Name: R09 0003 blackbirds fighting by stillwalks
Duration: 27 s
Description: Blackbirds fighting

Mineral Disobedience is an experimental soundscape inspired by an unofficial war waged in Sydney, Australia. Known for its natural beauty, the Emerald city is experiencing a period of rampant development; mirroring the wider world. Industry leaders must increasingly engage with environmental concerns raised by the public, as has been demonstrated by the ongoing climate change protests. For the latter group, this is a deeply personal issue which must affect the way we all interact with nature forever; for the former, it seems climate collapse is an administrative nuisance rather than impending reality. I use this context as a starting point to explore how Human, Machine and Animal might interact if the machines and tools we use in our taming of Nature were given anthropomorphic voices. Field recordings of construction sites and the natural world intersect as the machinery rattles to life. How would the diggers, jackhammers, trucks, the frames of the skyscrapers themselves, interact with their surroundings if liberated from their day jobs? The minerals from the ground, re-moulded into the building blocks of humankind, would surely have some things to say.

The piece charts a loose journey through the life of such machines, including the monotony of the construction site, hearing the dazzling voices of many humans, a flirtation with the natural world, and an inevitable return to ordained duty. The natural resonances of these field recordings inform the melodic content of the piece, including the recurring, poignant melody. 

Alexis Weaver is an electroacoustic composer based in Sydney, Australia. Born in the Shoalhaven, Alexis grew up learning flute, voice and harp before commencing study at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2014. Now, she draws on her classical music upbringing in a slightly different way, creating whimsical and adventurous electroacoustic works which celebrate the emotive capabilities of sound. While her principal interest lies in composing fixed-media acousmatic music, she has also composed soundtracks for animations, short stories, radio, dance and theatre, and exhibited audio-visual installations.
 
Alexis is also co-founder of female composer collective lost+sound, who in 2018 launched a series of concerts celebrating established and emerging artists working in experimental music fields. ​

www.alexismarieweaver.com

Alexis Weaver - Mineral Disobedience

The Yard, The Room Upstairs (Still Life) is a tape work inspired by allegorical vanitas paintings. Aiming at a moving target, the piece explores the elusiveness of memory by alternating two thematically connected field recordings, each time with overdubs and treatments gradually replacing the original source.

Two memories are revisited alternately three times each. The piece starts out from two short scenes recorded on site: a yard sounded by crickets and a piano in a room. Banal yet charged with what is absent: other senses, inaudible sonic details, layers of emotion. These scenes are recreated three times: first with the original source, the second time with part of the source and the third time without the source.

Scene I: The Yard
Date: August 14, 2020, South-West Finland
Setting: An almost empty camping ground. A remnant of the welfare culture of decades past. A remote bay surrounded by forest, houses, cottages and sheds, peeling red paint. An overgrown playground and mini golf court half sunken into the soft ground covered with pine needles.

At dusk, walking across the yard. The air has a smokey quality and is filled with the rise and fall of the sounds of crickets. They are always at a distance, never near, stopping when you enter their field, then starting again a few moments after leaving it, like the wake of a boat swelling back into the sea. A mouse runs across the gravel and freezes motionless under your gaze. Faint movements in the surrounding trees in full dark green at the peak of late summer. The light scent of burning logs.

Revisit the memory of this moment over and over as it evades you, like the crickets, the wake.

Scene II: The Room Upstairs
Date: August 29, 2020, Southern Finland
Setting: A yellow house surrounded by fields. Windows in all but one direction. Afternoon sunlight. A rarely played piano in a large living room. A dishwasher humming in the adjoining kitchen. The presence of people downstairs felt but not heard. Amateur oil paintings adorning the walls. Portraits, landscapes and still lives, mostly. A book case filled to the ceiling with 70’s and 80’s bestsellers. A stuffed snake on a shelf, a cow hide rug, a hearing aid and batteries on a mahogany coffee table, a pair of large slippers. Another scene inhabited by the remnants of hobbies, leisure time, objects to fill out the measures of an afternoon that grows longer with each year.

Play along to the piano.

The piece contains samples of rehearsal recordings from another work in progress with Aino Juutilainen (cello), Johanna Kalliokulju (mezzo-soprano) and Villa Ruscica (harp).

Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-Finnish sound artist and composer working with field recordings, electronics, feedback, magnetic tape and digital treatments. Her work gravitates towards organic textures and intuitive tunings, assembling rough edged yet precise compositions, poetically narrative and rich in detail. Ahti has presented her music in many different contexts around Europe, in Japan and the United States. She is currently active as a duo with her partner Niko-Matti Ahti and in the artist/organizer collective Himera.

www.marjaahti.com

Marja Ahti - The Yard, The Room Upstairs (Still Life) (excerpt)

Thought Landed In Brain

bass og røyk

Event: ropes attached to ship squeak
Location: Weiße Flotte Baldeneysee, Essen (GER)
Date: 25-09-17
Gear: Neumann KMR 81i, Sound Devices 744t
Micposition: 1m from the rope
www.soundofessen.com

Released under CC BY 4.0 - feel free to use in your projects

Sound of Essen - 11 - Weiße Flotte - 250917 - squeaking ropes - mono

Here is a track I put together from footage taken in Kansas City in December 2017, recently mastered. It features the crosswalks, the KC Streetcar, and a Chiefs game against the Raiders.

Power and Light

After taking more noise out of this track, I mastered it and posted it here. It's a bit slower-paced than some of my other ones. I'm trying to take Pierre Schaeffer's advice not to be afraid of slow tempos.

Crosstown Commute--Remastered

Example from the library:
Kramer KL11 Oldtimer Tractor (1955) available at:
https://www.asoundeffect.com/sound-library/kramer-kl11-oldtimer-tractor-1955/
https://www.nilsmosh.com/sample-libraries/

Kramer KL11 Oldtimer Tractor (1955) Idle To Turning Off BeltMic

Queetsh - 192kHz Squeaks and Scrapes (SOE004)
Out now:
A Sound Effect
633 Files
www.soundofessen.com

Queetsh (SOE004) - Musical Demo

www.soundofessen.com
https://www.asoundeffect.com/sound-library/queetsh-192khz-squeaks-and-scrapes/

R09 0003 blackbirds fighting

stillwalks

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