Sunday, May 6th is international dawn chorus day - why not arrange a gathering yourself ? a chance to meet up with friends & new people just to listen....

http://www.idcd.info/index.asp

& to get you in the mood, here's a nice dawn chorus recording by Peter Toll:

http://soundcloud.com/tolly-music/dawn-chorus-from-the-very

to really listen to an environment I personally don’t feel it helps to give oneself a time limit. Perhaps the point is that the ‘music’ of a place exists & can be truly heard when it is accepted rather than restricted. There is a question of framing in relation to any creative work that comes from these experiences but I have found it much more interesting, and ‘closer’, to allow that frame to be defined by an intuitive response to the place. I feel also its an important point to say that for some the act of ‘field recording’ is indeed always about recording, for others it is about listening & sometimes pressing ‘record’ doesn’t feature at all. This has always been the case & it would be, shall we say, helpful if the history of ‘sound art’ doesn’t forget that the art of listening is something that most field recordists & acoustic ecologists have always had a deep relationship with. The fact is that the constraints of the technology have created a picture of listening that is not a true reflection on the activity. Hours & hours of listening, of becoming engrossed in an environment are, archive-wise, represented by a few minutes or seconds of audio recording. Technology has moved on for those who want to record of course & yet still the dominant durational choices, both of recording and of listening, remain those established by earlier technologies.

four questions # 31 - Sally Ann McIntyre

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

SaM: I came to field recording through radio, and in one sense the practice of field recording is inherently, for me, connected to the history of concrete sound, the set of possibilities that arrived with the invention of recording technologies and was taken up by people like Walter Ruttmann, and has been used in radio ever since.

While broadcasting late night experimental music programs in the 1990s, which were non-signposted, collaged soundscapes, with a maximum of different media and many found elements, I also included the occasional recording i had made myself on tape and dictaphone, and in-studio self-reflexive recordings layered into the shows. This was probably also when I used digital recording gear for the first time, via a minidisc recorder i borrowed from the same radio station while interviewing for an arts radio

program show i concurrently hosted. I used to walk around after interviews conducted in the hotel rooms of visiting German curators and record the sounds of the street outside. I eventually moved more and more away from the journalism and more and more toward a focus on the sounds themselves, although i've always been interested in the links between both and will probably continue to try and combine them. Glenn Gould's 'solitude trilogy' is an obvious reference point here.

My relationship to field recording is also, and somewhat more fundamentally, connected to a personal history of building collections of sonic material, and trying to deal with various questions around memory, observation and presence, by connecting these things to a kind of amateur, personal sound archiving or museology. At the age of about 8 or 9, I went through a period of taping found sounds, recording imaginary radio programs with my brother on the little tape recorder in my bedroom, and compiling sound libraries of various things, like dinner table conversations recorded without my parents knowing, and every episode of the Australian Nature TV show 'In the Wild with Harry Butler', possibly so i could listen to them later, sans visuals, but i'm not sure if i ever actually did. I had no real idea what I was going to do with these collections, and it was a long time before i learned to identify them as part of an artistic or curatorial process. They probably emerged from a similar impulse to the time capsules i buried in the nature strip outside my parents house at the same age, a curiosity around the mysteries of place and presence and transmission across time, the notion that there was someone or something to speak to who was not present but somewhere in the past or the future, the recognition and preservation of a moment that nobody else seemed to notice or find valuable. There was a real sadness to this process, a kind of haunting. At the same time I also spent hours and hours watching ant colonies and collecting crickets and lake-dwelling creatures for the terrariums in my bedroom. My interest in biology was increasingly leading me to the conclusion that I didn't want to be a scientist after all, that insect collecting was inherently suspect, although I couldn't put words to that knowledge yet, and while I was comforted by the live soundtrack of the crickets who sang all night next to me while i was sleeping, i had not yet literally connected the practices of sound recording and observation.

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

SaM: Since participating in a transmitter building workshop run by the Japanese Radio artist Tetsuo Kogawa when he visited New Zealand in 2006, i've been making programs for a mini FM station called Radio Cegeste, which I take with me everywhere. Radio producers traditionally see the radio studio a bit like the art world sees the gallery space - as a neutral, non-place, without specificity, in a binary relationship to a notion of 'in-situ' radio that 'conveys' a sense of place, that builds a 'picture in the mid's eye'. There's a long art-historic conversation around Nature and realism going on in the background here, which relates to radio sound design, and piecing together elements in the studio to build a convincing sonic vista. The mini FM transmissions i've been doing since 2008 in sites are responsive to time and place in a different way, not a more direct way, but one that is less pre-determined and more phenomenological : I collect field recordings, whether they're interview based, or silences, or libraries or galleries, or buildings or birds or rivers, and don't take them away from the environment in question but re-transmit them back into the space they were collected in, or a conceptually related place, within a certain period of time.

Mini FM is the perfect medium for this kind of thing because of its battery powered, and sometime solar powered mobility, and also because due to the small radius of transmission, and the distortion and the weak signal and the picking up of other radio frequencies while transmitting, there's a lack of realism beyond a certain point, you cannot help but hear the sound of the medium itself. Moving out of the broadcast studio into this kind of more fragile, more mobile, more ecologically aware, site-specific way of using radio has given a lightness and greater experimentalism to my understanding of how radio can work, it's meant that the field, or the situation, or the location, can be easily included without overdetermination or mystification. So in the process of making programmes as 'experimental documentaries' in gallery spaces, or on public transport, or within the high fences of biosecure eco-sancturies, i've been connecting field recordings, as a way of being placed in-situ, in a site, with radio, which through this process also reveals itself as sited and material.

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 ?

SaM: Post John Cage it's pretty hard to think of any sound as not being listenable as music. There's still the tendency in sound recording communities to want a clean recording, to go out into the field and capture something at the source, at the origin, and bring them back to the studio, but when i'm recording natural sounds, because the nature of Mini FM means the playback is going to compromise the recordings in various ways, i'm not so interested so much in that Acoustic Ecology notion of getting rid of the human element, or in the most perfect way of capturing them, or in what i've come to think of as 'the greatest hits of nature', but more how this recording relates to the concept of the show i'm making, and how different recording methods can produce different materialities of sound that all react together to produce something quite specific. A few weekends ago I did an interview on a radio show called Avant Gardening that I co-host on Dunedin radio station Radio One, with the Dunedin musician Peter Stapleton, and he played one piece he made for a collaborative gallery installation, which layered cicada drones recorded in his home town of Christchurch, and the evocation of summer that came through the piece was so absolutely recognisable as being of that place, despite the fact it was all recorded on a cassette Walkman, using accessible non professional technology, as a lot of the experimental music from New Zealand has done. Without those recordings we have no sonic record of these events, but it's also a particular aesthetic choice which has informed the development of a certain strand of lo-fi sound here.

Doing Radio Cegeste has been a way for me to activate radio as a live medium which has instrumental potential within this kind of context. The programmes i've been doing with the little station include live collaborations with experimental musicians, and the narrowcasting to small radios in the context of live sound performances. Prior to this i wasn't involved directly in a musical output, and didn't think of myself as a musician at all, but I've come to understand the activation and making-audible of radio waves as a way of reading the space, as these waves are around us all the time, mostly without us knowing. To make them audible, via receivers as translation devices, and also to put new signals into the radio waves, via the transmission of field recordings and musical sounds, and experimenting with the relationship between electromagnetic instruments of various kinds, seems to itself problematise the notion of musical vs. 'natural' sounds in ways that are quite interesting. The same kind of thing happens when listening back to a really scratchy 78rpm recording, and the object-status of that recording becomes part of the history of how its sound has reached your ears, in ways that are completely inseparable from the sound itself.

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) ?

SaM: As I did when I was little, I still really get quite caught up around the ethical tension between experience value and use value when it comes to sound recording. As in : what am I doing this for? Am i recording this sound to listen to it in the future, or to preserve something, or to heighten my sense of the present? These are questions i've never been able to answer, and it's a confusion which also seems to be an inherent, embedded part of time-based observing and recording technologies themselves. But doing radio in the way i do it now is one way i have found of releasing the burdensome monumentality of the process of collecting, and speaking back in an active way to the idea of the archive as a search for a totality which locks something down, like pinning a collection of butterflies to a board.

In a way, i'd be lying if i said i haven't learned to listen far more avidly through the focused sensory process that recording involves. the experiential process of walking around with headphones on grounds the perceiving subject differently in the world. It can take you to places, to sensorial understandings, on a macro or micro level, which you wouldn't normally be able to go. But really the headphones, and the recording, are a prosthetic, an extension of being grounded in the process of embodied listening itself, which is a decision and an act that comes prior. A sound artist i know once told me about moving away from making music, into the practice of sitting in a place for 20 minutes a day, to listen to the sounds of the world, like he would listen to a piece of music, without recording it, just being present with it. This end-point to the idea of recording, and perhaps to the whole notion of the intentionality of music as well, like Duchamp giving up art to play chess, is often on my mind.

thanks Sally

http://radiocegeste.blogspot.co.uk/

as part of the new series of 'bang goes the theory', the BBC science series, you can watch Chris Waston as he listens to the sounds of snails, centipedes & maggots using one of my JrF c-series contact microphones.

here's an extract of the centipede recording (thanks to Chris Watson for permission to use this recording here)

The programme is available to view online via the BBC i-player for the next few days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00q6vht

for those outside the UK the clip is also available on the BBC's youtube channel:

telinga will be launching a new 'SoundscapeMic' in April

Telinga products are always extremely high quality as i'm sure most of you already know. This new stereo mic set up looks & sounds like it will continue that tradition.

for sound samples & tests click here

eg.p018

john grzinich

madal öö

(shallow night)

1. Ööküll forest house, small pond with frogs. Recorded June 28th, 2010 at around 1:30 am

2. Water insect and beaver territory, Räpina Polder. Recorded May 29th, 2011 at around 1:30 am

3. Diverse calls of the Emajõe Suursoo (Ema River delta). Recorded May 15th, 2011 at around 3:00 am

4. Quiet field with Corn Crakes on the road from Rasina. Recorded June 28th, 2010 at around 2:30 am

5. Noisy island on Meelva lake with Cuckoo chorus. Recorded May 21st, 2011 at around 3:30 am

five spring chorus recordings, made in the early hours of the morning in natural wilderness environments in Estonia. Simplicity, clarity and the richness of the sonic landscapes documented make this release a fascinating listen.

available as a limited edition taiyo yuden disc, mounted on an A5 art card with accompanying A6 postcard and as a digital download.

John Grzinich (b. 1970 new york state), lives and works in estonia & has work published on labels such as SIRR (PT), Staalplaat (NL), Edition Sonoro (UK), Mystery Sea (BE) CUT (CH), CMR (NZ), erewhon (BE), Intransitive Recordings (US), Orogenetics (US), Elevator Bath (US), Pale-Disc (JP), Digital Narcis (JP) Taalem (FR), and Cloud of Statics(CH). Currently John is a project coordinator for MoKS – Center for Art and Social Practice , an artist-run international residency center and project space in southeast Estonia.

price / postage options

UK £6.00 GBP rest of world £8.00 GBP

also available as a digital download

eg.p015

Bruno Duplant - ‘deux trois choses ou presque’ (scores by Manfred Werder)

1- 2009/4 (with the score)

2- 2009/5 (with the score)

3- 2010/2 (with the score)

scores by manfred werder

interpretations by bruno duplant (phonographies, sine tones, double bass & horn)

recordings made in waziers & douai, france, 2011

improviser and phonographer, Bruno’s latest release includes three realizations of text scores by Manfred Werder, using field recordings, sine tones, double bass & horn. Manfred has also supplied 'The Field', a further text piece to sit alongside these recordings.

available as a digital download only

review from 'the field reporter' website:

The installation of a sculpture into an area of countryside, or even sometimes into an established urban environment, can bring forth complaints. People object to the change of scenery. Letters are written to newspapers. Their sense of familiarity has been compromised.

A place they felt they once knew intimately has suddenly been transformed. An artist has had the audacity to position his work, a product of his singular imagination, in a place of prominence in the landscape.

As time passes the sculpture becomes assimilated into its surroundings. Children climb on it, people sit on its plinth to chat and it is used as a point of reference when giving directions to strangers.

In a small way this conversion happens when listening to Bruno Duplant’s deux trois choses ou presque, based on scores by Manfred Werder. Knowing from the text that Duplant is going to use sine tones, double bass and horn during these field recordings, there is a tendency to wait for their intrusion.

Listening attentively to a recording of what sounds like a semi- rural milleu of birdsong and a little human activity, I was ready for the instrumantal interventions. When they came they were slow, extended tones that seemed to rise over the everyday canvas of underlying sounds, disembodied and subtle but nevertheless at odds with their surroundings .

But as the tracks went on, a confluence occurred. Rather than existing alongside each other, the two seperate strands of the work seemed to coalesce. The distance and division between them seemed to lessen. By the end of its 40 or so minutes duration, the symbiosis was complete. The duality disappeared and in its place was a new entity.

For me (and this is purely a personal view, most probably not intended by the work’s authors at all), I envisaged an electromagnetic field of some sort emanating from the ground. It was as if Duplant, as well as recording the sounds of the environment, had also managed to record a field of energy vibrating beyond human audition.

Dedicating deux trois choses ou presque to the poet Francis Ponge is telling. Ponge’s poetry was based on minute attention to the detail of everyday objects. Free of emotion and symbolism, Ponge sought to express the world as it was. Pure concentration on simple objects. The cigarette. The potato. A bar of soap.

These three tracks demand similar attention too. Every listen creates in the mind different points of convergence and fusion between the elements of the piece. It is an object that can be turned around and looked at from many angles. Of course, each person has their own individual way of approaching any work of art, and each approach brings new rewards.

“Another way of approaching the thing is to consider it unnamed, unnameable.” – Francis Ponge.

-Chris Whitehead

review by Richard Pinnell (the watchful ear):

Bruno Duplant’s deux trois choses ou presque, a new release from Engraved Glass presents us with three realisations of these found sentences scores; versions of 2009(4), 2009(5) and 2010(2). In each we hear vibrant, busy sound worlds full of details of indoor and outdoor activity, traffic, city hum, birdsong, children at play, everything you might expect. Alongside each of the three Duplant plays an instrument, electronic sine tones, double bass and a horn of some kind. They are each quite fascinating to listen to, an aural window onto another part of the world, three sets of sounds we can only partly easily identify, and so we engage with them as a listener in a way we might not if we were just going about our way in the place they were recorded. Werder talks about The Field however as not being contained by anything. So the CD that I burned this music onto to listen to, the digital silence at each end of the disc, the sounds in the room around me do not sit apart from the performance. Here though, as each play of the CD presents the same set of sounds from the hi-fi, so maybe I am then extending the work out into my own experience here. Strangely, exactly a year ago tomorrow I wrote thisreview of a Manfred Werder score released on CD. Because it felt like the correct thing to do on that evening I split the review partly between my grasp of the sounds coming from the stereo, and partly on the cup of tea I was drinking while it played- both its taste, but also how it looked, smelt, felt in my hands. The need to extend Werder’s music beyond the aural, beyond even the extended sound world it met once merged into the sounds here once played seemed important.

So, I found myself engaging with Duplant’s realisations of Werder in similar ways, each time I listened, whether it be in the often interrupted near silence here this evening or alongside the roar of the car, and the already focussed visual awareness of driving to work and back today with the CD playing. To judge the music of this download away from such a consideration of everything else I can sense is then, perhaps a fruitless concern. I can tell you how the pieces here sound, but that might miss the point of Manfred’s music. I actually am not a big fan of Duplant’s playing on these works- a little too busy, and in the case of the final track with his remarkably electronic sounding horn actually quite distracting from everything else on the recording. This is pointless though simply because the recording of a realisation of these works is not the work itself. Playing the recording and existing alongside it certainly comes closer, but writing about the sounds coming from my hi-fi speaker alone would perhaps be to miss the point.

nice frog recording made with one of my JrF hydrophones, captured by Francois Vaillant

http://www.frvaillant.com/phonotographie/?p=222

The Binaural / Nodar residency team have just issued a great book / catalogue & double cd - €25 ! & available from their site - click here

there are still so few books on sound that are inclusive in the way they are presented - that don't attempt to enforce one perception of what sound is or might be. this one is a very welcome addition to that small number of publications indeed.

Texts by:

Aaron Ximm (EUA), Alicja Rogalska (Polónia), Amaya González (Espanha), Andrea Brandão (Portugal), António Pedro (Portugal), Arnold Haberl (Áustria), Ben Owen (EUA), Cédric Anglaret (França), Christine Niehoff (Alemanha), Dennis Báthory-Kitsz (EUA), Duncan Whitley (Inglaterra), Evelyn Müürsepp (Estónia), Francisco Janes (Portugal), Ignacio Martinez (Espanha), Jason Kahn (EUA), Joana Nascimento (Portugal), John Grzinich (EUA), Jurate Jarulyte (Lituânia), Keiko Uenishi (Japão), Lezli Rubin-Kunda (Israel), Luciana Ohira (Brasil), Luís Costa (Portugal), Maile Colbert (EUA), Maksims Shentelevs (Letónia), Manuela Barile (Itália), Maria Idília Martins (Portugal), Marta Bernardes (Portugal), Martin Clarke (Inglaterra), Melanie Velarde (Austrália), Nilo Gallego (Espanha), Noemi Fidalgo (Espanha), Pali Meursault (França), Peeter Laurits (Estónia), Rui Costa (Portugal), Rui Silveira (Portugal), Satoshi Morita (Japão), Sérgio Bonilha (Brasil), Sérgio Cruz (Portugal), Stevie Balch (EUA), Suzanne Caines (Canadá), Svetlana Bogomolova (Rússia), Toomas Thetloff (Estónia), Vered Dror (Israel), Viv Corringham (Inglaterra), Wolfgang Dorninger (Áustria), Xesús Valle (Espanha).

Lista de peças sonoras do CD duplo anexo “Nodar Location-Specific Sound 2007-2009”:

CD#1

1 -Jason Kahn: Windline [10:02]
2 -Satoshi Morita: .: :: – / – / – :. [2:55]
3 – Aaron Ximm: The Stone Giant, or, a millstone breathing in Nodar [9:56]
4 -John Grzinich: Flowlines [10:10]
5 – Maksims Shentelevs: Ghost of Nodar [10:00]
6 – Ben Owen: Resounding Nodar – Edit [4:56]
7 – Wolfgang Dorninger: in the water [8:00]
8 – Rui Costa: Traces of a Place [5:21]
9 – Xesús Valle: Tactile Processes [7:40]
10 – Samuel Ripault (Pali Meursault): Pleine Lune [9:15]

CD#2

1 – Martin Clarke: Mountain Quiet [8:21]
2 – Arnold Haber (Noid): Music for Five Instruments and a Gun [19:08]
3 – Manuela Barile: Moroloja [4:14]
4 – Duncan Whitley: Joga, Isso! [9:40]
5 – Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat): Serpentines and Chestnuts (several scenes for Nodar Social Composition) [7:41]
6 – Dennis Báthory-Kitsz: Three Songs for Manuela [4:33]
7 – Marta Bernardes & Ignacio Martínez: Coro de Noé [3:00]
8 – Viv Corringham: Where You Are [4:28]
9 – Melanie Velarde: Untitled [9:08]
10 – Maile Colbert: Over the Eyes [9:01]