'Dreaming' is one of a group of six string electric cello recordings made at the studio in July. Jensen electric cello, Dave Smith Tempest, Snazzy FX, Burriss Boost, Timeline, Space.

Dreaming (electric cello)

'Fukushima' is the second of a group of six string electric cello recordings made at the studio in July. Jensen electric cello, Dave Smith Tempest, Snazzy FX, Burriss Boost, Timeline, Space. This track was inspired by Shimpei Takeda's photograms of radioactive soil from the Fukushima area. The timbre references 'gagaku,' a form of ancient Japanese music, but the woodwind or shakuhachi like sounds are all all cello driven.

Fukushima (electric cello)

'GeoMorphology' is from the NEAR(ER) live performance at USC April 26th, 2013. 

NEAR(ER) imagines a virtual geography where nature, technology and consciousness combine. This sound was synced to video projections created by Israeli video artist Chen Serfaty. Constructed from Lindsay's A/V archive, the videos became ‘processed memories.’ Coming to Vimeo soon.

Instrumentation includes six string electric cello, samplers, Continuum controller, Dave Smith Tempest drum machine, various Snazzy FX including a modular synth, and an iPad running GlitchBreaks and Borderlands - my favorite software instrument. Many of the individual tracks were run through a Thermionic Labs Culture Vulture and then through an Elysia nvelope and mpressor.

NEAR(ER) - GeoMorphology

10,000 YEAR DREAM arrives fresh off the mule’s back. It is compiled from recent recordings made while on expedition into Baja’s Santa Teresa Canyon, where a small group of favorite compadres communed with the sprits of those ancient-rock-artists whose magnificent pictographs communicate across a 10,000 year divide. 

Presented much as the stratigraphic layers of geological record seen in the canyons, the field recordings are metamorphosed, weaving and eroding the same sounds those ancient artists heard along with more recent sonic overlays. Owls speak, frogs chirp, rivulets babble, mule bells clang and donkeys bray. There is distant laughter. Wind. A dreamer snores. 

presented at Castillo de Dracula in Todos Santos, Baja, Mexico for the inaugural UNIVERSE, METAVERSE AND VERSE happening. Single channel sound, dedicated room in the former sugarcane mill. A suspended SE VENDE work, appearing much as an aluminum landscape, held the space.

Thank You Julia Chaplin for hosting. Thank You Saddling South outfitters for the journey.

10000 Year Dream 2022

This is the sound file for the 'FIELDWORK' video - from the comb jelly capture at Hope Island, British Columbia, summer 2014. The video is raw material for installations. The sound is built from field recordings made at Hope Island, with hydrophones, contact mics, parabolics .... Processing was done with the Monome ARC4 and 'GrainChild' / Ableton Live software built by Alec Brady, and with Glitchgmachines 'Cataract' and Expert Sleepers 'Spectral Conquest.'

The vimeo link is here: https://vimeo.com/114138392

Fieldwork : Hope Island : Comb Jellies : 2014

These recordings are from the Deep Time Data Extraction Devices (DTDED) I’ve built as part of the ‘Mining the Moon’ series. Considering what we take with us and what we leave behind, whether fleeing climate change and fundamentalists or heading for the Moon, or Mars… The physical ‘artworks' are built from aluminum, fluid dynamics salvage, programmed LEDs, custom raspberry pi with microphones, surveillance cameras, rock samples, glass, crushed aluminum beer cans (trailhead discoveries which have been 24K gold leafed.) What remains from the deep past? I’m listening - imagining more data persists than we’ve previously been aware of. Rendered samples include a 1929 Steinway baby grand piano, the quantum computer at NASA Ames, ravens talking, a man paddling a kayak off the west coast of Vancouver Island, rocks, surf, beach walks, ocean bottom feeders and crustaceans, gulls on a bait ball, wind, amplifiers, lava tubes, cooing cave pigeons, a building implosion in Houston, electric guitar, electric cello drones, modular synth, vibration table glitch and horseshoe crabs mating - as they have for 450 million years.

DTDED - HorseshoeCrab Enclosure

These recordings are from the Deep Time Data Extraction Devices (DTDED) I’ve built as part of the ‘Mining the Moon’ series. Considering what we take with us and what we leave behind, whether fleeing climate change and fundamentalists or heading for the Moon, or Mars… The physical ‘artworks’ are built from aluminum, fluid dynamics salvage, programmed LEDs, custom raspberry pi with microphones, surveillance cameras, rock samples, glass, crushed aluminum beer cans (trailhead discoveries which have been 24K gold leafed.) What remains from the deep past? I’m listening - imagining more data persists than we’ve previously been aware of. Rendered samples include a 1929 Steinway baby grand piano, the quantum computer at NASA Ames, ravens talking, a man paddling a kayak off the west coast of Vancouver Island, rocks, surf, beach walks, ocean bottom feeders and crustaceans, gulls on a bait ball, wind, amplifiers, lava tubes, cooing cave pigeons, a building implosion in Houston, electric guitar, electric cello drones, modular synth, vibration table glitch and horseshoe crabs mating - as they have for 450 million years.

DTDED - Raven:Imploding

These recordings are from the Deep Time Data Extraction Devices (DTDED) I’ve built as part of the ‘Mining the Moon / Craters of the Moon’ series. Considering what we take with us and what we leave behind, whether fleeing climate change and fundamentalists or heading for the Moon, or Mars… The physical ‘artworks’ are built from aluminum, fluid dynamics salvage, programmed LEDs, custom raspberry pi with microphones, speakers, surveillance cameras, rock samples, glass, crushed aluminum beer cans (trailhead discoveries which have been 24K gold leafed.) What remains from the deep past? I’m listening - imagining more data persists than we’ve previously been aware of. Rendered samples include a 1929 Steinway baby grand piano, the quantum computer at NASA Ames, ravens talking, a man paddling a kayak off the west coast of Vancouver Island, rocks, surf, beach walks, ocean bottom feeders and crustaceans, gulls on a bait ball, wind, amplifiers, lava tubes, cooing cave pigeons, a building implosion in Houston, electric guitar, electric cello drones, modular synth, vibration table glitch and horseshoe crabs mating - as they have for 450 million years.

DTDED - Drone:Bow-Cabin

This audio was selected as source material for a Disquiet Junto project (disquiet.com/junto) that will go live on Thursday, January 28, around noon California time. Details will be posted here:

http://disquiet.com/2016/01/28/disquiet0213-complexsignatures/


OSA Costa Rica - Rain Forest - Disquiet

DWAVE2 - Quantum Computer / NASA Ames - Disquiet

BC Oceanic - Bunsby Islands / Hydrophone - Disquiet

Cello drones and what nots recorded outside the studio in September, 2015. Insect percussion. 

Sept.Studio.2015

Midnight, June 1st, bullfrog love fest too loud to sleep, who wants to sleep when we can listen to this ...

Bull Frogs 6.1.2016

This is a multi-track recording of nylon brushes played on the stainless steel railing at Derek Ferguson's house in Matapalo, Costa Rica. I was working with sympathetic frequencies and resonances, howler monkeys often came to listen during these dawn sessions. At the time I was reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx + Crake. This seems like an appropriate soundtrack.



Playing the Railing - Costa Rica (Oryx+Crake.) 2011

This track comes from an experiment with feedback and himalayan 'singing bowls.' I'm micing the bowls, running that through a small amp and then the amp vibrates the bowls and so on. At some point coyotes came very close to my studio in the northern Catskills of New York State and began howling. They were recorded concurrently with separate mics and then mixed together for this track. I was also running some sounds from the Snazzy Fx 'ARK' which appear in the background at the end. Certain tones seem to attract the coyotes to come in to listen and howl while I'm playing electric guitar or screwing around with the tone generators on my vintage short wave radios.


Coyote + Himalayan Singing Bowl Feedback Experiment. 2011

This is a re-mix of Laurie Anderson's 'Only an Expert' done through Indaba music. It includes Laurie's voice pretty much as in the original, with some of her beats, processed. Other than that it's my work on shortwave radio samples, Snazzy Fx Ark, 6 string electric cello, electronics, and Moog guitar.



'Only an Expert' ReMix for Laurie Anderson. 2010

Short sleeves in January, a friend moving back to Canada for political reasons, experimenting with strange noises - analog and software - processed ethnographic recordings, recordings of wolves in Montana. Strong coffee. Dave Smith's Tempest drum machine, Shopping for snake boots.

Climate Changes Processed Pygmies

Not for the faint of heart - I was recording midday rain forest insects and doves in Matapalo on the OSA peninsula in Costa Rica when there was a capuchin fight in the canopy above. That or else the monkeys had spotted a python or aother predator. I couldn't see them from where I was recording. It's right up there with my a little too close to the bull buffalo recordings in Yellowstone for primal blood curdling effect.... it gets wild at the 1:05 mark. Sony PCM-50.

Monkey Terror - OSA, Costa Rica

These are the sounds of bamboo in wind at Matapalo, Costa Rica - a straight ten minute recording. I recorded to a Sound Devices 722 deck using JrF contact microphones, attaching the mics to a pair of separate 7" diameter bamboo stalks five feet apart and seven feet above ground within a large clump of forty or so 50 footers. There was a tropical afternoon breeze, peaking in amplitude about every 4 minutes, and what a world of sound travels through those vascular inner fibers. The recordings are gorgeous and alive on their own but I expect to morph these into tectonic groans for experimental audio installations and musical applications.

Bamboo in Wind  (Stereo Contact Mics)

I stand corrected, this is not the sound of a Laughing Falcon but of a Common Potoo, recorded at 11 pm under a full moon, Matapalo, Costa Rica. Recorded with a Telinga twin-science parabolic mic to a Sound Devices 722 deck. In response to questions from some keen listeners, the original recording with these seven calls was five and a half minutes long. I trimmed the in between bits to keep the recording moving. The calls were originally from 50 to 60 seconds apart with some as much as three minutes apart.

Common Potoo (7 calls) Full Moon

This is a short clip from a group of buffalo recordings made on a butte above the Gros Ventre River, south of Yellowstone Park, Wyoming. I was a little too close @ about 30 feet from the lead bull as he led the heard. There was one false charge, after which I moved off.

Buffalo @ Gros Ventre River, Wyoming

Charles Lindsay is a multi-disciplinary artist interested in technology, eco-systems, semiotics and signaling. He creates immersive environments, sound installations, sculptures built from salvaged aerospace and bio-tech equipment, videos and photographs. 

Educated as a geologist Lindsay is the SETI Institute’s AIR program director, a Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art and Environment and the innovator behind OSA EARS: a project designed to deliver real time sound from one of the world’s most bio-diverse rain forests to anyone anywhere with internet. Lindsay’s work has been profiled by WIRED, Motherboard, ARTonAIR.org, Viralnet, NPR and CNN International. 

At SETI Lindsay collaborated with astrophysicist Laurance Doyle - who employed information theory and algorithms to prove that humpback whale communications exhibit syntax. “CODE Humpback” references this research through sculptural audio / visual works, combining ideas about encrypted signals and inter-species communications. “CODE Humpback” debuted at the Bolinas Museum (2014)and showed again at MassMoCA in 2017.

Lindsay received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010) for “CARBON” - a hybrid process synthesizing photography and drawing. “CARBON” harnesses the language of high resolution scientific imaging to render ambiguous the micro and the vast, the organic and the digital, the real and the alien. The large scale visuals are altered through sensor feedback and modulation to create subtly responsive art works. “CARBON IV” was shown at the LED LAB NYC (2014.) 

Lindsay has created and directed three live music shows, for which he plays six string electric cello, electronics and combinations of voice, continuum, processed field recordings and electric guitar. All incorporate his visuals, with improvisational music developed through collaborations. The Electrosense of Paddlefish was made in response to water issues in the American west. It was created and performed with David Rothenberg for Ear to the Earth at the Frederick Lowe Theater (2010.) Trout Fishing in Space imagines an off Earth habitation. Collaborators included Billy Gomberg, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Dan Snazelle and David Rothenberg. It was performed in Woodstock at CPW (2012.) NEAR(ER) imagines alternate modes of consciousness and involved video artist Chen Serfaty. NEAR(ER) was performed at USC's Rhythms + Voices performance series (2013.)

Lindsay is developing several new works including: “the Sound of a Quantum Computer Thinking” from his recordings at NASA Ame’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab and “Hope Island” from his oceanic work north of Vancouver Island. “Ecotone” envisions a mobile space in which to decontextualise live sounds from OSA EARS so they are experienced as though in an off earth / post earth environment. His 'Field Station' installation showed at MassMoca in 2016/2017 and then morphed and travelled to the Des Moines Art Center and the Akron Art Museum. He is currently working on several projects in China.

Recent lectures include "Anthropocentric?" for RISD's Digital + Media department, “Destination Unknown: Aliens, Art and Consensual Reality” at Rhodes House, for the 2014 class of Rhodes’ Scholars and ‘Conversations on Media Culture and Practice’ at CalArts Center for Integrated Media. Lindsay presented at Moogfest 2014, the California Academy of Sciences, Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History, 100 Year Starship Symposium (DARPA), USC’s “Visions + Voices” performance series, SwissNex, the American Museum of Natural History, Mountain Film in Telluride, The School of Visual Arts, Pratt School of Art and Design, the Open Center in New York, IDEA CITY in Toronto. Chronus Art Center Shanghai, and at The Hat Creek Observatory for SETI.

charlie's experiment

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