London Sound Survey

One of those great finds that happen on the internet. London Sound Survey is packed with ideas and information and most importantly for a phonography site, sounds!
Well worth a visit.

Spacepilots

Another interesting organisation whose work relates to place. Spacepilots.

Holly Rumble

This is an interesting place-related work, One Minute Bird Watching.

Transition

Transition: The London Art Scene In The Fifties was an exhibition at The Barbican in 2002.
This is a particularly interesting period for the research on this blog as it is the antecedent to a huge amount of the work I am influenced by.
What I liked a lot about this exhibition was the increasing amount of mixed media that worked its way into the art.
No sound, of course, but mixed and varied nevertheless.
I remember being struck by the sculptures of William Turnbull and the collages of Edward Wright.

Aerial Perspective

After looking at more Lowry paintings today, I thought about this phenomenon. It will be worth a try and see if sounds that have less contrast and depth will produce the distancing effect as this does with colour.

L S Lowry

Easily overlooked, thanks to the popularity and fame of his 'matchstick' men figures, are the wonderful landscapes by Lowry. Simplification and abstraction carried out to great effect.

Humphrey Spender

Back in Germany and able to get to my book case at last!
I have just been through Lensman, a book of Humphrey Spender's photographs of England 1932 to 1952 and what a fantastic collection it is. This book is probably more social observation than place, but there are some astounding images here nevertheless.
It is very easy to forget what a bloody miserable decade the 50s was. In fact, after the horrors of the war and the crushing cost in lives, property and infrastructure, the poverty was felt by most until about the mid-60s. Much of that burden, it seems to me to be borne by the working class. This poverty and hardship was reported by Spender in his work for newspapers.
It is very easy to forget that just over a generation ago there were still Public and Saloon bars in pubs and that relatively few people enjoyed the luxury of fridges, washing machines, televisions etc.until the 70s.
These days, we create a right tantrum if we can't get to The Maldives on time, 50 years ago, a 6-day week and unpaid leave was common.

Listening to the Building

A rather interesting site-specific piece by Ian Baxter I came upon this evening.

Wait 2

I have re-worked the sound for this little film and am now much happier. I don't want these to be entertaining visually, more to act as a vehicle upon which the sound should ride.
It is a bit of a difficult balance to get right, especially as most people are so visually aware and sonically neutral.
I hope the hammer and bolster are suitably incongruous.

Cafe Concrete

I play this from time to time as there are some interesting sonic representations of place. From the documentary to the musical and the realistic to the abstract.
I'm pretty sure this was a Wire magazine give-away. Thanks Wire.

Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi.

More dipping into R. Murray Schafer's The Soundscape has got me thinking about his ideas of lo-fi and hi-fi. To paraphrase him liberally, the lo sounds are those that are perceived to us as lower frequencies, but more importantly as continuous drone-like and non-natural sounds. The hi-fi relates to shorter, sharper sounds.
All this relates to Flat Lines noted earlier.
I do think this idea of the natural and the mechanical existing in parallel is really interesting. Maybe there is a way to corrupt or exploit this symbiosis.

Christina Kubisch

I listened today to Christina Kubisch's CD Five Electrical Walks. These are all sounds gathered with custom-made microphones to record electromagnetic fields. For this Cd she says the tracks are mixed pieces of audio that are not processed in any way.
Naturally, this is a composition and the walks she organizes where listeners wear these special recording headphones would have much more emphasis upon the place where one was, but as a second-hand listener, so to speak, I found the pieces pretty interesting.
It is always difficult this, the idea of removing the sounds from a place. What happens in that process?

Human Geography

Through reading and observation, I realize that my phonographic interests are taking me on a parallel journey into the world of human geography.
This was a discipline I was unaware of until recently and am now becoming quite fascinated with.
I have recently been introduced to the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, a noted authority on the concept of place.
Here is a link to the British Library pertaining to this topic.

phonography.org

I have been listening to 5 CDs from phonography.org this week to try and get to the kernel of what I do and don't want included in my pieces.
I find myself switching off unconsciously from the pieces that simply document a place.
That said, I do prick my ears up sometimes at the quality of some peoples recordings, Peter Cusack's Baikal Ice and Chris Watson's Outside The Circle Of Fire to name just two.