Day 1. L is for…

Day 2. I made this.  Rainbow necklace.

Day 3. Key.

Day 4. Lucky.  I found these Latin language cards in a junk shop.  A lucky find!

Day 5. Under.  The snowy trees at the park.

Day 6. Chair.

Day 7. Fear.  Ever fear that you don’t know the answer to this?

Day 8. Favourite

Day 9. Faceless Self Portrait

Day 10. I want… to read this book in peace and quiet.

Day 11. Important.  Spices for curry.

Day 12. In the distance.

Day 13. Sound.

Day 14. Tasty.

Day 15. Explore.

Day 16. 9 o clock.  Reading bedtime story, ‘The Brixton Brothers’ book 1.

Day 17. Green.  Illustration from ‘What is a Frog’ published in 1957.

Day 18. Shoes.  ’Sindy’ shoes from the 1970′s.

Day 19. A sign.

Day 20. Clean.

Day 21. Working.

Day 22. About you.

Day 23. What you do for fun.  Go to the zoo with Bodhi and check out the seals!

Day 24. Up

Day 25. In your drawer.

Day 26. Something you did.  Eat Chinese food for dinner!

Day 27. Pair.

Day 28. In the mirror.

Day 29. Good night.

Day 30. Relax.  All ready for Easter.

Day 31. Stuff.  Stuff is growing!

Now onto April’s photo challenge!  Find the list here at Fat Mum Slim and join in, it’s fun.  Do you already do a photo a day?  Let’s see them!  I think I like my budding pink tree photo best this month, do you have a favourite? You know I love to hear from you, so please comment away!

Intercession. SETH COOKE
(Impulsive Habitat 2013)

Review by Caity Kerr

From the artist’s online notes:

 “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.”
-Romans 8:26

Composed of recordings made – with permission – in and around West Yorkshire Police Headquarters; in the telephony equipment rooms; electronic alarm sounds; mobile phone interference; and various other drone phenomena – all sounds produced by the equipment that mediates emergency calls and other requests for aid. This is the sound of the devices that intercede for us and the machines that help maintain them, not the emergency calls themselves. No restricted or sensitive information or money gained from taxation was used in creating this composition.
-Seth Cooke

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
-Genesis 11:7

 The quotations are interesting because any text, sacred or secular, despite what the high priests will tell you, is open to numerous interpretations. And of course a good verse or two from the Bible affords gravitas. Biblical exegesis then takes us to literary interpretation, theory and critique which takes us on to the narrativity of this type of sound work and how we might begin to interpret what we’re listening to.

Obviously you have to listen to the work rather than read what I have to say about it, but it’s an intriguing piece and not difficult listening in terms of what unfolds – these are recordings of machines after all, from the sound of them relatively unprocessed. And there’s a fine flexible concept behind the work which offers numerous possibilities for developing the work and relating it to other media and communicative structures.

What is interesting here, and this stands for almost all of the work that goes under the name ‘field recording’ nowadays, is less what the artists did to make the work and the concept behind it, though this is essential in my view*, and more what you’re going to do with it at the other end – esthesis over poiesis. Listening to field recordings on a cd can be demanding. A work like Intercession would work well as some sort of element in a radio piece or a piece dealing with wider broad- (or narrow-) casting issues. It would also be an interesting piece to play in a social setting, allowing people to listen communally and comment or discuss afterwards, as you might do with friends at home looking at home movies or a slideshow (in the ‘olden days’). This apparently regressive step, because it focuses on people rather than devices, is to my mind in fact very pro-gressive and is the best way forward for what is being called ‘field recording’ nowadays, making new work more accessible and widening the debate on the artistic merit (if any) that these works might have. Otherwise we risk ending up with a 19th century gentleman’s club of conceited, opinionated and rather ridiculous sound collectors.

*essential that artists knows what they’re about – even if they don’t know what they’re about, they need to know that.

[Seth Cooke]

Seth Cooke website
Impuslive Habitat website

This was new in town

I stopped a few minutes to listen to these guys

Stocked up with fruit

Shopped for Easter presents

Another Easter pressie, cute eh?

My granddaughter will have fun with these

Home for a cup of tea

I washed some of my scarves

Went out with the girls . . .

To the green

Then off to meet my friend from the train

So how was your day?

I’m excited about the future, but I sometimes worry about what it might hold as well. The future is uncharted territory, it forces us to venture into the unknown, even for those who are creatures of habit.

To me, the future means the promise of better times ahead. Be bold, take hold, and own it.

The next day there was even more snow!  The woods were a whole new place with heavy branches across paths and even fallen trees blocking our snowy way.

Then we made Snow Henge!  Once we had rolled one giant snowball, we couldn’t stop.  Rolled and rolled until we could no longer push them.

Shot with Samsung Galaxy S Duos

Have I told this already? This is why I bought a camera phone. This was the stunning view right at the entrance of my office this evening. I was going out on a little break with my friends when I looked up and there it was. Loved it!

Reflections

by Tarab -Eamon Sprod- *

Having read many of the posts on The Field Reporter recently which might go under the heading of “debate” (although I have not followed the “discussion” elsewhere not being a facebooker etc) I am more than slightly disturbed by what seems to be an increasing interest in the creation of a “genre” and perhaps more alarmingly, with it a set of orthodoxies. Yiorgis Sakellariou‘s recent posting mentions a discussion elsewhere on the uses or misuses of volume, and this I can understand, people discussing and arguing about what the hell it is that we are all doing. However I find the fact the someone feels the need to post an article upon a site such as this to defend their choice of volume levels used in concerts against “group disapproval” to be a worrying one indeed. Surely if the volume choice is relevant to whatever is attempting to be achieved then that is the volume it needs to be. While Yiorgis states that he feels that his use of dynamic range “motivates the audience to listen more acutely”, given the same circumstances another person might choose a totally different method in an attempt to achieve the same result. Or simply decide to do something totally different altogether. To me this is what makes art interesting; each person (or group of people) finding their own ways and means to express or explore what ever it is that they feel is necessary to them. The creation of self imposed limitation can be a useful creative tool. For example George Perec writing a book with no E’s in it or Eric La Casa’s air.ratio constructed from many 2 minute air conditioner recordings. But the tendency to create or adhere to a musical or artist style, within something as open ended as what might simplistically be described as the exploration of sound and the effect it has upon it’s location and inhabitants seems to be alarmingly reductive. Surely the choices we make for one project will not be the right ones for another, from compositional strategy to the choice of sounds and indeed choice of dynamic range or volume (to name but a few) will change to fit the nature of the project and its desired effect?

John Grzinich, in his response to Yiorgis’s article posted on his website, mentions some of his issues with volume, ideas on amplified and acoustic sound and the concert hall format in general. However rather than suggesting that any particular path be taken in response, he outlines how he has attempted to responded to or resolve these issues within his own practise and how this process has lead to various avenues of further exploration. Surely this is the point? There are many things that concern me about how what quite plainly has developed into a set of clichés within “field recording based composition” and how what I call the current “orthodoxy” is further entrenching those clichés. (I am not arrogant enough to claim to successfully avoid them, though I try). And of course there are many musical choices that others make that I don’t find particularly interesting. But rather than air them here or suggest to anyone else that they should or should not do whatever they like (really, who cares what I think?? Far too many have already heard me lament the over use of what Simon Whetham termed ‘ambient drone with random field recordings’ in his comments in post 227), my response to the things I find problematic in the work of others is to question myself and my own work, to tackle things head on or to attempt to explore other avenues, to find other ways and means etc. I am more often influenced by what I do not like rather than by what I do. The things I choose to avoid inevitably shape the things I do choose to do. Everything raises more questions and I don’t think that there are any answers. Well I don’t have any anyway.

Field recording or art making in general is for me much more interesting as an activity; as a means to explore. Whether it be a specific location, whatever is bouncing around in my head at that particular point or simply whatever I stumble across. The things I produce are the artefacts or by-products of this activity, rather than a chance to tell others what it is that I think that I know. Of course these can also function as a form of communication, most often with other artists, but if we are all saying the same thing then this quickly becomes a fairly uninteresting conversation.

Many of the views expressed in this “debate” regarding the purpose or potential uses and interpretations of “field recording” have almost nothing to do with my own interest in the activity of collecting existing sounds from my environment. Which is what I would expect and to a large extent want. After all who wants to be surrounded by people who all think the same as them? I know it is somewhat of a human trait to seek the comfort and safety of the group, but what I see as the increasing desire of many people to find a clearly defined space to slot themselves into, is what makes so much of the sound work that uses the term field recording to define itself so uninteresting to me. As John Grzinich has pointed out already elsewhere in these pages, surely field recording is a method or activity. Not a musical style or genre. Not something for critics or curators to define, impart meaning upon or somehow grant validity to. To my thinking the only validity you need is your own, which you give yourself by doing whatever it is you need to do. There are so many more interesting and varied things that can be done around with these activities and their results that I am simply puzzled as to why there seems to be a desire to narrow the possibilities by constructing a collective container to put ones self into.

Nothing is true.

Everything is permitted.

* Guest editor and sound artist.

* The Field Reporter only claims authorship and responsibility for the material written by its editorial team.

** Top photo courtesy of Forepaw

[Photo by John Grzinich]

Eamon Sprod website

Boombana echoes. AKIO SUZUKI, LAWRENCE ENGLISH
(Winds Measure 2012)

Review by Patrick Farmer 

In the august sense, to hear is always already to have heard: to take one’s place in the assembly of prior listeners and thus permit them once again to be present in this enduring hearing. Maurice Blanchot.

Echo / Field Disappearing.

Who of us can stop repeating? It seems an incongruous association for such a quiet man, so perhaps it’s best to think of Suzuki, and English, as translators of an echo already existing, much like the detained breathe of Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone. An echo, a difference, is in a sense, like certain veins of field recording, a reduction, the glowing transience and a playful phenomenon that many of us, as we shrink older, tend to forget. Found here, hiding under baked pebbles, in the shedding atmosphere of pillbugs and nematodes, is a conglomeration of thick roots and a sustaining pulse that permeates beyond the relationship of stereo and architecture as a continuous–discontinuous space.

Echo / The Sound Of Sound

As echo becomes her environment the performers mimic the gum of previous interactions. Most of the tales in Ovid’s Metamorphosis take place outdoors, leaving the protagonists at the mercy of the elements, thus I hear Suzuki as he propels the onomatopoeia of oration as an amplification of the inside, the Anapolos, and many stories are reversed, voice and body are inseperable, around the edges of echo origins obscurely place themselves into the hands of a quavering impermanence.

In every conception of place there is the slightest glimpse of an interior (angles forever behind their angles) immobility. Burrowed and slow, labyrinths only as deep as their arms, the listener finds hatches of solitary personalities, Suzuki and English. The collision of a naked eye, a still pool, a pebble, revolving transitory subsistence, and the eventual rousing of a curiosity as all such events combine into a conjunctive and highly unstable element that can do nothing but collapse as it puts itself back together in a peculiar motion that never ceases to return to an everlasting compensation.

I’ll tail off with a quote by the French poet Jules Supervielle, one that wraps itself around the low rump and furrow of trace, the wagtail impressions found in every grain of this artifact.

Am I here, am I there? My customary shores
Change on every side and leave me wondering

In my notes I began to write. Resisting the urge to frequent and parable the fever of echo and her eventual fate in relation to the so-occurring proclivity of the collector, but I know I’m thinking it, as if I am awash in a superfluity of stale notion. It’s easy to point at the reiteration of others whilst overlooking the mirror image of your own mirror image.

A quick word in the ear of Suzuki’s accompanying topographical prints, wonderfully presented by Ben Owen. The black molasses of Suzuki’s cartography acts as a buckling trace, perhaps it’s the Yamabiko of Japanese folklore leaving hallucinations in corners? Amongst other things, I’m delighted to return to Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s, cats suggested as the fifty three stations of the Tõkaidõ, and I’m reminded once more of the playfulness of this recording, entangled in the personalities of those involved. There’s an impish insight into the infinitesimal cracks of tautology, and I see nothing but uncanny disposition staring back.

‘Cats suggested as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō’ by Utagawa Kuniyoshi

Akio Suzuki website
Lawrence English website
Winds Measure website

The one thing that tends to be a constant on my lunch break is a good ‘ol Starbucks coffee. So, without further adieu, here is a photo of my delicious obsession…

Now don’t panic y’all; you’ll still get the same mish mash of general ramblings and stuff, it’s just the look that has changed. I felt it was time for a new theme, you see my previous theme was based around the little illustrations I was doing but having since lost use of my power machine with all my art software, I have had to adapt. I felt that the theme left my homepage looking rather empty and it made me sad. So after shedding many tears, I decided to do something about it. I win. You win. We all win!

Here’s a picture of me disguised as a horse-man.

I pat myself on the back for being so awesome.

I leave you with a thought… when was the last time you disguised yourself as a horse person?

Good day to you.

Systemic Collapse. JAY-DEA LOPEZ
(Impulsive Habitat 2012)

Review by Flavien Gillié

Cet album de l’artiste australien Jay-Dea Lopez et paru sur le netlabel Impulsive Habitat nous donne à entendre une pièce de vingt minutes composée d’enregistrements de terrain recueillis vers la côte est de l’Australie, autour de Nimbin et Byron Bay. Des lieux de résistances où dans les années septante les communautés hippies ont lutté contre la déforestation industrielle.

Quelque chose ici prend place, de l’ordre de l’affrontement car la lutte n’en finit jamais, assourdissante. Petits ou grands insectes, tous vont au front, mais pour combien de temps encore dans ce combat inégal?

Jay-Dea Lopez a décidé dans ce nouvel opus de dresser un état des lieux sous le signe de l’inquiétude, de l’intranquilité. Un regard comme tourné vers l’abîme, d’une forêt en pâmoison, un combat qu’on n’ose qualifier de perdu d’avance entre les mandibules des insectes et la mécanique des engins qui avancent pour détruire.

La nuit est très sombre, il y a ici comme une envie de disparaitre, faire corps avec les insectes, ou bien de ce corps inutile leur en faire offrande, geste désespéré qui ne rachètera jamais la disparition programmée de leur espace naturel, mais qui pourrait faire place à une forme de rédemption, celle des vaincus dans une vision catastrophiste, destruction et effondrement, le progrès mécanique étant ici le nouveau totalitarisme.

Jay-Dea Lopez fait ici oeuvre d’historien, disciple de Walter Benjamin il capte ici ce profond souffle d’air qui détruit tout sur son passage, la forêt recule, inexorablement, les stridences des insectes sont déjà abolies, s’en vont diminuant, dans ce combat inégal les vaincus disparaissent, et l’écoute ne ressuscite rien, ne console de rien, mais on réalise quand le silence revient ô combien ce travail est alors essentiel.

[Jay-Dea Lopez, photo courtesy of Impulsive Habitat]

Translation to English -by Sismophone-

This album by australian artist Jay-Dea Lopez, released on Impulsive Habitat, is made of a twenty minutes piece composed of field recordings gathered on the australian west coast around Nimbin and Byron Bay. Places of resistance in the 70′s, where hippies communities fought against industrial deforestation.

Something here takes place, related to confrontation as this deafening battle royal never ends. Small or big insects, all go to the war, but how long can they resist this unequal clash?

In this new opus, Jay-Dea Lopez decides to draw up a state of affairs filled with worries and anxiety. A gaze as turned to the chasm, a forest into a swoon, a struggle no one dares to state already lost between insects mandibles and the mechanics of machines going forward in an inflexible destruction march.

The night is very dark, there is an eagerness to disappear, to unite with insects, or even of this useless body do an offering to them, a desperate gesture that would never redeem the programmed extinction of their natural space, although it could allow some form of redemption, the one of the defeated in a catastrophist vision, destruction and breakdown, mechanical progress being here the new totalitarianism.

Jay-Dea Lopez acts as an historian, disciple of Walter Benjamin, capturing this deep blow of air devastating everything on it’s way, the forest moves back,  relentlessly, insect stridencies are already abolished, inexorably vanishing, in this unfair struggle the vanquished disappear, and listening resurrects nothing, soothes nothing, but one realizes when silence is back how essential this work is.

Jay-Dea Lopez website
Impulsive Habitat website

Noise Intercepted is a series of ten experience-activated noise challenges that prompt participants to listen, observe and interact with their urban soundscape in new and unlikely ways. The project brings together over 200 collaborators from 28 countries around the globe — artists, sound ecologists, designers, writers, mothers, fathers, educators, filmmakers, administrators, technicians, scientists, students, programmers, health practitioners, and the list goes on.

As part of the project participants are given a weekly task.  The first week’s task is complete.  Entitled “The Pulse” the challenge was;

If your city had a defining sound, a defining pulse, a defining heartbeat, what would it sound like? look like? or feel like? …where would you go to find it? You have 1 week to venture outside and find the pulse of your city.

In response to this I submitted the following work;

The work is an idealized soundscape of rush hour at a busy city intersection. Unfortunately this is an illusion, but we can always dream. The original recordings are from a number of busy locations around the city of Berlin, with the main part from a busy intersection, Kotbusser Tor.

In the past I have studied the sound of a number of cities in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Berlin, Germany. The conclusion I arrived at is that all cities sound the same, more or less. Of course there can be individual features in a city, eg clocks or the transport system. But when I talk about the sound or pulse of a city I mean the everyday sound that people encounter, this is less than unique. Ever since the industrial revolution the din in cities has changed to a “lo-fi” drone, on top of what sits a cacophony composed of cars, trains, construction, and demolition, spitting out its omnipresent song. This is where the power of our own ears has helped us. We are able to filter out a great deal of this disturbance so we can function and communicate amongst this onslaught. This is possibly also why we have let the sound of our cities deteriorate so much, to the point where it can cause physical and emotional, and mental damage. People are now starting to wake up and realise we need to protect our soundscape and treat our most sensitive organ to more pleasant surroundings.

Through using a recorder we can hear the full force of this sonic barrage, minus the filtering carried out by our ears. Using computer processing and filtering I have created an idealised, but not perfect impression of how I wish Berlin could sound. When compared with the original recordings, this work is lighter and more spacious. There is a sense of less physical pressure on the body, leaving more space to think, reflect and breathe.

In 2011 the European Regional Office of the World Health Organisation published a document entitled ‘Burden of Disease from Environmental Noise’. It suggests that there is overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population. The publication provides an evidence base for the future development of suitable guidelines on noise by WHO. It supports the recommendations as set out in the ‘Night Noise Guidelines for Europe’ publication and supports this view based on a review of evidence based assessments of the impact of noise on health. (The Traffic Noise & Air Quality Unit, 2012)

Recordings of a crepuscular event. PHILIP SULIDAE
(Impulsive Habitat 2012)

Review by Daniel Crokaert

What does one expect from the practice of “Field Recording”, a genre which seems to turn its back on the parameters of a musical industry based on the “easily consumable/quickly memorable” and which educates us to listen ?…

Partly an opportunity of a unique journey such as the who’s who of audio-naturalists can provide…a phonographic cropping which glues itself in and flirts with our memories…

but above all, to my mind, essentially, the discovery of a close relationship to the world, and the blossoming of it, and also a powerful sensory stimulation through a fiction that our imaginary dresses up to its liking according to personal experience…

The Australian Philip Sulidae, gifted with an acute sense of sound observation is an enlightening example of this latest tendency…his goal is clearly not the docu-reality, but the transposition, the overhaul of select scattered fragments in an haunted patch-work, a dense, cinematic composition with a very particular grain and littered with micro-details…an editing in keeping with the elements which have infiltrated his unconscious to the point of becoming its mirror-image by absorption…

In “Recordings of a crepuscular event”, from first slice, the piece “Shadows suburbs” sets the tone ; one nestles into the dark, into the momentum of a charcoal which crushes, and its curls of graphite dust…a boned urban suburb of whom would only remain spectral traces of elapsed movements, sighs of an erased traffic…

“Accompanied hands” alternates dim voices, obscure manipulations, obsessing hum under some crackled varnish…

“Falls” distils an unbridled like free electricity, wheezes from obsolete, battered mechanisms, stamping of plants, statics and interferences, sliding on metal and vague breath, all to the sound of invisible insects…

“Arncliffe passing” tells a figurative crossing in ferry…from the motor rises up a slow monotonous chant closing with an opening gate which dumps its few passengers into the night…footsteps, wanderings, paced by a grey rain…

Finally, in “Further down the line (early morning storm)”, loaded and unstable air comes uninvited, thunder rumbles…changes into cracks, rustles, undefined agitations, evaporating in a distant drone punctuated with nocturnal insects…

in the end, the sensation of a long dazed spliceless ride…

Philip Sulidae keeps the substrate of real sounds which he then reroutes, while emphasizing on the quality of their sequences, modelling them in a kind of constant and gripping sound travelling, far from simple collage…he grabs us and take us away along side roads, an always fascinating liminal universe, a sort of “in-between two worlds” which gives more to feel, to imagine than to see… a most heady dusk !

[Philip Sulidae, photo courtesy of Impulsive Habitat]

- Translation to French-

Qu’attend t-on de la pratique du “Field Recording”, d’un genre qui semble tourner le dos aux paramètres d’une industrie musicale axée sur le “facilement consommable/vite marquant” et qui nous enseigne l’écoute ?

En partie une occasion de voyage unique telle que peut nous l’offrir le gratin des audio-naturalistes…un recadrage phonographique qui flirte avec et se visse dans nos mémoires…

mais surtout, à mon sens, essentiellement, la découverte d’un rapport étroit au monde, et l’épanouissement de celui-ci, ainsi qu’une puissante stimulation sensorielle au travers d’une fiction que notre imaginaire habille à son gré en fonction du vécu personnel…

L’australien Philip Sulidae, doué d’un sens aigu de l’observation sonore est un exemple édifiant de cette dernière tendance…son but n’est clairement pas le document-réalité, mais la transposition, la refonte de fragments épars choisis en un rapiécage hanté, une composition dense, cinématique, au grain très particulier et truffée de micro-détails…un montage au plus près des éléments qui ont infiltré son inconscient jusqu’à, par absorption, en devenir l’image-mirroir…

Dans “Recordings of a crepuscular event”, dès l’entame, la première pièce, “Shadow suburbs” donne le ton ; on se love dans le ténébreux, dans l’élan d’un fusain qui s’écrase et ses volutes de poussière de graphite…une banlieue urbaine désossée dont il ne resterait plus que les traces spectrales de mouvements révolus, les soupirs d’un traffic effacé…”Accompanied hands” alterne voix ténues, obscures manipulations, bourdonnement obsédant sous un vernis craquelé…”Falls” distille une électricité débridée, comme libre, des râles de mécaniques exsangues et obsolètes, piétinement de végétaux, crépitements et interférences, glissements sur le métal et souffle diffus, le tout au son d’insectes invisibles…”Arncliffe passing” narre une traversée figurée en ferry…du moteur s’exhale comme une lente mélopée qui se clôt par le crissement d’une grille qui s’ouvre, et déverse ses quelques passagers dans la nuit…pas, errances, rythmés par une pluie grise…

Enfin dans “Further down the line (early morning storm)”, un air chargé et instable s’invite, l’orage gronde…se mue en craquements, en froissements, en agitations indéfinies, s’évaporant en un drone lointain ponctué d’insectes nocturnes…

Au final, la sensation d’une longue ballade médusée sans raccords…

Philip Sulidae garde le substrat des sons réels qu’il détourne ensuite en appuyant la qualité de leurs enchaînements, en les modelant dans une sorte de constant et prenant travelling sonore, loin du simple collage…il nous agrippe et nous entraîne dans des chemins de traverse, un univers liminal toujours fascinant, une sorte d’entre-deux monde qui donne plus à sentir, à imaginer qu’à voir…un crépuscule des plus entêtants !

Philip Suliade website
Impulsive Habitat website

I will run minimum of 25 miles

I will keep up the “illiterate” food theme

I will not bring any school marking home

I will run before breakfast on run days

I’ll work on posting for next weeks phonography theme

I won’t use my car at all

So, what are your targets for the week to come?

Click to join me in this moment…

Some live to attain all they want, never considering what they want, or why. They wonder why they always struggle to have, or have to work so hard for what they want.

I looked at my wants and I asked why. Through questioning, I changed my wants; I want for less and find myself satisfied.