Synchronous Forest - Excerpts and Related Sounds

I have been working on a new form of polytemporal documentary with filmmaker Rachel Strickland. The idea is to map different timescales into the range of human perception, not only in image but in sound. The first instance is “Folia” a 24-minute film which centers around street trees on Folsom street in San Francisco, chronicling the activities of a particular 24 hour period. It will be released in late 2016 or early 2017. 

The fast “swooshes” are cars driving by at 60x speed; buses and sidewalk sounds are presented at 20x and 10x speed, while other sounds play in real time.  


Folia Mix (Excerpt)  2016-07-14v16 LtRt

A warm spring day in the Mission district, San Francisco 2009, at the backyard garden beehive of Tree, an original Digger and radical food activist. I spent several hours deeply immersed in observation of the bees and recording of their sounds… with small microphones in the hive, microphone pairs at its entrance, and following them with microphones. Returning from this experience I felt as though I’d been travelling for weeks in a foreign land, the impression left on me was so strong. 

Tree's Bees - Hive Entrance From Top (Excerpt)

The base field recording of crickets involves a “recording performance” wherein the microphone is moving through the array of crickets and insects at the edge of a Massachusetts wood - static point source sounds thus become spatially animated. This base is superimposed with sounds of street traffic, re-recorded through the tube /membrane resonator of a drum as a kind of distancing factor and musical, tonal frequency generator.

Tweak Crickets (Excerpt)

Mechanical clocks made tangible and observable the objective measure of something we had, since the beginning, experienced so ephemerally: the flow of time. To their first users clocks must have seemed like a form of magic: bringing heavenly perfection onto earth. In technological terms, they could be thought of as the great grandfathers of modernity.

Bees Without Bees (Excerpt)

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