An excerpt from one of six compositions appearing in Antarctica, An Absent Presence (Thames and Hudson Australia) by Philip Samartzis

Antarctica, An Absent Presence

At the End of Night

Each installment of this ongoing portfolio series features an original audio recording by a musician, composer, or sound artist along with their commentary. Projects range from raw documentation of live performances to sound collage and experiments with aleatory music. Click here for more details: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/field-recording-3/

Lea Bertucci: Field Recording #8

Dragon’s Eye Recordings is pleased to announce it’s first release from Seattle artist Jake Muir. With 'Acclimation', Muir continues his focus on mood, texture, and place, by taking found sounds and presenting them in a new context. Muir began field recording with the mindset of a natural sound recordist, in that he was largely interested in environments “free” from man made noise. More recently, Muir began contemplating the perspective that man is part of the soundscape, and that there is beauty to be found in some of our machinations. This acceptance of the given state of things opened his ears to more sonic possibilities.

Last fall, Muir was invited to perform at Seattle’s Corridor Festival, which would take place at the Georgetown Steam Plant —  a historic landmark over a century old. Muir took this opportunity as an impetus to create a live set based solely on industrial and aqueous field recordings, given the context of the setting. This live set became the basis for 'Acclimation', where the goal was to exploit the harmonic elements in these man-made sounds and to largely deconstruct the source material. The album consists of a variety of recordings made in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Iceland, and Washington. In thinking of what content he might utilize, Muir gave a home to recordings he had forgotten about and had previously deemed not useful.

Acclimation

Jake Muir - Acclimation (Excerpts)

arrival at the station

'The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past' is the latest album by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and composer Yann Novak, and his second for Touch. It considers the relationships between memory, time, and context through four vibrantly constructed tracks that push Novak’s work in a new direction while simultaneously exploring his sonic past. 'The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past' is composed as a quadriptych – a single gesture broken into four parts – that meditates on the inevitable progression of time, our relationship to the past, and our distortion of the past through the imperfections of memory. The album will be released February 23, 2018 on the London-based label Touch. Available digitally and on CD, the physical version will be packaged in a gatefold sleeve as a limited edition of 500. For more information on the artist and release, please visit www.touch33.net.

The album’s conceptual roots stem from 'The Archaic Revival' by American ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna. In it, McKenna theorizes that when a culture becomes dysfunctional it attempts to revert back to a saner moment in its own history. He suggested that abstract expressionism, body piercing and tattooing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, and rave culture were proof of this default to a more primal time. The text’s idealism was influential to Novak in the ‘90s, but today the theory bears a darkly-veiled resemblance to the rise of nostalgia-driven nationalism. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the signifiers of a ‘better time’ - McKenna’s idea highlights our propensity for selective memory, seeing history through the lens of memory instead of fact. On 'The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past' Novak looked back at his own older works through this lens as inspiration.

“For this album I was interested in expanding into a more emotive compositional style and palette. In doing so, I was reminded that this was territory I had covered early on in my career — the whole process became a way to reconnect with my own past and history.”

The Album’s four tracks dynamically shift and surge, where time is rendered as material and momentum compels it into movement. Subtle distortion throughout the album ties the tracks together and echoes techniques explored in Novak’s 'Meadowsweet' (Dragon’s Eye, 2006). Tension gives way to a halcyon vision of place in “Radical Transparency,” immediately followed by the austere swells of “The Inertia of Time,” a piece that captures the twin impulse of generating optimistic beauty in harshly muted tones. Both tracks introduce subtle bass swells and stabs reminiscent of 'In Residence' (Dragon’s Eye, 2008). From there, the album grows darker with “Casting Ourselves Back into the Past,” and “Nothing Ever Transcends its Immediate Environment,” two icier tracks that preserve the album’s core: a layer of something long since passed that locks us into the very moment we inhabit. The latter introduces a processed vocal sample of Geneva Skeen, similar to Novak’s collaborative work with Marc Manning on 'Pairings' (Dragon’s Eye, 2007). The album is a study in perception and alteration, manipulation and awareness, effectively capturing Novak’s command of emotional texturing.

The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past'

The Inertia of Time

At a lake surrounded by forest, early in the morning I set up and recorded the birds just waking up and beginning to sing.  Had to have the recording gain set to Max for this recording, but I think it is nice how it pulls out the tiny reverb that comes from the birds songs and calls.    Patvinsuo National Park Finland.  Recorded on the 22nd of May 2018 at 3.21am.  MKH8020, Sound Devices MixPre, Marantz PMD661.  Recording 3093.

Quiet Lakeside Atmosphere - 22 May 18 - 3.21am - Patvinsuo

A track featuring a few layered field recordings - earth, water and air - foot steps, hydrophone recording and an ambient recording from a meadow not far from my house, with lots of birds and insects...
I added a super short snippet of piano, that I treated with the great iDensity iPad app - as well as with the Ableton warp engine...
Enjoy

Layered Elements In Reality

Untitled (El Sereno Evening)
Processed field recording
Duration: 5 minutes, 16 seconds
2016

Tucked into the base of a north-facing hillside in the Los Angeles neighborhood of El Sereno, this audio composition was comprised of field recordings from the site and surrounding block, processed and distilled through digital effects. The installation itself seeks to provoke an internal dialogue between the listener and the idea of an individual's physical position within a complex, tiered environment.

Untitled (El Sereno Evening)

The Aeolian Harp (also called Wind Harp) is a string instrument that is played by natural wind. It sounds like layered feedback or drones with rich harmonic textures that will change continuously according to the wind direction, strength and consistency. One day, I bought the materials at the local DIY store and built a small Aeolian Harp. I brought the harp outside on windy days, but it made no sound at all. Through trial and error, by altering the string materials, tension, and the angle against the wind, it finally produced a sound.

The harp resonates with the surrounding environment, changing from place to place. I put two lavalier microphones into each of its two holes to clearly record the tiny resonant sounds, without too much wind interference. What is intriguing to me is that the recording will inevitably include environmental sounds from near and far which are condensed and slightly modulated by the harp. In a way, I use the harp as a kind of transducer as well as sounding body to interact with the environment through the forces of the wind. The recordings themselves are ecological, meteorological and geomorphological observations at a certain time and place.


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http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=16674
http://shop.gruenrekorder.de/?full#Gruen_182

Path of the Wind | Eisuke Yanagisawa

Originally broadcast on Ears Have Ears, FBi Radio Sydney. Listen back to the full program here: https://fbiradio.com/945fm/programs/ears-have-ears/2018-11-22/

An exclusive soundtrack by Los Angeles-based artist and composer Geneva Skeen. Influenced by écriture féminine, alchemical metaphors, and a range of musical traditions ranging from holy mysticism to industrial, Skeen works with with recordings, digital presets, voice, and mixed instrumentation. Her performances, publications, and installations focus on the contrast between facing the finite resources of our physical landscapes and their infinite digital representations. She is an MFA candidate in the Music/Sound program at Bard, a recipient of the Touch Mentorship program, and a member of VOLUME, a curatorial collective focused on sound-based practices. Her recent release A Parallel Array of Horses can be found on Australian label Room40.

Her soundtrack titled 'The Oval Window' is a stereo drone work composed strictly using recordings of voice and piano processed through digital and analog technologies. The sloping harmonics and peripheral speech affects highlighted in the composition were scraped from the original raw recordings, then reshaped in relation to each other’s’ line, pitch, and duration.

https://genevaskeen.bandcamp.com/

EHE 22.11.19 - Geneva Skeen - The Oval Window

Unknow fish, recorded in the harbour of Haikou 海口, Taiwan.
23.12.2018, late afternoon.

181223 Unkown Fish - Haikou Harbour

This is a sample from the album 'Cape York: Melaleuca Swamp', recorded on the the edge of a remote melaleuca (paperbark) swamp in Cape York, far northern Australia. The microphones were placed near the edge of the wetland, adjacent to dry tropical woodland and with an open lilypad-covered lagoon in the background.  Throughout the album there is a nice natural mix of early morning sounds from wetland and woodland species in this unique landscape.

https://wildambience.com/albums/cape-york-melaleuca-swamp/

Cape York: Melaleuca Swamp

Album Sample - 'Cape York: Melaleuca Swamp'

https://soundcloud.com/iruuuu / https://soundcloud.com/cammack_lindsey - visible window
from "∫ ( { } )_ visible window" (QNR029)
released 2nd December 2019
DOWNLOAD: http://www.mediafire.com/file/8kp3nlku0sn5h8r/i.ruuu%252C_Cammack_Lindsey_-_%25E2%2588%25AB_%2528_%257B_%257D_%2529__visible_window_%2528QNR029%2529.zip/file
cover by Elin Gonzalez

∫ ( { } )_ visible window

QNR029 (↓↓↓)

i.ruuu / Cammack Lindsey - visible window

Chris Duncan's Album

ELAPSE

Spontaneous mix with different house styles.
I slowed down most of the tracks for the sexiness.

crazy to what people partied back then.

enjoy!

photo: https://www.instagram.com/leckeres_wasser/

Untitled (El Sereno Evening)

Geneva Skeen

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