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Soundwalk in collaboration with Mickey Hart present Sacred Chants of the Gyuto Monks Tantric Choir. An installation for the Centre Pompidou’s Paris-Delhi-Bombay exhibit, the piece will occupy the escalator space of the museum from May 25th to September 19th. Audio extract is a sneak preview from the installation.
This week’s transmission is an extract from Death Must Die, which, like La Brulure, is one in a series of limited-edition Soundwalk releases with custom-designed letterpress packaging.
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“Death Must Die is a sound piece that begins before the rising of the sun and reproduces the cycle of a day in Varanasi… Benares, Kashi; a sacred city, where death is everywhere, bathed in light. It is here that the Hindus come to die and burn their dead. It is here, on the river’s edges, that the wrath and the grace of Shiva are expressed.
The sound intoxicating as death itself, it is a hammering song of the dead, playing until one is transfixed. It’s the murmuring of the Ganges… the power of silence.
[Death Must Die] revisits the cycles between life and death, using sound as a metaphor: the laughter of children playing, dogs barking – it contrasts the extreme accumulation of bells, the infernal trance of religious songs, the peculiar sound of bodies burning upon wood… the voice of a young nun coming from an ashram in the silence of the night.”
We hope you enjoy this second installment in the summer Transmissions series.
Artist: Cathy Lane
Title: The Pickle Jar is her home | ©
Date: 2010
Duration: 10′27
photo by: Cathy Lane
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THE SOUND
This composition is an multi-faceted exploration of food as a material, a commodity and as a sounding substance. It also aims to explore the many relationships between food and sound from their basic ephemerality to the links and metaphors that tie them as materials to be processed and transformed – from ideas of “mixing”, “chopping”, “cutting” and “blending”. Mixed, cut and blended together in this ‘ear-piece’ are sound recordings, from both the UK and India, of food being prepared and cooked, of the places where food is grown and sold, of people and companies selling food and food products and of people talking about food that reminds them of home and childhood and foods that they like to cook and how to prepare them.
The research for this piece into personal and global food culture included looking into how food, spices and materials have been and are still central to colonialism and how political exchanges have influenced food, food preparation and taste. This seems particularly pertinent in India where battles between small producers and agribusiness which have, by and large, been long lost in Western Europe are very much current and where strong regional food cultures seem to still be holding up against and possibly enriched by cultural invasions from Europe and the US. I am also interested in people’s emotional investment in food – as a carrier of memory and of ideas of “home”. Composing with spoken word material and with ‘real world’ recordings have been long held practices of mine combined with an interest in memory and how this can be both triggered and preserved in sound.
The links and metaphors between food and sound have also been used structurally in the compositional process particularly in the spatialisation and movement of sounds where gestures and spatial motifs used in cooking and preparing food have informed the organisation, distribution and movement of sounds between the speakers. This is part of a long held practice based research trajectory into gestural metaphor as a structuring process in sonic composition.
Thanks to all the interview participants, Srishti College of Art, Bangalore, London College of Communication, Sujata and Anurag at Rainforest Retreat.
THE ARTIST
Cathy Lane is interested in sound and how it relates to the past, our histories, our environment and our collective and individual memories. This informs her current work as a composer, sound artist, lecturer and researcher.
She has recently edited Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice, (available from Cornerhouse Books ) an anthology of works from over forty leading contemporary sound artists and composers who use words as their material and inspiration. A companion audio compilation will be available in mid 2010 on Gruenrekorder.
Cathy Lane co – directs Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, (CRiSAP) at the University of the Arts, London.
links: www.crisap.org
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
“The river Ganga itself cascades from its home in the Milky Way down onto Shiva’s head and, from his head, down onto the earth. In this way, Shiva represents the tangential point between the unphysical and the physical world. The physical world, which you and I live in, is one in which name and form are particularly important. The nonphysical world is one for which far more important is the unlimited consciousness, from which name and form have substantially been purged. Shiva is usually represented as sitting in the posture known as Ardha Malinda. This means his eyes are half-closed, which allows him to be aware of what is going on outside of him just as, at the same time, he is aware of the ocean of consciousness that exists behind his eyes that is not defiled or disturbed by any kind of action from the outside.” – Robert Svoda
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Noted DJ, Cheb-i-Sabbah, mixes this unique 70 minute sonic journey of India made with Soundwalk field recordings. Available to Soundwalk fans here, in five distinct audio excerpts.
Check it: INDIA: Soundscape and Varasani City of Light Audio Tour
Image: Dug Winningham Audio: Soundwalk and Cheb i Sabbah
“Varanasi, which most residents prefer to call Banaras or Kashi, has been a city for 6,000, perhaps as long as 10.000 years. It was originally a city where you came to die or to do sadhana. It was also a place where people came to be alone… as it encourages the kind of interiority that enables people to get a better reality that they might have when they are constantly in the current of human life… Continuously moving, continuously in flux, even Banaras’s greatest temple, the Vishvanath, has not stayed in one place, but has traveled along, moving as the energies and focus of the city have moved. What has remained, though, is an awareness of the vitality of human life and of the finality of death. In this sense, Banaras is completely unchanged from the moment of its founding.” -Robert Svoboda
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Noted DJ, Cheb-i-Sabbah, mixes this unique 70 minute sonic journey of India made with Soundwalk field recordings. Available to Soundwalk fans here, in five distinct audio excerpts.
Check it: INDIA: Soundscape and Varasani City of Light Audio Tour
Image: Eddie Stern Audio: Soundwalk and Cheb i Sabbah
“Varanasi, which most residents prefer to call Banaras or Kashi, has been a city for 6,000, perhaps as long as 10.000 years. It was originally a city where you came to die or to do sadhana. It was also a place where people came to be alone… as it encourages the kind of interiority that enables people to get a better reality that they might have when they are constantly in the current of human life… Continuously moving, continuously in flux, even Banaras’s greatest temple, the Vishvanath, has not stayed in one place, but has traveled along, moving as the energies and focus of the city have moved. What has remained, though, is an awareness of the vitality of human life and of the finality of death. In this sense, Banaras is completely unchanged from the moment of its founding.” -Robert Svoboda
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Noted DJ, Cheb-i-Sabbah, mixes this unique 70 minute sonic journey of India made with Soundwalk field recordings. Available to Soundwalk fans here, in five distinct audio excerpts.
Check it: INDIA: Soundscape and Varasani City of Light Audio Tour
Image: Eddie Stern Audio: Soundwalk and DJ Cheb i Sabbah