I'm really looking forward to the disc. From your notes it appears it was apretty jam packed soundwalk.

this is brutal, I must listen it again and again

Does the psycho-social importance of a site/event focus or distract from the aesthetic moment?

Thanks for this. I almost forgot how powerful your work is, Christopher. beautiful and deep.

Wow...with the associations I have of nuclear power plants....the intimacy with "danger" here and the sonic effect is quite powerful....moreso than nuclear power.  Ok, I couldn't resist my humor.  Thanks for sharing Chris.  I'll listen again.

Black-fronted titi call in Atlantic forest 

Recorded at 6:40am in Serrinha do Alambari, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil
With ORTF Schoeps microphones in Sound devices Mixpre-6 24 bits 96kHz

Thanks to Felix Blume & Gregoire Chauvot for their gear.

Callicebus Nigrifrons Call

Dropped two contact mics at the surface of an anthill

Recorded with JrF contact mics in Serrinha do Alambari, State of Sao Paulo, Brazil in Sound devices Mixpre-6 96kHz 24 bits

Ants swarming

4.33 Gales Rains Windowpanes

April 16th 2022. 67th(R) Subway, Queens. 7:47 PM

recording0170

Eavesdropping on a conversation amongst bullfrogs along Clear Creek in Coralville, Iowa. Recorded with a matched stereo pair of Rode NT5 mics paired in ORTF configuration.

Bullfrogs along Clear Creek, Coralville, Iowa

Recorded and mastered by Chris DeLaurenti, To the Cooling Tower, Satsop is a soundwalk documenting my journey through a tunnel intended to connect WNP-5 and WNP-3, two aborted nuclear power station cooling towers. The tunnel is now closed.

The entire album is an unedited, single-take field recording. Released by GD Stereo on compact disc, To the Cooling Tower, Satsop appeared as part of their Improvisational Architecture series in 2015. 

Designed to deliver water to cool the reactor core, the tunnel is long; it took me the length of the album, about 44 minutes, to enter and exit.

Much of the tunnel is a perfect tube, however the occasional turning passageway, pools of water, debris, and unexpected  vestibules contribute to the unusual acoustics heard in To the Cooling Tower, Satsop. Sounds near and far reverberate, smear, and echo.

My movement through this architecture co-composes the soundscape. Presence becomes performance: With eyes often shut, I walk through the tunnel. Performing blind belays most of the habits I have developed with other instruments and ideas as an improvisor. With no light, I cannot know how the tunnel - My instrument? My collaborator? - will change, or even where I and the passage ahead will go. 

Wanting a flashlight for a mere moment reminds me that darkness, nighttime, "the dark," shadows, and even the poetic adjective umbral deceptively connote mystery, the unknown, fear, the Other, menace, and evil, as if "to see is to know." To those who listen, darkness becomes a place of discovery, an aurally radiant invitation to re-listen and remap the world.

So I navigate (bypass, stumble over, probe, kick, step on, jab, echolocate) obstacles and small dangers with focused listening. My ears map the walls, the floor, the ceiling. I listen to the drones ahead and what flutters behind. Detecting changes in air pressure, my eardrums bend as oxygen thins. Sounds feel different inside and against me. This tunnel has an architectural, acoustic pulse.

To the Cooling Tower, Satsop embodies my notion of phonography: Vivid, possibly transformative field recordings made in unpredictable locations, amid accidents, and by often unorthodox means in tandem with an open embrace of the recordist's presence - all crucial components in the urgent quest towards new ways of listening.

- excerpted from my essay "A Length of Sound" slated for the book "Sonic Contestations of Nuclear Power."  Skyward photo of WNP-5 at Satsop by Chris DeLaurenti.

GD Stereo

To The Cooling Tower, Satsop (excerpt)

Your Felt Path by Olafur Eliasson at Sesc Pompeia

Stereo mix of eight-channel, electroacoustic music

Breath and the Machine

This is a stereo mixdown of my six-channel sound installation made from material I collected during the Sonic Mmabolela residency, November 2018, in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Birds, frogs, snails, people and, especially, cicadas are heard in this soundscape composition.

This recording was made using various input methods simultaneously (hydrophones, a contact mic, audio mics with and without physical filtering). There is a small amount of editing, but the temporal relationship among the channels (which I think of as voices) is maintained throughout.

The Limpopo River forms the majority of the northern border of South Africa. The pool in the picture above is a small eddy off to the southern side of the river, and the site of this recording. The shot was taken from a concrete bridge which carries a small road northward, across the Limpopo to Botswana.

Many thanks to Francisco López, Barbara Ellison and all of my Sonic Mmabolela compatriots for their guidance and companionship on this fantastic trip. Thanks also to Nyeema Morgan for her thoughts on 'implication'.

field: alarum, implication (v2.1)

g-maze

Each year, at the Hiroshima Peace Park, a pagoda peace bell is rung on August 6th at 8:15 a.m. I witnessed that ringing last in 2005. Some forty thousand people gathered at the park early that morning for the yearly ritual. And when the assembly was hushed for the ringing of the bell, I was overwhelmed not by our collective silence, but rather by the density of sound surrounding us. Cicadas. I experienced an instant ear flash, to say: that sixty years earlier, at the detonation 1900 feet above the city, cicadas were the last sound heard by the forty-five thousand people who perished instantly into the hottest heat, the brightest light, and the loudest sound in world history. That’s what was on my mind when I recorded the bell, and later the sounds of cicadas, to mix together. To create a historical patina, I played the sound back through two 1940s radio sets, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and re-recorded it the way it might have sounded if broadcast on that day. This composition was commissioned by the International Community Foundation and is dedicated to all who suffered from the nuclear atrocity.

The recording is available on CD:  https://voxlox.myshopify.com/products/steven-feld-the-time-of-bells-4

07 Hiroshima  The Last Sound

My sound work encompasses field recordings, electroacoustic and acousmatic music, text-sound scores, free-improvised low-tech electronics, and compositions for acoustic instruments. 

To The Cooling Tower, Satsop (excerpt)

Christopher DeLaurenti

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