It's September and Berlin is smoldering.  Hot weeks are rare here.  The school children have a name for it, one word that contains about 17 syllables.  I can't remember it now and couldn't pronounce it even if I did.  It's a magical word because it means the children don't have to go to school—Berlin's equivalent of a snow day.

I'm on the train now with my homemade binaural headset on.  I look strange wearing it, basically the cheapest headphones eviscerated and inverted, tiny speakers replaced with electret microphone capsules.  I'm recording my trip from my hotel near the bend of the river to my friend's sublet in Neükolln.  As I step onto the platform, I think about what another friend told me as we exited a different station near Schöneberg the day before: "this was the first stop on the way to the camps."

Later in the day I will conduct formal soundwalks around Neükolln, then the following day in Prenzlauer Berg and the famous Alexanderplatz Station.  My technique is a blend of Acoustic Ecology soundwalking and the Situationist Dérive.  I've conducted similar explorations of other cities: Mexico City, New York.  Sometimes the best results occur in unfamiliar places.  The attention becomes so focused, so intimate with the environment, even as the physical presence seems to detach and interactions become more difficult.  A woman asks me for directions in German and I struggle to remember even the simplest phrase…

These recordings are nothing if not intimate.  Years ago, my boyfriend at the time and I took simultaneous soundwalks around the Colonia Roma in Mexico City.  Listening to his recording was like being in his head as he eavesdropped at a cafe, flipped through dusty books, rummaged in his bag.  Listening to my own recordings feels similar—uncanny, dimly-remembered details emerging, mutating, like reaching for a vivid, but fading dream.

Through isolating these moments, I become obsessed.  Blurring, contouring, mixing, filtering: these processes reveal new dimensions in the aural data.  Like a medieval alchemist I seek that perfect mix that will transcend the source material.  Moments in linear time, snapshots of finite space open up to a new view.  Hidden voices coalesce, forgotten histories reemerge.  Is it possible to be both a native and a visitor in this place?

This week is Art Week in Berlin.  As you walk around the city, you encounter fragments of an experimental novel called And When the Panic Rises You Shall Have this City's Sympathy by John Holten wheat pasted to dumpsters, newsstands, bare walls:

What do you know of the moon? Like subjects of a teacher's boring class.  The only teachers left to you are abject and empty.  The fear rises much like the vertigo only you do not suffer from vertigo, the city is perfectly flat and yet the ground sways with electricity aimed against you.  And so the panic rises.

Berlin Drift

Berlin Drift

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