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TAG ARCHIVES: Transmissions

TRANSMISSIONS | HONG KONG

Picture 3 TRANSMISSIONS | HONG KONG

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This week’s transmission is an excerpt from our archive of field recordings done in Hong Kong in 2008. Though recent, many sounds captured in these few minutes reflect a Hong Kong of the past: due to development, the sound landscape of the city has changed drastically within the past few years, as Chinese institutions like the open-air food markets, or dai pai dong, disappear from the streets. This clip echoes the sounds of a Hong Kong that can no longer be accessed.

We hope you enjoy this third installment of transmissions.


TRANSMISSIONS | DEATH MUST DIE

 TRANSMISSIONS | DEATH MUST DIE

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.


TRANSMISSIONS | LA BRULURE

 TRANSMISSIONS | LA BRULURE

In light of Soundwalk’s various site-specific projects in the works to be featured in China, Europe, and the United States, we’d like to send word of our travels in the form of weekly installments of sound recordings from the Soundwalk archives, made around the world by our sound artists over the past few years, and the accompanying photography.

We’ll begin with an excerpt from our new sound project, La Brulure, which evokes the heat of summer at its most basic and primal. La Brulure is the first in a series of limited-edition Soundwalk releases with custom-designed letterpress packaging.

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“In a solitary trek along the Mediterranean coasts from Spain to Greece, along the south of France, through Italy, Montenegro, and Albania… Stephan Crasneanscki of Soundwalk records the sulfurous fury of summer. It all begins with sound.

It is that of a cricket in the heart of summer, which, in the intoxication of a lovesong, perishes, sucked dry, burnt by the rays of the sun.

It is the memory of childhood under the sky of vacation, always denser and more blue. The memories of adolescence which burn our skin. Bodily desire, sensual pleasure, betrayal.

The encounters of one night, of one day, the fever of a summer without sleeping. When the spirit is consumed and the passion does not rest.

The trance of cicadas, the music and the songs collected in villages, which like ripples of heat in the air rise to the surface.”

We hope you enjoy the summer’s first installment of recordings from the archives.