the Henry Art Gallery Seattle, the Frank Lloyd Wright Hollhock House Los Angeles, Alvaro Siza’s Serpentine Gallery Temporary Pavilion London, the RM Schindler House Los Angeles, and Thomas Walter’s 1835 building for Girard College Philadelphia.  He has also released over 20 cds of audio works.

Links: www.inbetweennoise.com

Artist:         Francisco López
Title:           untitled #233 | ©
Date:          2008
Duration:   10’00

photo by: Francisco López

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THE SOUND

Original environmental sound matter recorded at Mamori Lake in the Brazilian Amazon in 2008.

My first visit to the Brazilian Amazon took place twenty years ago. Like the other rain-forests in the world I have had the opportunity to explore, the Amazon has been a constant source of fascination and inspiration. My approach to the work with field recordings is essentially phenomenological and spiritual, and thus I have very little interest in representation, against most current perspectives on phonographic art. Since 2005 I direct an annual residency / workshop for sound artists and composers at Mamori Lake in the Amazon. You can find complete information about this creative and vital experience through the link below. (edited and mastered at mobile messor, Amsterdam 2009)

THE ARTIST

Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. Over the past 30 years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in 60 countries of the five continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 100 international artists) has been released by more than 200 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded three times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival. - Pedro Higueras, Sonom Studios

Links: http://www.franciscolopez.net | http://www.franciscolopez.net/amazon.html

Aritis:        Yann Novak
Title:         Indoors / Outdoors | ©
Date:        2009
Duration:  8’59

photo by: Robert Crouch

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THE SOUND

Recording something that was uniquely, Los Angeles posed a challenge at first.  When you think about the traditional identifiers of a city, Los Angeles falls short–there is no central core, no common meeting place.  Los Angeles seems to be a conglomeration of smaller areas, each with its own history and culture.  No single place or experience felt uniquely Los Angeles to me.  I stopped looking for a place and started thinking about the lifestyle of Los Angeles. Then it dawned on me. I had never experienced a lifestyle where the line between indoors and outdoors was blurred or even nonexistent.  This blurry line is built into many buildings, restaurants and homes in Los Angeles.  For this piece, I decided to focus on my own blurry line, the roll up door in my loft that is open so much of the year.  This door acts as the main passage to the outside and supplies the space with 90% of its light.  This blur is not just structural. During the night this door casts light and sound out into the ally, tinting it with the activities of the loft’s inhabitants.  In exchange, crickets make their way towards the light, and find small notches indoors to chirp through the night.  The resulting recording was done in this blur, sitting somewhere between the indoors and the outdoors.

THE ARTIST

Yann Novak (b. 1979 Madison, WI) is a sound artist, composer and designer based in Los Angeles.  His work utilizes different forms of digital documentation as a point of departure.  Through the digital manipulation of these sound and image files, his works serve as a translation from documents of personal experiences into new compositions fueled by the original experience.  His compositions have been published by Dragon’s Eye Recordings (US), The Henry Art Gallery (US), Infrequency (CA), and smlEditions (US). Novak’s installations and performances have been presented internationally at prestigious events and venues including American Academy in Rome (Rome, Italy), Decibel Festival (WA), Henry Art Gallery (WA), Las Cienegas Projects (CA), Lawrimore Project (WA), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA), Mutek Festival (Montreal, QB), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), TBA Festival (OR) and Western Bridge (WA).

Links: www.yannnovak.com | www.dragonseyerecordings.com