Need respite from too much food, too much company, too many balls in the air, from recycling gift wrapping paper, never mind the ongoing harangues over social justice issues? Do I have the thing for you!
On this 5th night of Hanukah my present to all is a pretty remarkable audio work based on ultrasound and echolocation used by bats, dolphins and other creatures who operate beyond the range of human hearing – ‘seeing’ with sound, or perhaps ‘hearing’ objects. Added to that are “real” sounds, those that we can hear without them being stretched in time to be made audible.
“The mix for the piece is based on ultrasound, hydrophone recordings below the water and also of echolocation sound within audible range. The recordings were made in various locations in Central Park and East River in New York, USA, a forest outside Kaliningrad in Russia, Regents Park in London, UK, and various locations in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The ultrasound is time-stretched to bring it into a frequency range audible for human beings. Recordings were made on a Pettersson Ultrasound Detector D1000X, Reson 4032 and DPA 8011 hydrophones and 4060 dpa microphones onto a Sound Devices 477T hard disk recorder.”
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I started to listen to Jana Winderen at the beginning of December, when I came across the article attached below. The Norwegian scientist turned artist makes field recordings and then creates audio collages in her sound studio. When she at times composes immersive installations for specific places, like the Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition in China, the Thailand Biennial, Oslo’s Kunstnernes Hus, and Art Basel, she checks out the acoustics, temperature, and air quality of the hosting location, talks to local technicians, and gets a feel for the architecture of the space, all of which gets integrated into the compositions.
Sitting and listening in a quiet place, uninterrupted, preferably with head phones, these compositions invariable generate a sense of peace and inner quietude that those of us who are meditation-challenged can otherwise only dream of. Your music for today.
And here are words capturing the sounds that the earth makes, as well.
Anchorage
By Joy Harjo
for Audre Lorde
This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.
There are Chugatch Mountains to the east
and whale and seal to the west.
It hasn’t always been this way, because glaciers
who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth
and shape this city here, by the sound.
They swim backwards in time.
Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open
the streets, threw open the town.
It’s quiet now, but underneath the concrete
is the cooking earth,
and above that, air
which is another ocean, where spirits we can’t see
are dancing joking getting full
on roasted caribou, and the praying
goes on, extends out.
Nora and I go walking down 4th Avenue
and know it is all happening.
On a park bench we see someone’s Athabascan
grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years
of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some
unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache
in which nothing makes
sense.
We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,
the clouds whirling in the air above us.
What can we say that would make us understand
better than we do already?
Except to speak of her home and claim her
as our own history, and know that our dreams
don’t end here, two blocks away from the ocean
where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore.
And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Native
and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at
eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when
the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,
no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn
on the sidewalk
all around him.
Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive?
