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TAG ARCHIVES: Soundwalk Editions

Olivia Block | Editions – Issue #6

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Artist:         Olivia Block
Title:           Cattle Guard  | ©
Date:          2010
Duration:    5′22
OliviaBlock_Issue#6
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

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Cathy Lane | Editions – Issue#6

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Artist:         Cathy Lane
Title:           The Pickle Jar is her home | ©
Date:          2010
Duration:    10′27

LANE_ISSUE#06
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

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Machinefabriek | Editions – Issue #5

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Artist:         Machinefabriek | Rutger Zuydervelt
Title:           The Breathing Bridge, part 2  | ©
Date:          2010
Duration:    10′01

EDITINOS_ISSUE5_FABRIEK

photo by: Rutger Zuydervelt

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THE SOUND

Composed for the International Film Festival Rotterdam, this piece is created using recordings made at the famous Rotterdam Erasmus Bridge.  It’s a sonic portrait and one of two sound-works that attempts to capture the bridge as a living creature while revealing the aural dynamics of everything that happens on and under it.  The first section of the piece focuses on the bridge itself and the second part is mostly constructed using recordings of the Nieuwe Maas river that runs beneath the bridge.

Both pieces were played in a darkened theater.

THE ARTIST

Born on 28 July 1978 in Apeldoorn (The Netherlands), now living in Rotterdam, Rutger Zuydervelt started working as Machinefabriek in 2004.  Machinefabriek’s music combines elements of ambient, modern classical, drone, noise and field recordings, to create ‘films without image’. He released on labels like Type, 12K, Dekorder, Digitalis and Staalplaat. Gigs were played in countries all over the globe, including Russia, Israel, Canada, Switserland, Spain, Chech Republic, Germany, England, and -obviously- The Netherlands.  Rutger collaborated (on record, or live) with artists like Ralph Steinbrüchel, Aaron Martin, Peter Broderick, Frans de Waard, Wouter van Veldhoven, Simon Nabatov, Xela, Simon Scott, Gareth Hardwick, Stephen Vitiello and Tim Catlin amongst others.

links: www.machinefabriek.nu

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Aaron Ximm | Editions – Issue#5

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

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

EDITIONS_ISSUE5_XIMM_1

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

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INVISIBLE TO THE EYE, VISCERAL TO THE EAR: NICK SOWERS ON HIS FEATURE WITH SOUNDWALK EDITIONS

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

bunker
photo by: Nick Sowers

In its Editions #3, Soundwalk featured Nick Sowers’ Audio Cemetery at Omaha Beach, an aural memorial to the thousands of German and American soldiers who died on this coastline. “Invisible to the eye, visceral to the ear,” Sowers’ work draws  upon sound’s evocative nature to give the listener a haunting feeling of immersion in this eerie landscape. On his blog, Soundscrapers, Sowers has written about Soundwalk’s feature of his work and explained the creative process behind the project.  ”In my piece, I am looking to create something at Omaha Beach, Normandy, that I feel is essential to the reading of the landscape,” he says. “I am seeking in sound what cannot be found in visual space.”

“Nick Sowers is practicing the construction of space with sound and 2×4s in the SF Bay area. He is finishing an M.Arch at UC Berkeley this May after a year of traveling around the world studying militarized landscapes, bunkers, US bases, memorials, and more.” His Soundscrapers work was also named by XLR8R magazine as one of the top audio installations of 2009.

Head to his site to read about his artistic process and his work with Soundwalk Editions, and check out his Flickr set for recent renderings of his other sound installation projects.

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