Dry Haze - Das Jahr ohne Sommer  Von Werner Cee  Nach einem Text von Lord Byron.  Mit: "The Unthanks" Rachel Unthank, Becky Unthank, Adrian McNally, Neville Tranter, Alf Terje Hana Zusatztexte: Ausschnitte aus US-Patenten; "Cloud Songs", Juna Robin.  Produktion:  	Deutschlandradio Kultur 2013 Länge: ca. 50‘	  	Im Jahre 1816, nach dem Ausbruch eines indonesischen Vulkans, verschleierte trockener Nebel den Himmel über weiten Teilen Europas und schirmte die Sonneneinstrahlung ab. Auch literarisch hatte die eingetrübte Atmosphäre Folgen, und inspirierte Lord Byron zu seinem berühmten Gedicht ›Darkness‹. Heute dienen die Erfahrungen aus diesem ›Jahr ohne Sommer‹ Vertretern des Geoengineering als Vorbild, wenn sie daran denken, die Atmosphäre mithilfe eines künstlichen Vulkanausbruchs abzukühlen. 	›Dry Haze‹ ist der Soundtrack zu dieser abgeschatteten Welt. »I had a dream, which was not all a dream./ The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.« (Lord Byron)
http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/dry-haze-das-jahr-ohne-sommer.1022.de.html?dram:article_id=264337

Preview DryHaze

Fish On Line is an audio installation created by Andreas Kahre and Darren Copeland, originally as a low-power FM 'narrowcast' at the Gabriola Island Ferry Dock, timed to coincide with the wait between sailings. Created from underwater recordings at various sites across Gabriola Island, the piece explores the various sonic environments around its beaches and bays. Some of the original recordings were used to create Fish on Air, a set of five sited radio installations commissioned by THE ELEMENTS—A festival of Nature in Performance, (Lulu Performing Arts, 2008), and . For more details, please see www.copelandkahre.net

FISH ON LINE

stealth recording of a crowded restored 1913 trolley ride through uptown in Dallas.  After the first stop we all turned our chairs around and faced the other way for a return trip.

Uptown trolley interior ambiance

Stereo mix of an 8-channel soundscape piece recorded and composed at Warbler's Roost (http://warblersroost.ca) in central Ontario. Invaluable assistance on the technical side from Darren Copeland.

Around the Roost

An acousmatic composition featuring excerpts of our interview with Canadian composer Darren Copeland.
// 
ANDREW O'CONNOR. LISA LA ROCCA. FOR MMEDIA 4A03.
---
Very special thanks to Darren Copeland for the opportunity. You can learn more about him by visiting his website - <a href="http://www.darrencopeland.net/index.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.darrencopeland.net/index.html</a>



Darren Copeland

Recorded at the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park, New York City. A business man, dressed in suit and tie, was standing on the side of the plaza holding a sign saying "I'm the 1% Let's Talk". He was surrounded by people who were asking him questions and listening to what he had to say (right side in the recording). Binaural recording, listening with headphones recommended.


Occupy Wall Street, NY - October, 2011

YVR (Why we are) is a sound-based installation that explores the past and present of the city of Vancouver, by recreating it out of paper. Presented by Radix Theatre in collaboration with the Roundhouse Performance Centre from Dec. 6-9, it is an installation of Vancouver's lost buildings created by workshop participants from memory. For images and a description of the project, please visit <a href="http://www3.telus.net/xenography/YVR_Front_Page.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www3.telus.net/xenography/YVR_Front_Page.html</a>.
The soundscore is an amalgam of workshop recordings, excerpts from the World Soundscape Project 1973 Vancouver Recordings and other sound material 


YVR:The Remembered City Installation Soundscore December 2012

For live solo computer, hand-held Holosonic AudioSpotlight speakers and low-level automated multi-channel spatialization.

Live performance at the Fast Forward festival in Toronto, 25 November 2011. 

While we wait for something to happen, the space comes to be inhabited by a quiet clicking. 

Slowly it is joined by others. They move around. Everywhere: behind, in front, across all the walls, the cealing, the floor. Across the furniture, the people. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, they have different characters and rhythms. They pass very close, they glide far away, they disappear into the distance. They also move through the center of our heads. They don't seem to respect the boundary between inside and outside. Nor do they reveal themselves in the same way to each of us.

Independent and interconnected, they come and go, swell and turn, speed up and slow down, float about, spin around, move on. They ignore us, or maybe they observe us with disinterest. Exploring "this" space, they seem to open up another. As if they inhabited another kind of space, as if their space were moving somehow diagonally thru our own.

switch   (25 November 2011 - Fast Forward, Toronto)

On May 19, 1845, two ships, the Terror and the Erebus, set sail under the command of Admiral John Franklin. Their mission: to find the elusive Northwest Passage. They never returned. After three winters, two of them spent stuck in the Arctic ice, the crew at last abandoned their vessels and began an impossible trek southwards, which none survived. The story of that ill-fated expedition had long fascinated Kucharzyk, and when he discovered in the archives of the CBC a transcript and tape of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s 1975 radio play on the subject, he seized the opportunity to give musical voice to the tragic tale. MacEwen’s play was scripted as a series of monologues by four characters: Franklin himself; his second-in-command, Captain Francis Crozier; Qaqortingneq, an Inuk; and Knud Rasmussen, the Danish polar explorer of the early twentieth century, who narrates. In Kucharzyk’s setting, one performer portrays all four characters.

Libretto by Gwendolyn MacEwen  

Instrumentation:
for Solo Baritone and chamber ensemble (flute, 2 clarinet/bass clarinet, trumpet, percussion, 
harp, piano/synth, violin I, violin II, viola, cello, contrabass).

Performed by: Theodore Baerg (baritone), Northern Portraits Ensemble and Gary Kulesha (conductor).

To learn more about Henry Kucharzyk and his work, please visit our SoundMakers website: http://www.SoundMakers.ca/composers/henry-kucharzyk

About the Composer

Terror and Erebus by Henry Kucharzyk

Able to Disabled: My Changing Landscape

The Absent Listener is a series of pieces derived exclusively from long duration soundscape recordings made outdoors at my home, a rural property 22 KM west of the village of South River, Ontario, Canada.  The recordings were made unattended, which means that once the recording button was pressed I left the location of the recording only to return every 12 to 14 hours to change the battery.

This 60-minute piece is the second one composed in the series and it is derived from a continuous soundscape recording between March 16 and 18, 2020, which was close to the start of the COVID-19 social distancing measures in my area.  This piece follows a previous 45-minute piece in the series which is based on outdoor recordings from February 2019 at my home.  If my location of the recordings were in an urban setting then the difference in the soundscape would be more pronounced then it is between these two pieces.  The difference in my case has more to do with seasonal changes between mid-winter and late-winter as well as the slight difference in location of the microphones with this piece being located at the shoreline rather than 1000 feet uphill from the shoreline.

The circumstances for composing the two pieces was also different.  The first piece was composed for a multichannel sound system which had the advantage of distributing in space several recordings playing at the same time. With the second piece made for no particular occasion, and during the social distancing measures, the assumed audience member would - at least theoretically - be listening in isolation on headphones or a personal stereo system.

With that in mind I chose to make the experience more intimate and spare by avoiding any obvious layering of content.  Instead I focused on sequencing together singular moments.   It was an interesting period of three days as the weather shifted from high winds, to rain, and then to freezing cold temperatures with periods of sunshine and snow.    Through all of this the ice on the lake was in the process of thawing and then freezing again making these distinctive low frequency “whoop” sounds at different periods.  Bird life was also more apparent in this piece with woodpeckers, blue jays and chickadees all coming to visit the microphone and inspect it up close at different times.

The recording equipment for this piece used the same two DPA 4060 miniature omni-directional microphones separated by a boundary.  The mics were about four feet from shore under some trees. The stereo recordings are used in this piece with very minimal signal processing for equalization. The piece follows the chronological order of the recordings. Recordings were selected and arranged to evoke a sense of the natural rhythms and nuances of events as they unfold without my presence.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts whose funding allowed for the recording system to be built and this composition to be made.

The Absent Listener

Absent Listener - March 2020

Darren Copeland is a Canadian sound artist who has been active since 1985 and lives outside the village of South River (Ontario). His work encompasses multichannel spatialization for live performance, fixed media composition, soundscape composition, radio art and sound installations.

His fixed-media compositions have explored both abstract and referential sound materials. Many of these works are released on the empreintes DIGITALes label. His radio art works engage in the associative qualities of environmental sounds in relation to spoken text and have been commissioned and presented by public radio broadcasters in Canada, the US and Europe. His sound installations include gallery and sited works which examine the relationship of sound and place, including Sound Columns (2011) co-created with Andreas Kahre, and Copeland’s installation Expanded Listening (2014).

Darren Copeland founded New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) in 2001. The organization established the NAISA North Media Arts Centre in South River in January 2017 after operating in Toronto for 16 years. The organization presents year round programming that include installations, radio and multichannel concert presentations, artist talks and workshops.

Copeland’s work with NAISA has included his development of multichannel spatialization systems that began in 1999 with the Richmond Sound Design Audiobox and Third Monk Software’s ABControl, and in 2006, a performance-oriented system using the Polhemus Patriot as a gestural controller along with customized software by Benjamin Thigpen.

Darren Copeland is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre (CMC). He has served on the board of directors for the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology (CASE), the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), Vancouver Pro Musica, and Rumble Productions. He holds degrees from University of Birmingham (England, UK) and Simon Fraser University (British Columbia, Canada).

Absent Listener - March 2020

Darren Copeland

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