★Gruenrekorder
Morne diablotins
What did the Caribbean islands – acoustically- look like before the arrival of Columbus? With this question in mind I took a short trip to the National Park of Guadeloupe and to Dominica, one of the most preserved island of the Lesser Antilles, which still retains some of its primary forest on the slopes of its volcanic peaks. I crossed the paths of the ‘Jaco’ and ‘Sisserou’ (the endemic species of parrots), met some local insects and tree frogs, but unfortunately failed to find any ‘Mountain Ch…
Burmese Days
Over the past several years, Vienna-based composer / producer Peter Kutin has been working intensely at the little-explored junction between sound art and journalism / documentation. Focusing on sonic experiences in extreme or exceptional conditions, Kutin explores both the physical and psychological impacts of such extremes on how we hear. Later translating or orchestrating these experiences into sound. Despite his age, Kutin has already seen (and heard) many lost corners of the world, having r…
Elegy for Bangalore
The sound/video installation-project 'Eye Contact with the City' (recipient of an Honorary Mention at PRIX Ars Electronica 2011) was the outcome of an artists' residency in Bangalore in the autumn of 2010. The primary materials used in the installation were the field recordings made and video footage shot at various locations in Bangalore. Materials also included retrieved audio from old reel-to-reel tapes found at the city's flea markets. The extensive repository of field recordings and other a…
The Hebrides suite
How does history - past lives and past events - leave sonic traces and how can we hear them? The Hebrides Suite is the result of an attempt to answer this question and the culmination of composer Cathy Lane's three decade long engagement with the Outer Hebrides. The Outer Hebrides form a 130-mile long archipelago about 40 miles off the north-west coast of Scotland. There are more than 200 islands but only a few are now inhabited. In the 2001 census the total population of the islands was 26,502.…
Mosaique mosaic
My first visit to Cameroon in summer 2010 occurred thanks to an invitation by the Goethe-Institut Yaoundé and the independent art organization Doual'Art. During my residency I prepared a sound installation for a festival in Douala in December. I also conducted a workshop, together with Eckehard Güther, for young local musicians and artists on the theme of field recordings. Field recordings? In the cities people are surrounded by distorted sound systems playing lo-fi illegal copies of Camerooni…
TransMongolian
TransMongolian is a composition of unprocessed field recordings composed in soundscapes. I recorded these acoustic phenomena on my journey through Russia, along Lake Baikal, through Mongolia, China and South Korea to Japan. These countries do not only have very different landscapes and ways of life, they also differ in their sounds, a dimension which more often than not goes unnoticed. The 6 acoustic portraits reflect what I found to be representative of or very special about the countries.
Air pressure
"Air Pressure" is a collaboration between Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle. “Air Pressure” is primarily based around two periods of field work in Japan, one scheduled to coincide with the harvest in 2010 and one coinciding with the sowing season of 2011. All the recordings were made on the site of the last farming family – of the estimated 360 who arrived after WWII – who continue to make their livelihood from an organic small-holding with fields of fruit and vegetables, pens of pigs and a barn with…
Sounds Like Silence
In 2012 the world celebrates not only the centenary of John Cage’s birth, but also the sixtieth anniversary of the premiere of his ”silent piece” 4’33”(four minutes, thirty-three seconds) on August 29, 1952. This composition in three movements without intentional sounds is the composer’s best-known work today. As an ”art without work” (John Cage), it takes up and renews the impulses of the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, notably Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, which the artist h…
Ultrealith
Ultrealith' is an electro-acoustic sound-adventure exploring sounds that exist on the periphery of human perception, such as underwater recordings (such as fish-songs, crustaceans etc), ultrasounds (sonar of bats and dolphins, insects), electromagnetic signals and other textures. These recordings were sourced in the Amazonian rainforest, Africa, Canadian Newfoundland, northern Australia and in various parts of Europe.
Sempervirent
I spent two months in protected areas of Costa Rica making multichannel field recordings of the different forest ecosystems of Central America. Armed with a quadraphonic setup (IRT cross), a parabolic microphone, a hydrophone, and a scientist's passport, I went to nine main sites to record: the coastal evergreen forest, the tropical dry and deciduous forest, the mangroves, the wooded riverbanks and floodplains, and the forests altered in cultivated areas. The recordings were made at the S…
Three days of silence. The mountain of the stigmata
restocked ""three days of silence" is conceived as complete phenomenological experience of listening. i have been three days within the sanctuary of la verna on the top of a mountain called "the mountain of the stigmata" in tuscany. i've lived together with the monks recording and attending the ceremonies and the sounds of the place trying to penetrate in a dimension of pure contemplation. la verna, in latin alvernia and geographically known as monte penna, is a locality on mount penna, an…
Mumbai Diary
This is the work of German vocal artist, composer and improviser sound artist Bettina Wenzel which consists in nine pieces created while she was attending as an artist-in-residence in Mumbai, India in 2009. She has studied vocal techniques, contemporary dance and dancetherapy in Europe and has performed her vocal works in Europe, USA and South Asia. On top of the field recordings of street sounds, found objects and religious musical ceremonies Wenzel makes guttural and breathing noises, high ton…
Swiss Mountain Transport Systems
Swiss Mountain Transport Systems consists of location recordings made during the summer and fall of 2008 of the various transport systems which are specific to mountainous terrain Ð gondolas (aerial cable cars), funiculars, and chairlifts Ð of different types, of different vintages, and accessing different elevations, in different parts of Switzerland. In this way the album is a sonic investigation of the integration of such technology into the Swiss social-geographical landscape. Recorded from …
Fire And Frost Pattern
“The cold ice burns like the hot fire” wrote Max Beckmann in 1948 in his letter to an imaginary female painter. The extremes of fire and ice have always been a popular metaphor for the opposites of ardent passion and unfeeling frigidity, of flux and torpor – extremes which, for all our polarizing way of perceiving them, are very similar. This is also true, especially so in fact, in the acoustic field: in terms of their behaviour and dynamics, the sounds we associate with fire and ice – as create…