Released this week on Impulsive Habitat, Underwater is a collaboration between Arizona based artist Jeph Jerman and Tony Whitehead from Devon, UK.
Each improvisation was recorded underwater using natural objects in rockpool, river and desert wash. The material was transfered on to a master tape, which was then submerged for a period of time.
The resulting sounds are available for free download here:
Sound Atmospheres of the Ancestral Territory of the Cofanes by Jose Ricardo Delgado Franco is published today. Jose describes the album …
Las atmósferas sonoras fueron grabadas durante 13 días en el Resguardo Indígena De Santa Rosa De Sucumbíos, territorio ancestral Cofan en el piedemonte Andino Amazónico, frontera entre Colombia y Ecuador. Durante los múltiples ciclos sonoros entre el día y la noche en el bosque húmedo tropical. Esta comunidad indígena es conocida por sus profundos conocimientos botánicos de la selva y por su medicina tradicional basada en prácticas chamánicas con Yagé (un alucinógeno curativo) y otras plantas. Durante el viaje camine y camine por la selva, me perdí y me volví a orientar para después volverme a perder; me bañe en quebradas y contemple el paso del tiempo en la selva. Compartí la cotidianidad con la comunidad. Tomé varias noches yagé en ceremonia con el Abuelo Guillermo Lucitante: Medico Tradicional y sabio de la selva de 97 años y sus hijos. Estas experiencias tuvieron una influencia en el proceso de escucha, percepción corporal e interrelación con el bosque húmedo tropical. Lo cual en conjunto nutrió de manera orgánica el proceso de grabación, escucha, y selección del material. Los invito a cerrar los ojos y dejarse llevar por este universo sonoro.
In January I started work with a community arts project on the Barne Barton housing estate in Plymouth. The project, called BBRoots, is about looking at what is unique about the area, capturing it, celebrating it and using it to raise aspirations for the estate. My part of the project involves giving people the opportunity to listen to, record, and talk about Kinterbury Creek – a green space within the community that leads down to the Tamar Estuary. So far we have held a couple of informal Saturday morning sessions and a drop in event at the local community centre.
Some of the sounds collected so far can be heard here:
Mirwart is a village located in the Belgian Ardennes. This piece was recorded on the day of the dead, 2nd November 2013, on the balcony of a room, after a day walking in the forest. credits
Flavien Gillié (BE) is a field recordist interested in the relationship between place, voice and memory. He uses his soundscape recordings in installations and performances.
Arts Wave Devon is an arts project supporting people to discover and engage with their own creativity and improve their wellbeing. The project works with communities to design a varied programme of opportunities, with a particular focus towards supporting groups working with children and young people, older people and people with disabilities.
On 1st of Feb I ran a sound art “drop-in” day for Arts Wave Devon to give people the opportunity to work with a variety of recording equipment and microphones to improvise and record with a variety of objects. This was inspired by my own work recording improvisations with natural materials and recent collaborations with American sound artist Jeph Jerman.
Recorded on the River Rhine at the border of Switzerland, France, and Germany, near the shipping port at Kleinhüningen, Basel.
For the first half, the left microphone points across the river towards France, and the right across the entrance to the harbor towards Germany, while the microphones stand in Switzerland. For the second half the mics have rotated clockwise, with the left now pointing towards across the water towards Germany and the right across the harbor towards the shipping activities in Switzerland. (Schoeps cardioid microphones in ORTF stereo configuration with Sound Devices recorder) Ernst Karel ek.klingt.org
A new release today by Peter Lenaerts on VQR Static …recorded in the Serbian Orthodox Church of the Prophet Elijah in a remote part of South Australia…
This underground church is located 8 km outside the town of Coober Pedy, deep in South Australia, roughly 847 km from Adelaide, or 2088 km from Sydney. To call both locations remote, is an understatement. The town has a population of 1695 and average summer temperatures around 34 ̊C. The highest temperature recorded was 47,8 ̊C. To call this place hot is an understatement. The church no longer has an active parish. Only tourists visit, and because of the heat, not many tourists travel through this part of Australia in summer. To call this church empty is an understatement. I originally intended to record the empty quiet of the church interior, but when I first got there the wind outside was audible in the sub frequencies inside. So I changed my idea, placed a stereo microphone between two candles and recorded the entire process of both candles burning. For good measure, I let the recording continue for another half hour after both candles had burnt up. All in all that makes for almost three hours of Static. (Because the uncompressed file was too heavy to upload, I had to split it up into five equal parts. It is one uninterrupted recording though.) If you decide to listen through this recording, there’s a couple of surprises along the way. Recorded December 20, 2011, in the afternoon. The candles were processed by a Rode NT4 microphone and an AETA Mixy preamp linked digitally to a Sony D50. This recording was then imported into Pro Tools, where I edited out the beginning of me striking the match and adjusting the microphone position. No other filtering nor gain was applied, even though the file should be 5db louder to correspond to the actual volume of the candles. As that would compress the transients, I decided to leave the file untouched. Crank up the volume a notch or two when playing. Peter Lenaerts November 2013 www.surfacenoise.be/peter/
I made this recording in Ambeliona, a small mountain village in Greece, a place which I am very fond of since I have family roots there. This is the third publication I’ve made with sounds from that specific area. The first release, Mecha/Orga – 40:49 (Echomusic, November 2010) is a compositional work in which the environmental recordings were heavily processed. A year later I released Mecha/Orga – 34:13_Ambeliona, on Triple Bath label. Again, the work is a composition although the multi-layered sounds were not processed at all.
Summer Afternoon, on the other hand, is a durational recording. No additional edits or filtering took place in post-production. All the compositional decisions (location, time, duration, setting up microphones) took place just before pressing “record” on that peaceful afternoon in August of 2013.
Recorded by Darius Ciuta in Palanga, Lithuania, 27 October 2013. The pdf that is included in the download will explain a little more about how the album was recorded.
The third release on VQR Static is Holtstangi by Icelandic field recordist Magnús Bergsson. The recording was made on a beach on 19th of June 2012 close to the wooden pier at Holstangi, near the small village of Flateyri in northwest of Iceland. Part of the recording was first released on Magnus’s website but this is the full recording. Magnus describes it as follows:
On Önundarfjörður (fjord) in northwest Iceland is a small village, Flateyri. During the winter, there are lots of avalanches in the area. In October 1995 a huge avalanche hit Flateyri. Many houses were wiped away and 20 died. Several other avalanches and bad wetaher closed the road to the village so the only way for rescue team was from sea. The first rescue unit used a 45 year old pier at the bottom of the fjord at Holtstangi. This pier was built in 1950 in case avalanches closed the road and other communication to Flateyri This terrible avalanche on that October night in 1995 demonstrated how important this pier was for the community, so it was rebuilt in the spring 1996.
Tony Whitehead is an artist from South Devon who is interested in sound and sound recording. He runs Very Quiet Records and leads listening and sound recording workshops. Tony is also interested in natural history and works for the RSPB in the south west.
