Field Recordings
selected by Duncan Whitley for Audiolab10 'the language of place'.
Gilles Aubry & Stéphane Montavon “Dalle sur sous-sol [Slab on basement]”
Recordings realised in Rebeuvelier (CH), on September 8th 2009.
1. Nappe extérieure [Outer mesh], new edit 8:00 (original 22:20)
2. Nappe intérieure [Inner mesh], extract 8:00 (original 14:24)
We've spent an afternoon on a construction site recording the pouring of a concrete slab. The site is located in the Swiss border area close to France. Each piece offers another acoustic "perspective", one atmospheric, the other tactile, on the same event. "Outer mesh" gives account of work steps, gestures and exchanged words, including fragments of interviews with the workers about the object they are building, their thoughts while working, their work conditions, their itinerant or immigrant backgrounds, as well as our intrusion and the purpose to release the recordings. "Inner mesh" is a succession of contact mic takes, the mics having been attached to a concrete truck, to cranes, reinforcement bars and other steel elements. Dalle sur sous-sol relates to Belju sound bridge, a project on transborderality, see http://www.belju.info/english/home.html, http://www.belju.info/
Nina Perry “You have to learn some Swahili” 2min35sec
Mwenge Carvers Market, Dar es Salaam Tanzania September 2009
Field recordings gathered whilst producing ‘The Music Tree’ a radio documentary about making an Irish Flute from African Blackwood with Tanzanian carvers. The carvers market was full of inter-actions, and I discovered a very literal relationship between language and place as well as a sonic or musical language of the environment.
John Levack Drever “The Language of Place: Festival Walk, Harbour City”
Festival Walk, 3min46
Shopping malls, such as Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong – “an energised environment of innovation, originality and pleasure” (http://www.festivalwalk.com.hk/eng/about.htm) – with its Gothic cathedral-like acoustic backdrop and ice rink to boot, are “essentially a fantasy urbanism devoid of the city’s negative aspects: weather, traffic, and poor people” (‘The World in a Shopping Mall’, Margaret Crawford, 1992). Shopping malls have become Hong Kong’s focal civic spaces.
Harbour City, 5min52
A recording made on Canton Road by the entrance to the underground car park to Harbour City, a large shopping mall in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong, which hosts a major cruise terminal. The frenetic call of a traffic warden’s whistle penetrates the background noise: “… that incessant hubbub, our signals, our messages, our speech and our words are but a fleeting high surf, over its perpetual swell” (Genesis, Michel Serres, 1995).
http://www.myspace.com/johnlevackdrever
Rui Costa “Suspension of Judgement” 5min00
(recorded Lisbon, April 18th 2009)
From my high-rise apartment, outside sounds generated at several distances
appear flattened in one plane, which can be disorienting.
On a Saturday afternoon I noticed an interesting sound event. It had rained
and the flow of traffic outside produced a constant swoosh that made other
sounds barely inaudible. The disorienting character of the soundscape was
even more evident than usual.
I edited the recording in a multi-layered way, creating multiple “folds” of
the original timeline.
http://www.myspace.com/ruigcosta
Dale Berning “Matani and Eden” 8min05
Matani and Eden, the Old City of Jerusalem, 11 November 2009
The Old City is a polished maze. Ancient stone walls and paving slabs and houses and roofs and wooden doors and small windows are pieced together in some unfathomable order, thickened by people and history. In this impossibly dense place, a tree teeming with a myriad tiny birds offered a rare space to breathe and listen as people walked to and fro beneath it.
http://www.boweavilrecordings.com/berning.html
Phill Harding “Damens” 7min57
Sometimes, places speak to us very loudly of their multi-layered histories.
Damems was constructed from recordings made in the summer of 2004, in an abandoned and burnt out mill in the Worth Valley, between Keighley and Haworth. The entire roof of the building had collapsed in the fire, covering the floor with a dense layer of small pieces of glass, burnt wood and rusty metal. Somehow, this new "carpet" seemed to carry a kind of sonic residue of the fire itself.
Meanwhile, outside the building, boys collecting grasshoppers in a jar.
Jez riley French “....approaches to quietude (Belgium)”
Records of situations where I was sitting silently listening – each is also a record of the stillness of the location.
Street (4min00)
The audible silence of surfaces offers a different approach to stillness.
Each object filters the sounds of the environment in which it is situated.
Turning ones ears to a different audible field of sound can be said to create
the effect of listening through a mirror – observing from inside a point
that is not accessed by others at the time.
Bookshop (4min00)
I always hunt for bookshops when I visit a city. We can hear the sound of
several young people attempting to be quiet. This might not sound like a
remarkable event, but it is becoming rarer to find people who lower their
voices in certain situations.
http://JezrileyFrench.blogspot.com/
Carlos Suarez
"Amphibians and thunder on the borders of the Orinoco" (2min00)
"Borders of the Orinoco - bats and insects" (4min53)
http://www.escoitar.org/Soundscapes-from-Venezuela