A portrait of a garden in Svedala, Sweden for the Tiny Portraits project
flamingpines.com/tiny-portraits/

This piece is based on a field recording I made at dawn in the garden of the house where I grew up. My parents still live there, and once in a while when I go back I'm reminded of my teenage years and how I sometimes, after coming home from friends or parties at 5 or 6 in the morning, used to lay down in the grass just drifting off  - reflecting, contemplating, listening to the emptiness, the distant freeway, the wind and the birds, before falling asleep. Those moments really stuck with me.

After being asked to participate in the Tiny Portrait series, I decided to have a go at recreating, or interpreting that state of mind sonically the way I remember it, making this one of my most personal audio compositions to date.

Tobias Hellkvist, Svedala, Sweden

Tiny Portraits

5 am - Tobias Hellkvist - Tiny Portraits

Stationary Travels is a personal music blog covering ambient, electroacoustic, modern classical, post rock & experimental music.  Outside of ST, I enjoy a variety of other genres which you may see mixed in here as well.  Please feel welcome to follow along on Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress (links below).  If you are an artist and would like to submit something for consideration of promotion or review, you can message me to discuss the details. 

 "He who does not travel, who does not read, who does not listen to music, who does not find grace in himself, she who does not find grace in herself, dies slowly" - Martha Medeiros

A Flaming Pines project:

Tiny Portraits: 

Small renderings of place in memory and sound. 

Sound and place are two terms often thrown together, but what actually connects the two? Sure places sound differently, or may shape the sounds that enter them in particular ways but in what ways is sound actually able to capture and convey place? Is place something to be captured at all? 

In Listening to Noise and Silence, Salomé Voegelin talks of soundscape compositions occupying a site 'between preservation and invention' – an attempt by the composer or field recordist to retain the essence of a site inevitability results via the processes of recording, composition and listening in the creation of somewhere new. 

Tiny Portraits asks each participant to dwell on these connections and disconnections between sound and place, representation and invention by starting somewhere small, somewhere overlooked or obscure, and to interrogate this site using sound. 

In listening to these pieces we ask you to bring only some stillness and imagination, as together we create new places, connections and silences out of these traces of forgotten and hidden sites. 

To visit the Tiny Portraits map by Arash Akbari visit: 
http://www.flamingpines.com/tiny-portraits/

Credits: 
Tiny Portraits is conceived and curated by Kate Carr and is distributed via the record label Flaming Pines. 
Website design and programming by Arash Akbari 
All pieces by listed artists. 
All artwork by Kate Carr 
Mastering by Taylor Deupree at 12k Mastering. 

If you would like to pitch a portrait for this project contact: flaming.pines@gmail.com

“ Where words leave off, music begins.”

Tobias Hellkvist is a Swedish composer and sound artist, working mainly in the field of ambient, drone and electroacoustic music.

A dweller on the streams, handy the confluence of MIXCLOUD SOUNDCLOUD & SLEEPBOT, I make occasional day trips to AMBIENTBLOGnet ACL A_L ASIP ASP BC CAMP DISQUIET DREAMSCENESnl E&D FS HEADPHONECOMMUTEcom LSR PC RADIO-RETHINK RESONANCE-FM SEB SF10-33 SOATC TIMJ TSC UBU UT WAAG & WFMU.