four questions # 30 - Signe Liden

JrF: when & why did you become interested in field recording ?

SL: First when I saved some cassette tapes of birds singing from being thrown away, recordings that my grandfather had done some decades before, I got interested in field recording. At that time I guess it was as much the narrative around the recordings: the idea of him sitting somewhere in the forest at the different seasons of the year, searching for songs to be caught. He is present in the recordings, as his breath and movements often drown out the sounds of the forest.

Shortly after, sound was an important element in an installation piece I was working on even though I knew little about sound and almost nothing about recording. A friend told me about the Soundman Binaural Microphones, and I bought a pair of those, connected them to my minidisc and recorded me through a travel around in Bosnia. Most of these recordings were crap but two of them caught my interest, one from the squeaking and hauling train in the mountains between Sarajevo and Mostar. The other one from a café on the riverside one evening in Mostar as the church bell sang along with the songs from minarets and where these celestial sounds got accompanied with the gay voices in the cafés. For fun, I had put the microphones inside some empty bottles at the table and I got surprised by the strange poetry I found down there. That was in 2007 and I guess that was where my interest in field recordings started.

JrF: how do you use your field recordings in your own artistic output ?

SL: I am interested in hidden sounds in our daily surroundings and I search for ways of discovering them. I often record sounds that are natural filtered, for example through pipes, wirings and also through waste laying around, like bottles and plastic cans. Much of my work where I use filed recordings are recreations of the "negative" spaces in places, the hidden spaces of auditive landscapes.

Also displacement of sound is a field of interest that I would like to explore more. How a place sonically reacts when it gets intruded by an alien sound environment.

JrF: do you regard 'natural' sounds as a musical element (bearing in mind that the conventional definition of 'music' is rapidly becoming obsolete) or as sound ? is this definition important ? does it matter ?

SL: Hmmm, no, I don´t consider that definition very relevant for my works. Still, I actually have to confront it when I do a live performance and use field recordings. As I have a visual art background, I think the approach to and language around my work are different from a musician`s but in the end I guess it does not matter.

JrF: has the act of making field recording had an effect (positive or negative) on the way you listen to your everyday surroundings and how has it affected the way you listen to other music and sound (if at all) ?

SL: Very much indeed! I think I hear much more than before and am more aware of how my perceptions of my surroundings effect me in different ways both physiological and psychological. The luxury of having the possibility to extend my ears from times to times through microphones and increase my hearing capacity through various types of microphones has opened up a mysterious and magic parallel space in my everyday life.

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