isomer.nula.cc

59479 the limits of reason

The author Stanisław Lem is reported to have thought the various film adaptations of his book were off the mark; their failings for him amounted to turning a philosophical problem into a story focused on the erotic problems of the protagonist. In Lem’s mind, Solaris is about nothing less than the limits of reason.

59460 intercession

Located in a meadow rimmed by a birch forest, at the edge of a placid pond which was once the place where the rivers Nerl and Klyazma joined (they have since changed course) stands the 12th-century Церковь Покрова на Нерли (Church of the Intercession on the Nerl), part of a UNESCO world heritage site. It was also the shooting location for the opening scenes of the film Andrei Rubľov (A. Tarkovsky, 1966).

59447 verso

A richly carved portico, surmounted by a startling owl, frames an entryway leading inward. The tap of your shoes on the hard floor resonates, lending your footsteps a surprising importance. A series of electric bulbs, some burnt out or missing, throws your shadow in evolving patterns, fractured and scintillating, a dark glissando passing along the half-columns that line the walls.

59407 cicadas

Cicadas may be all the rage this year due to the 17-year brood emerging in North America. However, this recording of an annual brood of cicadas (ჭრიჭინობელა) in Tbilisi also creates a dense sonic atmosphere from their treetop feeding zone, here recorded on a hot July afternoon in a forest at Lake Lisi (ლისის ტბა).

59360 isle of the dead

A scrap of paper you had earlier pushed deep into your pocket now rests on your fingertips. As you consult the smudged address, you understand that you have arrived. The fillings in your teeth are picking up something — click cli-click ca-clic-click — energies pulsating with the urgency of a message intended only for you.

59310 stochastic elegies ~

These tracks evolved in an exploration of SuperCollider and its apparently limitless possibilities, as filtered through my own modest ability to exploit them. Basic motifs where laid down using stochastic processes and granular synthesis in mincing through a variety of field recordings, whose subject matter was seen as arbitrary and thus an unimportant consideration. At a later stage, various tracks consisting of found materials were layered on to hint at some dramatic or emotional impulse, lest the results languor in an arid academic state. I don’t know whether or not that was entirely successful. A wise man once said: a work of art is never finished, it is merely abandoned. Requiescat.

59266 displacement

What world am I on? We have a sun that rises and sets; we have a moon, too. There is an absent glow; something torn down, trampled upon, and then put back up, gashed and sorry-looking. I see a diffracted vision of the present, its tides and indifferent coercions. I feel unreal in this world, as these and other doubts amass and accrue.

59251 aruchavank

I have chosen the 7th-century Armenian cathedral of Aruchavank to represent the many churches in Armenia in which I made recordings. An earthquake, centuries ago, has left its sturdy walls standing beneath a gaping oculus where the now-missing tholobate and conical dome should be.

As we enter and look up, we find ourselves as if standing at the bottom of a well, lowly beings, our only consolation to peer upwards into a mysterious blue beyond, a wintry world peopled by a roaring wind and soaring birds.

59240 early spring

The journey to Kakheti of which these images are the subject, took place six years ago, more or less exactly. In reviewing them, I also recall non-visual sensations; the sound of dripping leaves, moist breezes warm and cold, mysteries slowly revealed and again hidden by curtains of fog, the rushing water of gray rivers, the echoing chambers of the ancient sites, and the feeling of springtime returning to the thawing countryside.

59235 anomaly

A long street stretches out before you, foreshortened and dissolving as it thrusts into the sharp glint of a low sun. A scatter of nervous sparrows explodes as you approach; then a passing car parts the air, leaving its traces in the whispering turbulence. A distant clocktower strikes the quarter-hour. And then — [the page is partly burnt; the rest is lost].

59207 reverie nº5

59186 winter walk

Afternoon, a winter walk. In the still air, flakes of snow cling to their slow descent like wistful bits of ash from a disintegrating civilization, coming to rest upon the undisturbed snowfall of the previous night; the first of the winter. The forest is quiet as a library; few birds sing, and for a long time, footfalls and breath are the only sounds. Hidden somewhere in this glade are the mysterious stone rows of Kounov, possibly dating to an Iron-age culture of the Hallstatt period from c. 800-500 B.C.E.

59183 november

In the Czech lands, the name for November is listopad, referring literally to the falling („pad“) of leaves („listy“). Our own common word for this time of year, fall, puts focus on the same annual phenomenon. This composition uses the riffling of the ‘leaves’ of an old book (playing on a common English colocution), together with additional sources.  

59090 a horizon effaced ~

Two movements consisting of heavily altered field recordings from Crimea, together with a small number of instrument samples, exploring a theme suggestive of clouds, fog, mist, rolling waves and the negligible boundaries between these domains. These works can be heard as extreme subjectivizations of the memory, after more than five years had elapsed, of having traveled the peninsula, roaming its roads, wandering among its mountains, towns, open fields, caves and historical sites. They can also be listened to as dynamic abstractions that give a sense of turbulence and fluctuating energies where diaphanous and fluid elements meld, where the horizon disappears, yet seems to float perpetually just beyond reach.

59048 cattle market

We come to a cattle market alongside the road as we are leaving Artashat, an Armenian regional administrative capital. Sheep, cows, dogs and men standing in the grass and the gravel, making deals. We strike up a conversation with one of the men and, as commonly happens in the Caucasus, we are invited for a visit.

Part of World Listening Day 2020.

59042 land of the rose

This series of images was made during a week-long journey through the southerly part of Bohemia, a week of rain, roads, heavy clouds, lofty spires, weighty castles, afternoon sun, buzzing flies, beer, nettles, tombstones, statuary, fountains, arched doorways, and receding light.
For historical context, see also: ⨀.

59033 from my window

A dawn recording of birds and rain from my window overlooking a wooded park. The park is home to many doves, jays, magpies and numerous kinds of little birds I don’t know the names of. It forms my contribution to the compilation Pass it on ~ Early Morning Soundscapes ⨀.  

59008 unraveling

58999 morning truck

Blaring local pop music from a horn speaker mounted atop the driver’s cab, trucks arrive early in the morning at a crossroads north of Pune to take workers to the fields, in the mean time waking every one in the nearby guest house up. And so, we take a walk into the nearby countryside over the pastures and fields to find that the red soil glows in the morning sunlight.

58992 afilador

This residential street in the city of Montevideo is quiet in the late afternoon. Someone plays a piano; someone else drives nails with a hammer. There are a few cars and motorbikes. Most striking, however, is the sound of the afilador, whose careering slide whistle lets the neighborhood know that he is available to sharpen their knives.

58985 urfa

I went down into the bazaars of the old city of Urfa (today called Sanlıurfa ) two times that day last July; early in the morning to make photographs, before the business of the day had really begun; and later that day, when the bazaar was in full swing, to capture some of the common sounds of the streets, shops, shoppers, craftsmen at their trades, and the streetside teahouses.

58980 frontier

At the doorway of sleep lies an abyss, ripe for the falling. Careful, now! The ledge is slippery. Soundlessly, a pebble slips over; barely seen, now gone forever. Down below, we see the moon and the stars, spinning light through autumn trees, pets long dead, the faces of loved ones; our advancing peril.

58963 impromptu nº1

I might have as well called this cabin fever, but I decided against it. In our confinements, the mind may wander off to strange corners of the soul, or simply turn outwards and put common household objects to new uses. This impromptu arose from a whim involving a clothes drying rack and two unmatched contact microphones.

58952 a poem for burning

A small trusted circle would … memorise each other’s works and circulate them only by oral means. She tells how Akhmatova would write out her poem for a visitor on a scrap of paper to be read in a moment, then burnt in her stove. … “It was like a ritual,” Chukovskaya wrote. “Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.”

58951 drumming

It is well after sundown when, in a pool of harsh light under a street lamp, we come across a group of young men who have gathered in a circle at a cross street to drum. Called candombe, this is a perfectly ordinary activity on the streets of Montevideo.

58950 fifteen years

For about fifteen years of my life, sometime during the late 1980s and 1990s, I "stopped listening to music" and became a non-listener. For me this does not mean that I stopped hearing music, but rather that I stopped listening to it: that is, hearing it with intent.

58925 a quiet city

Yesterday, I went out of my apartment into the streets of an unknown city; one largely without people. Each year, Prague welcomes millions of visitors. They swarm the attractions, they choke the streets. They guzzle the beer and drop wads of cash on tasteless trifles. Some swoon at the complete Baroqueness of the city; some leave grafitti on the precious monuments. Sometimes, they carelessly laugh at things taken seriously by Praguers, and sometimes they stand in awe at things the locals find banal. Today, it is as if a tornado has come and swept them all away.

Not just the visitors, but the locals, too. By government decree, beginning at midnight tonight, anyone without a valid reason to be out in public must stay at home. It is for our own safety, and the safety of others.

Yesterevening, I went out one last time before the curtain is drawn. The planet Venus, bright enough to cast a shadow, hangs in the northern sky. Light from a corner večerka (shop with late hours) spills out onto the street as the shopkeeper prepares to close. I stop, not far from Loreta. Standing in the empty streets of Nový Svět (New World), I hear the faraway bell of St. Vitus Cathedral in Hradčany strike eleven o’clock.

What new world awaits us when all of this is over?

58902 st. petersburg metro

In St. Petersburg, the metro trains explode into the tunnel stops like black comets, accompanied by a fearsome burst of wind. With seating aligned to the lengths of the cars, there is none of the incessant chatter that you hear in Prague or Budapest. You sit facing a file of strangers, each of whom seems to look straight through you.

58898 as it rises, so it falls ~

An EP assembled from two recent filecasts.

58885 so it falls

We are interested here in the sheer weight and physical presence of flowing water, its horror and its beauty, as if alive, rolling and coiling, darting down from clouds, washing the earth, like a glassy or muddy serpent, muscular and voluptuous. (Taken from field recordings made in Tusheti, Albania, Ukraine, and Czechia.)

58853 as it rises

Let us accept for the moment the collective fantasy that the turning of the great imaginary odometer, in its perfect regularity and predictibility, has some independent meaning beyond its accidental existence. If we do so, we will more readily accept this work as a way to open a new decade. And one, it seems, in which almost anything may happen.

58818 nocturnes ~

How heavy the blackness is, yet how easily pierced by light. The night reluctantly recedes from the advance of electricity; a grid of incandescent windows, the shreik of a bright advertisement, the swinging beams of a passing vehicle. The fragments of night scuttle off in all directions, to hide in the glades, and collect the in dark corners, the lightless caverns of the imagination.

This anthology draws acousmatic portraits of reveries or direct experiences of the night, whose interchange with the day forms one of the most fundamental dichotomies of human existence.

58803 diyarbakır

Even as the old Sur of Diyarbakır is being desmolished, street by street, we spent a good part of three separate days wandering the narrow old byways, collecting images, and subjective impressions, before everything is inevitably gone.

58800 dengbêj evi

We explore the neighborhoods of the Sur, the old walled city of Diyarbakır, and find a labyrinth of narrow channels within walls of dark basalt, perforated here and there with windows and doorways, leading to unknowable courtyards and the inner sancta of domestic life. …
Photo: Tamás Sajó

58772 night poem

58768 hapax legomenon

Hapax legomenon is a transliteration of Greek ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, meaning “(something) said (only) once.” The related terms dis, tris, and tetrakis legomenon respectively refer to double, triple, or quadruple occurrences, but are far less commonly used.

58740 mare nostrum

The sea had lapped this Sardinian shore for untold years before finding my microphones before it. In turn, it has inspired this reverie of sampled sirens, trumpets, and a ripped-off foley sequence from the Béla Tarr film Kárhozat (Damnation) — with all due apologies.

58706 asia minor

To fly over a country as immense as Turkey is to take in the contour and content of a landscape in general terms; the specific features are reduced to typographic details; the enormity of the land passed over becomes merely pocket-sized.

58704 nemrut dağı

Although they have sat aloof, atop a tumulus of rock for some 2,000 years, the ruins of Nemrut Dağı receive regular visitors: at dawn and dusk, busfuls arrive to take in the sun’s rise and set. But at midday, we have it to ourselves, and share it only with the flapping wind, and the birds who swoop, dive, and play in it.

58636 addis ababa

My journey in Ethiopia began and ended in the city of Addis Ababa, or “new flower” in the national language, Amharic. Here, I attempt to give some impressions of my few days there through this small portfolio of glimpses.

58616 kutaisi (redux)

To take in an unfamiliar city on foot may serve as a cross-sectioning device, a tool for understanding the totality of a complexity by inspecting a single thread pulled from it. Or, at least, a *beginning of understanding. …*

58601 fata morgana ~

A mirage is a thing at once true and false; the image of a thing not there, which nonetheless can be seen and even photographed. In this collection of works, you will hear various field recordings placed on backdrops or in landscapes instantiated through convolution, the unnatural echoes of one voice within the impossible chamber modelled by another. The groaning metal door of a machine shop, the nimble fingers of Armenian carpet weavers, a paternoster elevator, crows, bells, steam whistles, rattling pot lids, dry leaves and sleet falling are the voices. Where are they in these pieces? On what planet do they resound?

track notes

58579 departure

58558 an end to words

58529 landing

We are coming in for a landing at the airport in Cairo, and we descend into a clearly defined stratum of vapor. We are surrounded by clouds and the sun is rising. Do you see the Brocken spectre beginning to form?

58528 bus ride

We ride in a rattling bus from Gondar to Lalibela across the northern part of Ethiopia, a dusty area with only intermittent greenery. In villages, the roads are choked with people and their goods and beasts. The going is slow, and once in a while we stop to pick up a couple of cops wielding military rifles, whom we then take to the next town.

58521 lake tana

Ethiopia. We embark from Bahir Dar going north by boat onto Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile. We hike around the Zege peninsula, surrounded by endemic coffee plants, and visit the monastery churches of Debre Maryam, Ura Kidane Mehret, and Azuwa Maryam.

58511 reverie nº4

58503 les angoisses

A bleak sound portrait of anguish drawn from a somehwat random assortment of found audio passages and field recordings. The stream of consciousness sketched out by this collage leads inevitably to an uncertain conclusion. Here a penchant for optical film sounds is, once again, on full display.

58470 a dream of smoke and birds ~

Seven studies of near silences and contrived resonances based on a somewhat random collection of found and original material. Some sources make use of the material qualities of wood, water, glass, wind, and similar common materials. Others include found material taken from online scientific and technical sources, among others. Still others are excerpted from various field recordings.

track notes

58469 kutaisi

Kutaisi. Convolution between a field recording of light early morning rain in an enclosed courtyard and a squeaking machine of some sort, both recorded in Kutaisi (Georgia).

58441 wind in a jar

A pair of sensitive omnidirectional microphones is suspended in the center of the void in a four-liter glass jar, while outside the wind is blowing. The recording is slightly manipulated.

58429 vanadzor

58416 alaverdi

58392 reverie nº3

58360 edge of town

58353 reverie nº2

58321 reverie nº1

58307 one kilometer

A broad double avenue cuts a neat slot in the forest, running nearly the entire length of the former royal game reserve at Obora Hvězda in Prague. Starting at 0, along the left side of the graveled path, there runs a precisely spaced line of 40 geodetic benchmarks at intervals of 25m, placidly revealing for us the distance of 1/40,000th of the polar circumference of the Earth.

58301 street scenes

1 In rural China, a horse driver manoeuvres his horsecart around a tight corner. 2 Later, I wander away from the old part of a town to take in the ambience of the shopping district. 3 As evening falls, I hear the faint sound of a moaning man from behind a high wall.

58295 trilogy ~

Three works of friction, involving metal, wood, skin, water and air. Before electronics, musical sound was always produced by means of the phyiscal friction of a solid or a gas (air or breath) against some other object. These electronic works also center upon frictional elements, in this case the motion of the sensitive end of a microphone moved directly across various surfaces. …

58293 ionosphere

Swaddled in its blanket of charged particles, our Earth floats protected from the profound indifference of outer space, while at home, we make use of the inner surface of the ionosphere to send straight-propagating electromagnetic radiation over the curved horizon.

58289 hither in fog

‘One boy, for example, in a New York suburb, has a wireless installation which is practically entirely the work of his own hands. In the evening or after school hours he often sits at his instrument and talks with one or another of half a dozen of his friends who have similar installations, or listens at random to the messages with which the air is filled.’

58285 the other three

‘I do not,’ said Confucius, ‘enlighten those who are not eager to learn, nor arouse those who are not anxious to give an explanation themselves. If I have presented one corner of the square and they cannot come back to me with the other three, I should not go over the points again.’

58222 points on a map ~

Here are three new long-form remixes, which are decidedly cut from the same cloth as last year’s filecast Moving still. This is because they have been built up by layering selected tracks from that playlist, and selections from those tracks, along the way making a few edits and minor adjustments. This collection also represents further refinements of a live mix performance which took place in November, 2017, as part of a series of all-night listening events called Silent Night, held with some regularity at the theatre Divadlo Ponec in Prague.

58207 istanbul

The ancient and momentous city of İstanbul sits astride two seas; its bridges and ferries straddle two continents; its history surmounts a cleft between cultures and creeds; and today its forest of minarets points upward, joining the earth and the sky. Twenty-three images from recent sojourn.

58200 sleepwalker

Heavily, the sleepwalker rises, places one foot, the next, and again; after a long time, stops in the yellow cone of light that falls from an overhead streetlamp. He poses theatrically in silhouette. No longer aware of any purpose; weightless, timeless, floating; not able even to imagine a longing for the sweet warmth of his bed.

58194 late winter

Two locations are conjoined in this filecast; a matching pair of binaural field recordings separated by twenty-four hours and a few thousand meters. 1 Birds are active in a forested park. A nearby thoroughfare provides a persistent low rumble. 2 A chilly rain in a windless grove on a hillside signals the greening to come. A droplet or two spikes the signal by falling close to the microphone.

58182 momentum ~

Momentum consists of a selection of filecasts that generally imply a sense of forward motion, although at least one track that does not fit this description has been included for the sake of contrast. …

58167 the singing baker

On five consecutive summer mornings, during a visit to Tbilisi, I walk the old streets of the city, collecting ambiences. Among other things, I record birds and workmen in a rose garden, a conversation in a church, and a singing baker rolling out the day’s dough.

58160 fall to earth ~

The next afternoon, I find myself in the same park. The mist is gone. The snow has melted. In its chill, the still air remembers the mists of the previous day. Crows have settled in the park, they stagger and peck in the field, picking up things with their beaks as if to show them to one another. They sit in the trees watching me. They wait for me to come near. Now and again, one of the shaggy, draped beings hovers in the cold air and drops to ground like a fallen sycamore leaf. Suddenly, all of them fly away, a dark shroud veiling the nacreous sky. They rasp and cough, barking like little dogs.

58153 vale of dusk

I walk through the park in the evening. I find a veil of mist clutching the trees, the buildings, the slope of the hill. There are white crystals of snow coming down, a delicate shower of feathery stars. I cannot see very far down the path before me. There is only a vaporous place where space is lost and time is lost and all sounds are far away and one has left the world behind.

58133 a word image

This is an image. This is a word. This is an image of the word “word”, and a word that says, “image”. You see an image and a word, or two words. Or two images? If you know how to view source, it may become clearer. But maybe not.

58108 new year bird

The call of an unfamiliar bird captures my attention, and forms the heart of this recording, cutting through the sounds of New Year’s activities in a temple in Shaxi. People chat, prepare food, move tables, while street sounds seep in from just beyond the gate. Eventually, a workman outside begins to mimic the birdcalls, trying to coax the unseen bird to emit more of them.

58101 end of ramadan

I sit outside the Ottoman-style Xhamia Mbret mosque in Berat, Albania, in the shade of its portico, in the middle of a sunny little park next to a busy road. As part of the solemnities marking the end of the feast of Ramadan, a reading of all the ayat (verses) of the Qur’an takes place.

58090 mahjong

We rent bicycles and take the main road leading north to the town of Baisha, where we find some people in a storefront playing mahjong. As each player smacks a tile down to emphasize the boldness of the move, others sit around, gossiping and commenting on the game. At intervals, the tiles are shuffled by all hands in a rustle of soft clacking sounds.

58080 cable car

Two years on, and I once again visit the Georgian mining town of Chiatura, this time to capture a recording of a ride in one of the archaic, but still very functional cable cars, which comprise the mass transit system of a town whose inhabitants must daily negotiate the various altitudes of their urban space.

58066 penumbra

Across an ocean of moist and green land, over distances breached by chugging machinery or shining wings, past black gashes, stained monuments, melting concrete, muddy settlements with chickens and dogs, we find a different world sundered from ours by our divergent histories.
A portfolio of photographs made during journeys through Central and Eastern Europe, assembled here to accompany, by analogy, allegory or suggestive equivalence, the previous filecast.

58060 east by rail ~

I stop for the night in a shabby hotel overlooking some train tracks, near the end of my journey east. Floating in through the open window, along with a night air still clinging to the smell of rain, are the sounds of the trains, coming and going, a song of rolling metal and churning gasses. The platform announcements call out, metallic and chiming from the mouth of the speakerhorn, their precise meaning drowned in swells of reverberation, which gather strength as they propagate outward. They seem to say, “Your journey is not over, not yet.”

58033 blood of a poet

Stalks of barley and black wheat / nod ominously. I race towards them. / The poet’s pen no longer sings / though it used to be his nightingale. From „Desk: My Parnassus“ by Paolo Iashvili, 1932. Translated from the Georgian by Rebecca Gould.

58000 prototype

This is the page documenting a slow-moving long-standing project, shown in rudimentary form here, and most recently to be exposed in the form of a brief performance as part of the series Wakushoppu held at the Café V Lese in Prague on 5 September 2017.

57999 field notes ~

Field notes was a monthly column that I contributed to the Czech music periodical His VOICE from 10 September 2014 until 14 March 2017, twenty-four installments in all. An additional five essays appeared for the first time on the blog Poemas del río Wang.

57994 nostalgia

It lies down a back street to the hinterlands of memory, where a gate opens to a foggy yard; wet grass, dripping leaves. Something is there: sensed, but not seen. Something old: its shriveling chrysalis exposes a rotting core. It emits the aroma of corruption. Once a fulsome object of longing, now hollow, it sighs with the melancholy echo of a nightingale.

57994 nostalgia

It lies down a back street to the hinterlands of memory, where a gate opens to a foggy yard; wet grass, dripping leaves. Something is there: sensed, but not seen. Something old: its shriveling chrysalis exposes a rotting core. It emits the aroma of corruption. Once a fulsome object of longing, now hollow, it sighs with the melancholy echo of a nightingale.

57987 eclipse

57970 midnight sun ~

He was looking at the icy water, raging alongside the ship, thinking how terrible it would be to be left behind in this world of ice, alone without help, to watch the ship disappearing into darkness. “My God,” the Commander thought, peering into the black chaos. “Where am I? Who am I?”

57939 gelati

Founded by David the Builder in 1106, the monastery of Gelati, just outside of Kutaisi, represents for Georgians their golden age. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as an active place of worship.

57938 market – bazari

The central market (or bazari ) area of Kutaisi (Imereti, Georgia) occupies several city blocks along Shota Rusaveli Avenue, and is especially busy in the forenoon. Here, over a period of some two and a half years, and seven separate visits, I have pieced together these impressions.

57900 moving, still.

Darkness moves in alternation with light, dawn shares the day with dusk. Each of the thirty-some works in these combined playlists is a twilight, neither one thing nor another, neither here nor there, always in the process of arriving and yet never managing to get there. …

57884 forum romanum

Like ordinary tourists, we wander the ancient Forum in Rome along with the curious throng during the late afternoon. We stop at the Arch of Constantine, under the sign of lengthening shadows, gradually dimming light, and, inexplicably, the sound of numerous helicopters fluttering overhead. 𝄐

57872 lost street

Excuse me, can you please tell me how to find Lost Street?” “I am sorry, but I’m not from around here, and so I do not know where Lost Street is.” “Oh. Well, thank you just the same.” (Ztracena ul., or “Lost Street” can, in fact, be easily found running along the southeastern edge of Horní náměstí, in the Moravian city of Olomouc.) 𝄐

57858 besh barmag

The steep path up to the rocky outcrop called “The Five Fingers” — Besh Barmag — in the glare of the sun on a hot afternoon is draining. Three old women sit on a set of steps and offer to tell my fortune, but I keep moving; I don’t understand their language. 𝄐

57857 black garden

The region called Nagorno-Karabagh takes its name from a Russian word referring to mountains and Turkish and Persian words referring to a black garden. People there light beeswax candles in the churches, which sputter as they burn, and the winter wind whistles through the ancient stone belfries. 𝄐

57848 gazimağusa

The sight of Gothic mosques is surprising, but historically logical. In the city of Gazimağusa, (the Greek Famagusta), located in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Gothic-style churches from the time of the Crusades have been converted to a new purpose as mosques for the local populace. 𝄐

57841 shaniwar peth

The Indian state of Maharashtra is dry and sunny in January, and in its cultural capital, the old city of Pune, we record the street ambience, including motor traffic, passing conversations, and the sound of a sugar cane press producing cane juice for the delectation of passersby. 𝄐

57840 after marco polo

In the old market town of Shaxi, a way-station on the historic Tea Horse Road, which ran from Yunnan to Burma and Tibet, there runs a river. And this river is spanned by a very old bridge over which very likely passed the Italian explorer Marco Polo on his long journey to China. 𝄐

57838 bakhchisaray

We visit the Crimean Tatar capital in high autumn. Golden poplars, their dewey leaves sparkling in the soft wind, tower like upright pencils, as do the town’s minarets, and also the stolid, turbaned grave stones in the gardens of the Palace of the Tatar Khan. 𝄐

57837 qobustan

In the land around Baku, truck tires tear out ruts that pool spontaneously with natural bitumen seeping up from below. Mysterious gasses burble up through mounds of gray mud, and the placid surfaces of dead ponds are disturbed by a constant effervescence. And strewn over the land, a swarm of oil derricks, arrayed like gigantic mosquitoes, are sucking the black blood of the earth.

57833 park in göygöl

The park in Göygöl named after Heydər Əliyev sits incongruously across the street from a large European-style Luthern Church — which in the end, is not so surprising, for the town (formerly Helenendorf) was populated during the 19th century by Caucasus Germans, all of whom were deported to Central Asia during World War II. 𝄐

57832 along the mekong

On the border between Thailand and Laos, the Mekong River bisects the vista horizontally, with a thin crust of dark green vegetation forming the dividing line between brown water and blue sky. In towns along the river, radio music leaks from cheap public address horns, counterpointed by the whistling cicadas of the nearby jungle. 𝄐

57830 tarnów

The tinny scree of a street violinist, playing popular movie soundtrack hits to electronic backup over a cheap amplifier, or the rollicking sound of an accordion polka.Take your pick: both can be found in the streets that branch out from the old town square of Tarnów. 𝄐

57827 coffee on sand

The street named for the Armenians — Вірмéнська вулиця — attests to the long history of this people in the city of Ľviv. Here you can see their emblematic khachkars (stone crosses), visit an Armenian basilica, and enjoy kawa po skhidnomu, Armenian coffee slowly cooked over hot sand. 𝄐

57826 notes from yunnan

My journey to the Yunnan province of China resulted, not only in the collection of photographs comprising the previous filecast, but also the following selected recordings which I collected at various spots along the road, together with brief text descriptions.

57821 saint-séverin

In a quiet side street next to the Église Saint-Séverin in a touristy part of the Quartier Latin, I wait patiently until the coming of midday to hear, and record, some of the oldest church bells in Paris, dating from the early 15th century. 𝄐

57820 ouarzazate

The bus station in Ouarzazate, a city that lies on the edge of the Sahara desert, is a roost of drivers who call out destinations, directing passengers to the correct vehicle. Meanwhile, other buses move in and out to the sound of clanking motors and screeching brakes. 𝄐

57811 calles de sevilla

On the day before Christmas Eve, I am in Seville. I walk the depleted streets, visit the main sights, the Cathedral of St. Mary, the Alcázar. In the afternoon, I respite in a small bar for a café cortado and a glass of rioja. When I emerge, the shining sky is beginning to darken and I can hear the faint sound of faraway church bells. 𝄐

57809 berliner dom

The birds that nest under the porticos of the massive Berlin Cathedral, located in the heart of the city on Museuminsel, chatter without surcease and flit in and out, bringing food to their hungry nestlings, while a flock of crows stands watch in the nearby trees. 𝄐

57808 kutaisi rain

The morning after a traditonal supra, a supper for guests, I am sitting on the back steps of my lodgings in Kutaisi, listening to the warm rain come down in the courtyard. A fat dormouse scurries from her hiding place, which is quickly filling with water, bringing out her young one by one and depositing them safely on higher ground. 𝄐

57800 tea and horses

I recently traveled in the Yunnan region of China, a culturally rich region which abuts Myanmar and Tibet, and is the site of the historic Tea Horse Road. (I hope these images as they stand — an arbitrary number of inscrutable impressions — serve as a key to my as yet undigested experiences there.)

57777 light and snow

I seem to be walking through a foggy 19th-century photograph, a displaced daguerreotype on display in a snow globe. The naked trees reach up like strokes of faded ink and the wind struggles to uproot them, to make them fly like the crows who circle the chimneys and and swing around the rooftop antennas in hectic, whirling orbits. …

57758 karpaz

It is early in the morning, and we make a stop along the shore road that leads almost to the end of the Karpaz Peninsula, the rattail of land that juts out into the eastern Mediterranean from the northeast corner of Cyprus, where I capture this ambience.

57736 place lahdim

I find myself lost in the vortex of old Meknès, and I ask a shopkeeper for the way out. “My nephew with show you,” and without hesitation, the young boy takes my hand and leads me through a dusty snakepit of dappled and shadowy passages, until we are at last debouched onto the Place Lahdim. I fumble in my pockets to offer the boy a coin, but he has already melted into the crowd. 𝄐

57735 swallows of putna

The swallows who dwell in the eaves of the buildings of the Putna monastery — Mănăstirea Putna — swarm in tight formation as they chase each other around the rooftops and bell towers. Their high-pitched cries and the bright summer sun seem to meld together into a single sensorial phenomenon. 𝄐

57732 seaside promenade

Watched over in the steady gaze of the poet Pushkin and his memorial fountain, the seaside promenade in Odessa — Приморьский бульвар — is frequented on summer evenings by hungry dogs and revellers, and not a few foreign tourists, come from afar to take in the view of the Black Sea below and to descend the Potemkin Stairs . 𝄐

57729 regolare a milano

Boarding a slow train in Genoa on my way to Milan, I find that the public address system in the car is malfunctioning, and each time the voice comes on to make an announcement, there is a sudden electrical squawk that jars my dozing self to alertness. 𝄐

57728 stelæ at odzun

The church in Odzun, Armenia — Օձունի եկեղեցի — stands forlorn in the middle of a low-lying yard, blanketed in snow. Passing school children stop and stare at the strange visitors who carefully photograph the pair of monumental funerary stelæ which have stood guard here for fifteen centuries. 𝄐

57727 dark passage

In cities such as this one, which lies somewhat to the north, there is a salient grimness to the brace for the coming winter, and one sometimes feels that the day has had scarcely enough time to get its wind before its charging rays start to slip away, and the night begins to fall.

57725 zastávka orionka

In the small hours of the morning, traffic at the crossroads near Náměstí U Orionky in Prague becomes sparse, and pedestrians are almost non-existent. However, the audible signaling at the crosswalk, intended for the visually impaired, continues doing its job: slow ticking for “Wait!” and quick clicking for “Get a move on!” 𝄐

57724 garden of osek

The bounty of autumn is everywhere in the orchard, the apple trees are heavy with uncollected fruit. I pluck some, and find that there are not less than three varieties here, some tasting of honey, some of wine, and some even hinting of rose. But they are late apples, left too long on the tree, dried out, and hard to eat. 𝄐

57723 marjanishvilis kucha

Morning and the main street leading out from the metro station, named after the theatre director Kote Marjanishvili, plunges this observer into the throng of a working class neighborhood of Tbilisi. At precisely 9:20, the carillon of the Russian Orthodox St. Aleksandr Nevskij Church begins to ring. 𝄐

57722 trieste

As I climb the stone steps to reach the Cattedrale di San Giusto Martire, sited on a hill in the multicultural port city of Trieste, the autumnal sun is low, a dazzling orange bauble hanging in a cloudless sky. Just as I reach the plaza, the church bells begin to toll, and I step inside. 𝄐

57720 kaunas centras

A simple binaural recording of a street ambience is brought together with a single-note multi-instrument orchestral strain, whereby the field recording is almost completely effaced, serving only to provide a stochastic impetus to activate the convolution filter. 𝄐

57719 over the danube

Under the deck of the modern functionalist Elizabeth Bridge — Erszébet híd — next to the abutment on the Buda side of Budapest, I make a recording of the ceaseless vehicles above me as each speeding pair of front tires strikes the expansion joint as they roll onto the bridge and over the river. 𝄐

57714 highway 59

Driving across a spring landscape of freshly-turned soil under gray, drizzling skies, the radio is tuned to a gardening show. Sometimes, distant lightning on the faraway horizon disturbs the ether as crackles in the audio are sent out in all directions as a quivering, invisible tsunami of disturbed energy. 𝄐

57711 syzygy

I dream of a film-noir cityscape as if Fritz Lang had directed with de Chirico as his set designer. Hounded in its streets, I am chased, I am nabbed. The full moon is at periapsis. In the dead of night I awaken to find its pale blue light shining hard on my face through the open curtains.

57702 adrift

Can you smell the dusty confinement of attics, the chilly, vaguely menacing, breath of dank cellars, the damp and worm-eaten pages of long-stored books, the sour smell of a stack of old magazines that have not been able to stretch themselves open in a great while, like a cleansing yawn after a deep sleep? …

57690 evanescence

We listen as a failing fluorescent tube in a hotel bathroom somewhere struggles against time to keep the mercury vapor glowing as its cathode undergoes its final moments. The recording is passed through a number of convolutions, making it a poignant swan song for an age of excited gasses.

57681 momentum

1 A recording of frogs and other animals as the night falls over a potato field beneath the mountains of Tusheti. 2 From there, we listen as a group of Russian villagers pushes a heavy wagon over a long distance. 3 Finally, we convolute the sound of a marching rabble with a stereophonic tone.

57680 vigil

Warily we watch as a re-alignment slowly takes form, first noted only in our peripheral vision, but lately much hardened as it comes into focus. A harbinger of an unsettling period to come, unknowable, with an incipient sense of promise, hand-in-hand with its mischievous twin, dread.

57674 marktkirche

The late Gothic Marktkirche Unser Lieben Frauen (where Handel was baptized) stands on Marktplatz facing the Roter Turm in Halle. As the afternoon wanes, vendors begin to close up shop once the tower clock chimes the hour to the tune of the Westminster chimes, thought to be taken from Handel’s Messiah.

57664 long shadows

A persistent atmosphere derived from eight looped fragments of field recordings, which are combined with one found excerpt from a scene that takes place in a clockmaker’s shop, aspires to evoke the expressive light and long shadows of a late summer’s day’s late afternoon.

57651 cold fire

The mountains are a place where the bones of the earth rise up out of the soil and the surface of the land towers over itself. At night, the clouds hang like a cold fire smoldering in the moonlight, the deathly glimmer of that frigid, distant sphere.

57640 eastward bound

… I can also hear the sounds of the platform announcements, reverberating through the distance until their substance is lost in the waves of echo that they stir up, seeming to say, “your journey is not over, not yet.”

57616 behind a wall

What started as a simple field recording of a construction site (now completely buried in the subsequent manipulations that took place) has become by turns an extended moment combining sonic voices of both contrasting and coincident hues.

57602 storm receding

The splendor of glowering skies, laden with summer electricity and rumbling and cracking like the guts of hungry titans, while common in these parts, is but anything but banal. A late-season squall’s final ebbing is captured in this lightly edited field recording.

57589 databending

Through databending, the meanings of digital artifacts are transmogrified …, shedding their moorings to conventional interpretations, forcing the perceiver to explore variant ways of understanding them. It is a reinterpretation of what the “meaning” of “data” is, …

57579 is anyone there

Samples culled from Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, among other sources, are perhaps a case study, as well as a response to Wells’ extolling Welles’ facility at creating ‘jolly good new noises’ (as hinted at in a previous filecast).

57570 aurora

A work arrived at incidental to other strivings. Here a scientific recording of the invisibile energies of the cosmos takes its place alongside the kitschy noodling of a lounge piano. A study in contrasts and congruities.

57567 ghost train

Some fragments of optical sound taken from old movies is convoluted with scratchy old recordings of violins. A field recording from the main train station in Wrocław tries to anchor it to reality. (If you think you hear harps, it is just an accident of the process.)

57560 solstice

The rhythm of diurnity is slow, and slower still is the semiannual frequency modulation (what would that be expressed in Hz?) that variably alters the light with the dark, oscillating between a kind of cosmic sublargo and its converse superpresto.

57549 on recording

The role of these media is at least partly to stop time from passing … . But these artefacts also propel time forward, by the fact that perceiving recorded reality is a distinct and new experience, and separate from experiencing it in the first instance. …

57548 views of kutaisi

Between 2015 and 2017, I passed several times through Kutaisi, the capital city of western Georgia’s Imereti, usually on my way to somewhere else. Nonetheless, these brief visits afforded several opportunities to observe and image the denizens of this lively and ancient place.

57536 buildings

Architecture gives buildings circulatory systems like those in animal bodies, moving liquids and gasses around and within, through channels which behave with both regularity and chaos. They shudder and sigh, palpitate and wretch, squeak and sing, in accord with resonances both purposeful and accidental.

57529 lake sevan

This series of photographs captures the environs of Lake Sevan, during both late winter and early summer journeys to the region. The lake occupies most of the area of the provice of Gegharkunik, Armenia, and is one of the largest high altitude fresh water lakes in Eurasia.

57520 strange signals

… I still have no idea if what I experenced was related to one of these things, or simply the subconscious yearning of our brains to find order in the chaos, to find the hidden meaning of things. But both instances are fairly interesting to consider.

57505 multiversum

Multiversum is a collaborative work created for the music festival vs. interpretation, which was held in 2016 in Prague. It consists of a two-channel video installation that documents its own creation and, in its own way, stands as a minimal model of a multiverse. …

57481 excerpt

I heard the phrase in a dream, and then in a dream, again, as if coming from some deeper emissary. I counted the number of times that I heard it, two, then three, four, up to seven. Then I heard it again, a crippled haiku: “Fire is the joy of lost hope.”

57475 micro-continent

Due to the variety of the island’s ecosystems, which include mountains, woods, plains, largely uninhabited territories, streams, rocky coasts and long sandy beaches, Sardinia has been metaphorically defined as a micro-continent. In the modern era, many travelers and writers have extolled the beauty of its untouched landscape, which houses the vestiges of the Nuragic civilization   (Wikipedia).

57474 s’incontru

On Easter Sunday in Oliena, a village in the Barbagia region of Sardinia, congregants assemble in two different churches and then depart, separately bringing with them effigies of Christ and the Virgin Mary. When the two processions meet, a moment called ‘the reunion,’ the scene erupts with church bells and rifle fire.

57460 winter wind

The winter winds of Armenia strike hard, a cold anvil to the face. They protest against the solid surfaces of buildings, moan like ghosts through the straining trees, and roll through church belfries like sighing flutes. They crash along the glistening ice with a momentous glide that is deafening.

57448 leap year

The last time we passed a bissextile, we made a filecast to mark it. And, four years later, here is another one to mark the leap year day. Accompanying it is a series of images taken in the Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome, which houses a spectacular meridian line, a kind of elaborate sundial.

57446 yerevan

In the ancient city of Yerevan the streets do not generally coil and narrow into dense networks as in other cities that old, because in the 1930s, there was a fever for pushing aside the elaborations of the ages, replacing them with a rationalized grid. Well, it is what it is, and some of it looks like this.

57435 selim pass

Winter is already waning in the mountains of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabagh), when we attempt the passage from there to Armenia proper. As we approach the crest of the Selim Pass, we find our car can go no further in the tire-packed snow. But other drivers stop to help push us out, and we go on our way.

57432 coffee machine

As it is winter in Armenia, and cold outside, I step into a snackbar for a hot coffee while waiting at the filling station. A young woman at the bar plays the radio while I wait my turn at the automatic coffee vending machine.

57428 roadside eatery

Next to the road near Akori, Armenia, we come to a shack advertising food, a steamy one-room eatery smelling of ash, smoke, mutton and cabbage. We step inside and sit in a sphere of heat coming from a wood-burning stove. Three men are playing cards at the only other table, growling out their bids and arguing over each other’s playing, while a woman prepares their food. We order coffee and discuss tomorrow’s itinerary.

57426 sanahin

The late winter snows are wet and heavy, dripping profusely in the afternoon sun. The air is cool and still as we pay a visit to the 10th-century monastery of Sanahin, in Armenia’s northern province of Lori. The name ‘sanahin’ translates as “this one is older than that one.”

57412 boyer chute

A grassy plain, sparsely treed, lies on the Nebraska side of an obscure bend in the Missouri River. On a spring afternoon, the many birds who live here are busy, while sounds of a freight train and an occasional airplane let us know, illusions to the contrary, that we have not really left human activity far behind.

57402 vapor

Data bending recognizes that computer files are simply numbers, and that what they represent is, essentially, arbitrary. So (for example) one could take a series of grayscale images of the sky, and similar things, and then play them as sound files. A thing from the image realm may then take residence in the realm of sound.

57390 no train of thought

Words can only partly describe what and how we perceive, with accounts that are riddled with holes. Details that are challenging to describe are often left as openings for the reader to fill in. Recordings also reveal important omissions, …. Machines have limited perspective and flexibility; they can mimic but not entirely replace human tissue. …

57388 last days

A great curtain of crows draws itself over the sky like black lace over a face radiant with happiness. The last days have come. As the final tide comes in, it gets ready to wash the shore clean, leaving a blank slate to serve as a foundation for the next round.

57377 december

December comes twelfth but is named ‘tenth.’ November is called ‘ninth’ but it is the eleventh month, and so on with the two preceding months. March was once the first, and the days between the tenth and the first back then were, curiously, considered monthless.

57371 baku metro

Among the banalities that fascinate me are the public transportation systems that the cities of the world often provide. People themselves are interesting to watch in any event, but in combination with constant motion, a sense of urgency, bad artificial lighting, and an industrial sound environment, the effect for me is irresistible.

57366 chiatura

The distant rattle and screech of the moving cables can be heard from all corners, the thrum of a great guitar. Over the hours of a day, it infests the mind, and days after we left Chiatura behind, I could summon the sound in memory with convincing precision. …

57349 another shore

The sea sunders as it joins, and washes the ends of distant lands even as it provides a heaving pathway to them. As we cast our eye at the horizon, our imagination’s arrow attempts a gossamer bridge to the unknown, over an endless plain of sighs.

57311 various mysteries

A note is sung, flung freely out, into the air. What is essential, what draws us in to listen, what siezes our attention? The soft friction of warm breath against taut cartilage sends out a signal: something alive calls out to us. And we respond.

57289 equinox

For this equinox, we bring you a set of images of a small stone sphere which I found while walking on a gravel path. Mysterious in its regularity, and only one centimeter in diameter, when looked at closely, it begins to look a little like the recent photographs sent back from the dwarf planet Pluto.

57286 precipice

I dream that I am at the edge of a cliff overlooking golden waters that shine in the sun. As the daylight fades, a throat of welded metal heaves a voluminous sigh as a ship moans its sad good-bye to the receding port. An improvisation for three parts.

57280 black ocean

This strange and caustic place outside a chemical plant near Záluží u Litvínova in northwest Bohemia produces a steam reeking of sulphur while, in pulsing gushes, it disgorges a black effluent. It makes a sound that, ironically, recalls the crashing surf of our mother ocean, somewhat like a siren calling us to death.

57275 lost recordings

Things often happen quickly out in the field, and inspiration can be quickly squelched by adverse circumstances. It is common that unexpected sounds take me by surprise, and by the time the recorder can be prepared and initiated, the interesting sound is often already well underway.. …

57239 a silent room

The faucet drips, a floor board creaks, the house slowly settles into the earth with quiet cracks. The refrigerator purrs and then gently quakes to stop. An electric clock emits a faint motor hum and makes soft alternating clicks, as if it were walking through time. …

57212 beyond time

Xinaliq is a small, isolated village at the end of a valley in the Greater Caucasus Mountains in northern Azerbaijan. The villages speak their own language, and descend from a population that first settled there thousands of years ago. …

57208 mise-en-abîme

As the grip of sleep tightens, my purchase on the world dissipates. I drift into a misty forest, where birds chirp and insects drone, and soft leaves on tender branches brush my skin. Voices speak in dim words, bubbling up like the oracular gasses of Delphi. But then I start, a jolt, all my muscles suddenly contract, and I cannot recall what was said.

57194 swifts

They flit and flutter and dart and dodge, and in the patterns they make, evince a kinetic ecstasy, a special craft, a gift for the marvelous. Then they disappear as quickly as they appear leaving only the shrill mental echoes of their passing. …

57175 caspian sea

We go out onto the beak of land known as the Abşeron peninsula, where Baku lies, where an old Zoroastrian Atesgah, or fire temple, lies, and the fire mountain of Yanar Daǧ, and the singing stones. But mostly we go there because we seek the feeling of being at one of the ends of the earth.

57167 roof of the world

It is late May. The sun is warm, but the air is cool. We are surrounded by snowy peaks as we come to a wayside stop on the Georgian Military Road at the high point of Jvari Pass. Next to the graves of the German prisoners of war who built this road, trailer trucks rumble by as a flock of crows passes overhead, on their way to who knows where.

57160 imereti

These photographs capture fragments of a springtime afternoon among the shepherds and their grazing sheep in the pastoral landscape of Georgia’s Imereti. In the soft daylight, a strong breeze spreads the scent and sounds of the meadow all around us.

57156 paternoster

Occasionally, I see a person or two standing, waiting. The alternating bright and dark, an ebb and flow of light, a lugubrious pulsation, makes a mechanized mockery of sunrise and sunset from these quick false days and nights. …

57137 bells of sapânţa

It is obvious to the workmen of the Cimitirul Vesel, the “merry cemetery” in Sapânţa, Romania, that I am curious about the bells. I approach them, study them, tap them gently with a knuckle to guess how they might sound. Suddenly, one of the men puts down his shovel, strides over and begins to ring the bells with full abandon.

57135 convergence

The festival „Konvergence ---Alotof---“ took place in April, 2015 in Prague, and included a brief concert from this project. The performance made use of light which was modulated by passing it through various spinning objects in conjunction with a light-sensitive device as a means of producing sound.

57130 city of lions

The jaunty blast of the amplified polka rolls off the old Renaissance town square, and townspeople spin like coupled tops to these words, „Let the others go whitherever they want, to Vienna, to Paris or London. But for my part, I will never leave Lwów. … Tylko we Lwowie!“

57126 ľviv tram

In this recording, we hear the sounds of the car interior as the №3 tram sets off from the periphery to the city center of Ľviv. Over the ups and downs of the old rails, and the corresponding creaks and groans of the tram car, a mother calmly answers questions posed by her child.

57121 road to ushguli

We come to a house, and a woman responds to our knock, peering at us from a window. She invites us into a warm steamy kitchen, where she is already preparing the khachapuri for her family’s evening meal. We are given places at the table. …

57117 inner workings

I felt a mild fluttering in my stomach as we passed the final black line. I knew no harm would come to me, but nonetheless I was overcome by the inevitability of that turning motion, its fatedness. Had I wanted to, I could not have stopped it.

57111 drifting (xinaliq)

High above a canyon in the Greater Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan near Xinaliq, we witness: a parade of clouds drifting between the twin escarpments; and below, a flock of sheep being driven to a green meadow.

57092 mountain of song

Our driver abruptly comes to a stop there. We are at a roadside eatery, pressed between the winding highway and the mountain face, right next to a raging stream in rapid descent to the valley floor. “How long do we stop?” we want to know. “As long as it feels good!” is the reply. …

57080 sentinel

1 Sonified weather data from the city of Philadelphia. 2 Magnetic spectrum data of a so-called ‘singing comet.’ 3 ESA launch of a Sentinel satellite, altered. 4 Field recording of distant bells as heard from the Betlemy neighborhood of Tbilisi.

57072 marks

The walls of the buildings in Tbilisi, a city repeatedly conquered, flattened and rebuilt during the course of its history, are striking not only for the copiousness of their handwritten marks, but also for the way they hint, in foreshortened form, at this old city’s profoundly layered and multiethnic history.

57065 exhalation

Late evening, the traffic lessens and the bleat of motorized vehicle horns gradually subsides. By midnight, it is a wash of sound, just the unfocused sibilance of the wind in the leaves, blended with the soft chaos of every other thing happening in the neighborhood, the actions of the quick upon the inert.…

57063 tbilisi metro

This brief journey takes us along for three stops on the metro in central Tbilisi. Starting with the cheerful electronic card readers, we move on to the rumble of the two-minute-long escalator ride, the glassy plink that calls the stops and the roaring metallic din of the train ride itself.

57056 peths of pune

In the old peths of Pune, the traffic is relentless. Endless motorbikes compete with push carts, rickshaws, and buses, each wheedling for just an inch more of space. A pedestrian must put his faith in their drivers, for progress is impossible if you stand petrified at the street’s edge.

57055 shoe mending

The rough streets of Kutaisi are no match for cheaply made Chinese boots. And so it comes to pass that we enter a shoe mender’s shop in the hope of re-attaching a loose-flapping sole. This sequence of images shows him making light work of the problem.

57049 end of night

In the pre-dawn, the city of Pune, India, slowly rises. Sounds that drift across the river are torn apart by the strut and surface of intervening buildings, shredded by their mass and matter, and reassembled around my ears as ghostly groans and soothing whispers.

57040 cave temples

We took the opportunity of a weekend to travel by car over the Western Ghats of India around Pune, in Maharashtra state. The images here focus on the caves of Karla and Bhaje, while the sound file that accompanies them connects bits and pieces from a number of other temples and historical sites.

57038 urban temple

As I walk through the ground floor of a concrete parking ramp, a shortcut suggested by a local, I hear the sounds of prayer and a yellowish light coming from a crack in the wall to my right. And thus, by chance, I stumble upon the Marigold Balaji Temple, in the city of Pune.

57030 metro

With a look that said, “Watch how I do it!” he started across. Encouraged by his intrepid example, I followed. Enlightenment came. I immediately understood that to keep moving at a regular speed was safe, but one must never, ever stop. …

57001 ghost fiddler

The supple hands of the ghost fiddler fluttered like little hummingbirds over the glasses’ halos, seeking the sweet essence of the music, and the fairie-like ring of it was a sheer delight. The tourists were recording the performance on mobile phones, paying homage to the performer by tossing coins into a pot laid before him. …

57001 ghost fiddler

The supple hands of the ghost fiddler fluttered like little hummingbirds over the glasses’ halos, seeking the sweet essence of the music, and the fairie-like ring of it was a sheer delight. The tourists were recording the performance on mobile phones, paying homage to the performer by tossing coins into a pot laid before him. …

56999 under the ice

Come winter and the winds rise, air grows bitter, water stiffens, the supple creaks, footfalls, once sure, become tentative; the sun loses its hold as the brittle days shrink and the cold night draws ever nearer, as if threatening to last forever.

56975 fragments of a journey

At each grade level crossing, we pass a semaphore, our motion smearing the sounds of the dinging bells, like a foley cue from an old spy film. It begins high on the musical scale and then smoothly sweeps downward, simultaneously rising and falling in loudness, a small seance to summon the spirit of Christian Doppler …

56975 fragments of a journey

At each grade level crossing, we pass a semaphore, our motion smearing the sounds of the dinging bells, like a foley cue from an old spy film. It begins high on the musical scale and then smoothly sweeps downward, simultaneously rising and falling in loudness, a small seance to summon the spirit of Christian Doppler …

56968 a warning

“The conviction of its substantial, tangible reality is now so overwhelming that later, when I wake up, I have the impression that I have just left a state of true perception, and everything I see after opening my eyes seems hazy and unreal.”

56968 a warning

“The conviction of its substantial, tangible reality is now so overwhelming that later, when I wake up, I have the impression that I have just left a state of true perception, and everything I see after opening my eyes seems hazy and unreal.”

56953 excursus

Our tireless habit of trawling like magpies leaves us a trove of disconnected fragments of unclear usefulness. Combined with the feverish symptoms of our imagination’s labors, they elicit dark harbors, burst tensions, continents of bleak emptiness, moments of quiet violence, and even love. We find solace in these digressions.

56953 excursus

Our tireless habit of trawling like magpies leaves us a trove of disconnected fragments of unclear usefulness. Combined with the feverish symptoms of our imagination’s labors, they elicit dark harbors, burst tensions, continents of bleak emptiness, moments of quiet violence, and even love. We find solace in these digressions.

56953 excursus

Our tireless habit of trawling like magpies leaves us a trove of disconnected fragments of unclear usefulness. Combined with the feverish symptoms of our imagination’s labors, they elicit dark harbors, burst tensions, continents of bleak emptiness, moments of quiet violence, and even love. We find solace in these digressions.

56946 islands

The city of Wrocław, formerly Breslau, lies on both sides of the river Odra, and spans some eleven islands. After the war, its populace was driven out and replaced, the newcomers also having been forced from their previous abodes. This has left this richly layered city fragmented, but not broken.

56939 father of apples

With the sound of trickling water all around and the late summer wind in the trees, many parts of Almaty enjoy an almost pastoral ambience, surprising for a rectilinear city of a million and a half people. …

56912 bird calls

The trams at Karlovo náměstí resound differently from those at Alexanderplatz; they are perhaps a bit sadder, more moaning than singing. Once I heard the cries of a wounded dog in the song of those rails. …

56911 play of light

In this filecast, I apply the technical concepts of stereography to a selection of found monoptical motion picture fragments, and construct a semi-imaginary space from them, partly reconstituting the actual space in which they were recorded. …

56911 play of light

In this filecast, I apply the technical concepts of stereography to a selection of found monoptical motion picture fragments, and construct a semi-imaginary space from them, partly reconstituting the actual space in which they were recorded. …

56880 æther

The luminiferous æther was thought for centuries to be the pervasive medium via which light propagated throughout the universe. Its existence came into doubt only in the 19th century, when careful experiments failed to measure any of its predicted effects.

56880 æther

The luminiferous æther was thought for centuries to be the pervasive medium via which light propagated throughout the universe. Its existence came into doubt only in the 19th century, when careful experiments failed to measure any of its predicted effects.

56851 down deep

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath … Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?”

56836 vişeu de sus

A former logging train in the Carpathian Mountains of northern Romania now takes tourists up from the station at Vişeu de Sus on a forty-five minute joy ride deep into the mountain valley. This minimally adjusted field recording is an abridgement of the experience.

56831 ocean of steel

Beneath us in the city, where stunted columns cradle a blackened sky, lies a strange forest of bird calls, an inferno of clanking struts and pistons, sucking and exhaling the taint of ancient dust and smoke with the feverish march of clockwork, a surging ocean of steel.

56831 ocean of steel

Beneath us in the city, where stunted columns cradle a blackened sky, lies a strange forest of bird calls, an inferno of clanking struts and pistons, sucking and exhaling the taint of ancient dust and smoke with the feverish march of clockwork, a surging ocean of steel.

56831 ocean of steel

Beneath us in the city, where stunted columns cradle a blackened sky, lies a strange forest of bird calls, an inferno of clanking struts and pistons, sucking and exhaling the taint of ancient dust and smoke with the feverish march of clockwork, a surging ocean of steel.

56823 forest light

1 Insects in the forests of Bohemia flutter and twirl in pine scented columns of air heavy with the summer heat. 2 The morning sun pirouettes with autumn trees as our car follows the winding mountain road on the way up to Mt. Ai-Petri in Crimea.

56823 forest light

1 Insects in the forests of Bohemia flutter and twirl in pine scented columns of air heavy with the summer heat. 2 The morning sun pirouettes with autumn trees as our car follows the winding mountain road on the way up to Mt. Ai-Petri in Crimea.

56823 forest light

1 Insects in the forests of Bohemia flutter and twirl in pine scented columns of air heavy with the summer heat. 2 The morning sun pirouettes with autumn trees as our car follows the winding mountain road on the way up to Mt. Ai-Petri in Crimea.

56809 forecast

I stand alone in a late afternoon, heavy in stillness and threat, a wary eye on the gray shroud drawing close overhead, heeding also to the electric frissons of a shuddering sky that ripples and shimmers across the broad river valley. The forecast is rain.

56789 consequently

If we allow ourselves the luxury, we may find ways to make sense of a collection of unapologetically various sources, in such a way as to form a coherent and consequent whole, in spite of the best efforts of what we may think of as our common sense.

56789 consequently

If we allow ourselves the luxury, we may find ways to make sense of a collection of unapologetically various sources, in such a way as to form a coherent and consequent whole, in spite of the best efforts of what we may think of as our common sense.

56760 isle of calm

Although known to many solely as a holiday destination, the island in the western Mediterranean known as Mallorca reveals another dimension in winter, and when the sun-seekers and merry-makers recede, its other profiles step forward.

56757 freight train

This is an untouched recording of a freight train passing through an Iowa town in the mid afternoon of an early spring day. If you stick it out to the end, you will hear the three distant blasts of its horn as it makes the next grade level crossing.

56751 bazaar

We order our tea and consider the journey we have undertaken, to this far side of the world, this most landlocked of places, the fabled Fergana Valley. Here, the foreigner is always watched and cannot rely on the crowd for anonymity. Eyes follow us everywhere, sometimes wary, sometimes curious or bemused, perhaps wondering why we have come, of all places, to this corner of the globe.. …

56751 bazaar

We order our tea and consider the journey we have undertaken, to this far side of the world, this most landlocked of places, the fabled Fergana Valley. Here, the foreigner is always watched and cannot rely on the crowd for anonymity. Eyes follow us everywhere, sometimes wary, sometimes curious or bemused, perhaps wondering why we have come, of all places, to this corner of the globe.. …

56733 almost forgotten

Are you lost? No. I used to live here. But you can get lost in the most familiar of places. Yes. A memory? From many years ago. You never forget it, even if you've only heard it once. What could be more simple when someone is lost in the dark, guided by memories?

56708 solaris

At dawn, the clouds flash an angry pink, like eosine, until their inflamed passions are shamed by a hot rising sun, withering away to the frailest wisps of rose and mauve, in turn finally sapped to depletion by the sea’s breath. For the rest of the day, the sun rules. …

56700 in the twilight

“The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it.”

56690 world of stone

“Run away! Today! Or tomorrow. But tomorrow might already be too late! Because what do people become around here? They just burn out like this old mountain that was once a volcano. And they will all be left with hearts of stone in the end. Hard stones. Cold stones. This is such a dead world!”

56690 world of stone

“Run away! Today! Or tomorrow. But tomorrow might already be too late! Because what do people become around here? They just burn out like this old mountain that was once a volcano. And they will all be left with hearts of stone in the end. Hard stones. Cold stones. This is such a dead world!”

56686 winter bridge

A young couple made the traditional wish (throwing a coin in the river) at the spot where Jan Nepomucký, on 20 March 1393, was thrown into the water, his tongue cut out, for having angered King Wenceslas. What do they wish for? Long life? Eternal love? …

56658 beginning

Beneath autumn stars, overlooking the valley that embraces the Tatar city of Bakhchysarai, we watch the pinkening sky as we hear an early morning chorus of dogs, the slight whoosh of a solitary vehicle, the crowing of restless cocks, and a call to god.

56654 khersones

On a hook of land jutting into the Black Sea, amid the ruins of ancient Greek Chersonesos, supposedly lies the birthplace of Russian Christianity. There we find the recently rebuilt neo-byzantine Cathedral of St. Vladimir, and inside it, a nun who half-whispers, half-chants, her supplication.

56651 evening falls in holešovice

“Do you hear that?” asked the caretaker when I moved in. I was forced to admit that I hadn’t. “Exactly my point! It’s quiet as a tomb here, and that’s how we like to keep it.” …

56651 evening falls in holešovice

“Do you hear that?” asked the caretaker when I moved in. I was forced to admit that I hadn’t. “Exactly my point! It’s quiet as a tomb here, and that’s how we like to keep it.” …

56633 put out the light

Playing the role of the familiar Venetian Moor, a recording of Orson Welles’ interpretation of these four words, stripped of all context, are suggestive enough, without even bringing up other salient themes such as the darkness that enshrouds the vengeful, or the fragility of life itself.

56630 a crimea in impressions

Why is the sea here called black? The Turkish language uses the words white and black to signal the ideas of greater and lesser. Thus, when there are two of anything needing naming, seas, for example, we get a White Sea … and a Black Sea. …

56630 a crimea in impressions

Why is the sea here called black? The Turkish language uses the words white and black to signal the ideas of greater and lesser. Thus, when there are two of anything needing naming, seas, for example, we get a White Sea … and a Black Sea. …

56606 sound lens

Situated in a tight spot between railroad tracks and a cliff face, the Cave Monastery of St. Clement at Inkerman, in the Crimea, occupies an unusual sound environment. The concave rock overhang acts as a sound lens, focusing in a small area the acoustic energy emanating from the large scale industrial activities just across the tracks.

56580 atomic montage

Motion is not the primary truth represented in a collection of frames, but rather change. Motion is only a subset of all forms of visible change.
A frame by itself can either break continuity or reinforce it. It cannot be neutral. …

56565 lost identity

“The man who had lost his identity card remained silent and thoughtful for a few minutes, then said, ‘I have troubled you. Still, if it’s no problem, could you please look around and find me an identity card of someone who has died? Is that possible?’”

56550 maramureş

A summertime journey into the northern marches of Romania where it joins Ukraine yielded a number of rustic experiences. Come along amid the dawn insects, barking dogs, rattling mountain funiculars, bell-bedecked goats, crowing cocks, singing women — and more besides.

56530 concrete music

Workmen in a neighboring enclosed courtyard mix cement, haul sand, dig holes, and also use an unidentifiable piece of equipment that regularly emits a series of three percussive notes in the course of its operation. This is what I made of that.

56499 nine minutes

Waiting was not a problem. He was well-versed in that art. The uncertainty was no more so. He had always lived tentatively, saying, “Everything we know is provisional.” He knew what he meant by that, even if few others did.

56480 like clockwork

“So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?”

56480 like clockwork

“So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going?”

56452 the millions

The throngs. The multitudes. The crowds. The masses. A host, a horde, a mob, a swarm; in numbers, scores, droves and waves. In 1944, the orchestra tunes up as Toscanini prepares to conduct Verdi’s “The Hymn of the Nations,” with other sounds added.

56440 chufut-kale

If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.

56440 chufut-kale

If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.

56440 chufut-kale

If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.

56440 chufut-kale

If you take the elektrichka from Sevastopol going NW, after 50km you will come to the town of Bakhchysarai from which, take a marshrutka past the Tatar Khan’s palace and mosque, all the way up to the Uspenskiy cave monastery. Then, proceeding on foot, after a 2km hike into the dusty countryside, you will at last arrive at the ancient cave city of Çufut Qale.

56428 density

Water, the scientists tell us, reaches its maximum density before it freezes, at 3.98° centigrade. This is why, they tell us, ice floats. Now the question before us is, perhaps, why does one sound seem to float easily above another?

56414 colossus of air

“The custom-built, 50-ton blower was situated in an adjacent chamber, separated from the waiting area by a long corridor. The Æolor blower was 21 feet high, 16 feet long, and 13 feet wide, and it contained two colossal lengthwise paddles which rotated to draw air in one side and out the other.”

56390 a beacon

“My God,” thought the Commander, peering into the heaving black chaos, “Where am I? Who am I?” He waited for the beacon’s beam to seep through the fog, still unable to work out why, the entire day of their departure, he had been dogged by anxiety.

56390 a beacon

“My God,” thought the Commander, peering into the heaving black chaos, “Where am I? Who am I?” He waited for the beacon’s beam to seep through the fog, still unable to work out why, the entire day of their departure, he had been dogged by anxiety.

56390 a beacon

“My God,” thought the Commander, peering into the heaving black chaos, “Where am I? Who am I?” He waited for the beacon’s beam to seep through the fog, still unable to work out why, the entire day of their departure, he had been dogged by anxiety.

56369 shymkent-almaty

Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the pastoral landscape of southern Kazakhstan between Shymkent and Almaty quickly passes and slowly darkens as evening falls.

56356 inner circle

56356 inner circle

56341 aerograd

Fascinated by the richness of the sounds that accompany images of flight in war movies made in the U.S.S.R., particularly the Bojevoj Kinosbornik series, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1935 Aerograd, I pieced together an atmosphere based on exemplary fragments.

56341 aerograd

Fascinated by the richness of the sounds that accompany images of flight in war movies made in the U.S.S.R., particularly the Bojevoj Kinosbornik series, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1935 Aerograd, I pieced together an atmosphere based on exemplary fragments.

56341 aerograd

Fascinated by the richness of the sounds that accompany images of flight in war movies made in the U.S.S.R., particularly the Bojevoj Kinosbornik series, and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s 1935 Aerograd, I pieced together an atmosphere based on exemplary fragments.

56333 observance

1 Spontaneously, travellers in Medzhybizh recall a song from the film Austeria (The Inn). 2 The midrash in Uman containing the tomb of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov. 3 In Trieste, a man prays as a woman mops the floor at the Cattedrale di San Giusto. 4 Morning services and bells at Odessa’s Cathedral of the Transfiguration.

56306 impulse

Although clear on visual inspection that the wave form is rich in undulations, on playback, our source file here confers only silence. So variants of it were made, lowering it by two, three, four, and six octaves. Here they are as a chorus, together with a few added sound effects.

56306 impulse

Although clear on visual inspection that the wave form is rich in undulations, on playback, our source file here confers only silence. So variants of it were made, lowering it by two, three, four, and six octaves. Here they are as a chorus, together with a few added sound effects.

56306 impulse

Although clear on visual inspection that the wave form is rich in undulations, on playback, our source file here confers only silence. So variants of it were made, lowering it by two, three, four, and six octaves. Here they are as a chorus, together with a few added sound effects.

56294 blesk a hrom

The Czech words for “lightning and thunder” aptly characterize the outdoor city-wide sound environment replayed in Prague every year at Silvestr — or New Year’s Eve. Here is a recording, beginning just at midnight, of what it sounded like most recently.

56275 dividing line

The borderland between countries can create an odd feeling as one passes through a place where bureaucracy and armed guards interrupt the free sensation of moving down the road. Psychologically, we may feel the need to steel ourselves for the leap from the familiar into the unknown.

56232 distant land

The foreboding was heavy as the struggling train juddered and screed on the tortured rails, first this side of the mountain stream, then that, being forced at intervals to cross on worrisome bridges. A wan gibbous moon floated in the mist, deftly evading the black graspless arms of trees. When they finally reached the city, the Carpathian night was already deep.

56228 black sea

The Black Sea near the port of Odessa as seen from the deck of a passenger boat, brought together here with incidental sounds and music by Sergei Pototsky from the score of the 1936 film By the Bluest of Seas, mentioned here before.

56222 disembarking

The passenger docks at Odessa, sitting more or less at the foot of the famous Potemkin Stairs, toasts gently in the October sun; the salty breeze, the churning waters; the press of fellow passengers eager to disembark; the rusty creak of boats and dock equipment; are now nothing but a memory, feebly rekindled in these documents.

56222 disembarking

The passenger docks at Odessa, sitting more or less at the foot of the famous Potemkin Stairs, toasts gently in the October sun; the salty breeze, the churning waters; the press of fellow passengers eager to disembark; the rusty creak of boats and dock equipment; are now nothing but a memory, feebly rekindled in these documents.

56211 fundament

Sounds from the basement. Amid the out-of-sight out-of-mind, the 60Hz hum of a fluorescent tube is convoluted with a souvenir bell and a ukelin (apparently the unholy offspring of a ukelele and a violin). A scratchy old cylinder recording rounds out this set.

56211 fundament

Sounds from the basement. Amid the out-of-sight out-of-mind, the 60Hz hum of a fluorescent tube is convoluted with a souvenir bell and a ukelin (apparently the unholy offspring of a ukelele and a violin). A scratchy old cylinder recording rounds out this set.

56211 fundament

Sounds from the basement. Amid the out-of-sight out-of-mind, the 60Hz hum of a fluorescent tube is convoluted with a souvenir bell and a ukelin (apparently the unholy offspring of a ukelele and a violin). A scratchy old cylinder recording rounds out this set.

56200 the other side

Nasreddin is seated on the bank of a river, lost in thought. A man is scurrying along the opposite bank, apparently searching. He comes to a point across from Nasreddin and calls out, ‘How do I get to the other side?’ Nasreddin, his train of thought broken, snaps, ‘But you are on the other side.’

56195 budapest keleti

From a certain perspective, the cavernous, acoustically lively interior of Budapest’s classical eastern train station can be experienced as a place of contemplation, provided one can find a relatively isolated spot from where to listen.

56195 budapest keleti

From a certain perspective, the cavernous, acoustically lively interior of Budapest’s classical eastern train station can be experienced as a place of contemplation, provided one can find a relatively isolated spot from where to listen.

56108 machine age

Our present entr’acte begins with single-perf light-struck roll-ends on optical sound, quickly overtaken by steel scraping against wood, as if gnashing. Along with a mimeograph, party horns, mumbling men and a string in E, the question comes to mind, ‘What is modernity?’

56108 machine age

Our present entr’acte begins with single-perf light-struck roll-ends on optical sound, quickly overtaken by steel scraping against wood, as if gnashing. Along with a mimeograph, party horns, mumbling men and a string in E, the question comes to mind, ‘What is modernity?’

56088 morocco

1 Calling out departures at the bus station in Ouarzazate. 2 A musical group performs on the Place el-Hadim in Meknes. 3 Late afternoon, birds and muezzin at the Saadian Tombs, Marrakech. 4 Night falls on Bagdadi Square in Fez, as most people are heading for home.

56072 falling light

Oddly, when you take a perfectly ordinary suspense strain from an unremarkable Hollywood police thriller, and give it the old granular synthesis treatment, something almost Gothic emerges. At least, that’s what I think.

56072 falling light

Oddly, when you take a perfectly ordinary suspense strain from an unremarkable Hollywood police thriller, and give it the old granular synthesis treatment, something almost Gothic emerges. At least, that’s what I think.

56072 falling light

Oddly, when you take a perfectly ordinary suspense strain from an unremarkable Hollywood police thriller, and give it the old granular synthesis treatment, something almost Gothic emerges. At least, that’s what I think.

56066 interlude

A simple assemblage of sound passages from a selection of mid-century movies, evoking an eventless space where only time passes. A close inspection of moments approximately intended to come forward once, then dissolve quickly into the past.

56066 interlude

A simple assemblage of sound passages from a selection of mid-century movies, evoking an eventless space where only time passes. A close inspection of moments approximately intended to come forward once, then dissolve quickly into the past.

56040 vacuum

We find that the Jovian planets emit a kind of energy that can be converted to sound, affording these alien impulses a perceptible mien for us humans. So if the vacuum of space is, as is said, abhorrent to nature, then it at least leaves plenty of room for the imagination to fill.

56020 pendulum

Swinging to and fro in the Église Saint-Martin-des-Champs, adjoined to the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, is the famous pendulum of Foucault, placidly marking the rotation of the earth. Or rather, a restoration of the famous experiment, the original cable having snapped in 2010.

56020 pendulum

Swinging to and fro in the Église Saint-Martin-des-Champs, adjoined to the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, is the famous pendulum of Foucault, placidly marking the rotation of the earth. Or rather, a restoration of the famous experiment, the original cable having snapped in 2010.

56000 ostinato

With a new thousand-day cycle beginning, we present a short movie of a movie projector in a repeating cycle, or loop, with each iteration slipping in time by a frame at a time for one color channel, and two frames for the next, until the cycle completes and the colors are once again in synch.

55986 bissextile

An intercalary day comes only once in four years (slightly less, in fact) so it is a worthy thing to mark it with a new filecast. To accomplish this, we mark time with a beat and set noise in the background. Later, a woman reads a list of numbers, which a man acknowledges — for no apparent reason.

55969 deleted scene

It turns out that even silent films transferred to video tape in fact have a soundtrack — there is at least tape hiss, always present in any case. Here, the telecine’s sound output was patched thru to record during such a transfer, the result being an unintended sound passage, put to use here as the backdrop for a few more intentional added musical incidents.

55952 transported

Three weeks of travel in Morocco left many impressions, among them the bleared memory of the days-long effort of getting from here to there. Air, rail, and road are sketched here in field recordings, with incidental human sounds freely intruding.

55928 horloge

The famous astronomical clock in the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Lyon is our subject. The incidental sounds of a tour group milling about the nave go on until the four-minute mark, when the horloge begins its labors, as it does just four times a day. A few minutes later, we proceed outside to the square just as the bell tower heralds four o’clock.

55905 dresden station

Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the urban space around the Dresden Hauptbahnhof slips by as the afternoon train departs for Prague.

55905 dresden station

Captured in a series of fleeting glimpses, the urban space around the Dresden Hauptbahnhof slips by as the afternoon train departs for Prague.

55892 soprianoforte

A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.

55892 soprianoforte

A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.

55892 soprianoforte

A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.

55892 soprianoforte

A hapless soprano and the nether strings of a pianoforte, selected for their natural positions at opposite ends of the sound spectrum, are set in motion just to see what happens. The tension is relieved by the occasional rattle of a cowbell.

55886 notes from laos

Audio notes, sound snapshots, and sonic impressions made while travelling in Laos at the end of the rainy season. Locations include several wats in Vientiane, a guest house in Savannaket, and the road along the banks of the Mekong River.

55849 seven times

Three sources, one repeated seven times: 1 Modulated brown, white, and pink noise with aggressive equalization. 2 Fragmentary output from a SuperCollider session, complete with file corruption. 3 A marginal Skype connection throwing errors (deleted).

55843 lugubrious

The tolling of a large, sad bell is emulated by passing a sampled electric guitar through a series of filters, so that the elicited alter-ego of a normally ebullient sound breaks like mourning.

55843 lugubrious

The tolling of a large, sad bell is emulated by passing a sampled electric guitar through a series of filters, so that the elicited alter-ego of a normally ebullient sound breaks like mourning.

55821 light on water

An atmosphere based on sounds taken from the film By the Bluest of Seas (dir. Boris Barnet), filmed in 1936 on an island in the Caspian Sea. We attempt, and inevitably fail, to capture some of that film’s unclassifiable sensibility.

55821 light on water

An atmosphere based on sounds taken from the film By the Bluest of Seas (dir. Boris Barnet), filmed in 1936 on an island in the Caspian Sea. We attempt, and inevitably fail, to capture some of that film’s unclassifiable sensibility.

55791 crossing

An invention for three sources, where each part was laid into a timeline carelessly at first, and then over many iterations, gradually moved here and there, until something like a composition came slowly into focus. Digital error noise was left in; that’s the machines talking in their own language.

55791 crossing

An invention for three sources, where each part was laid into a timeline carelessly at first, and then over many iterations, gradually moved here and there, until something like a composition came slowly into focus. Digital error noise was left in; that’s the machines talking in their own language.

55763 rumble ping

The title is merely suggestive: Here are recordings of contrasting spaces that are filtered through the mind’s ear, and, in this brute juxtaposition, found to be congruent. We use sound from a train compartment in Germany, the beach in Barcelona, and a street in Seville.

55749 recognition

“The state in which simultaneously we see a thing, react to it and read it as a letter casts us into an unimaginable, yet real space, in which it is not clear whether seeing, reacting and reading are parts of a single primary action or it is their incompatibility that has set the dizzying vortex in motion.”

55730 addendum

In which we continue to explore a simple technique developed for the portfolio of collages known here as north, and find that it yields further results: a collection of additional images in the same vein.

55719 hungry

A transfer of a much-screened print of Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain, which was based on Pavlov’s pioneering work on animal reflexes, has fallen into my hands. The most interesting textures and moments have been collected here, with color and sound liberally applied.

55719 hungry

A transfer of a much-screened print of Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain, which was based on Pavlov’s pioneering work on animal reflexes, has fallen into my hands. The most interesting textures and moments have been collected here, with color and sound liberally applied.

55699 passing wave

A chaotic, dissonant strain derived from an arbitrarily chosen segment of found sound, which has been divided into various tonal strands and then layered, slowly finds its center of gravity as it drifts toward consonance.

55699 passing wave

A chaotic, dissonant strain derived from an arbitrarily chosen segment of found sound, which has been divided into various tonal strands and then layered, slowly finds its center of gravity as it drifts toward consonance.

55644 snow

When seen from below in full daylight on an overcast day, snow’s bright fortune is reversed: instead of being white, pure, and clean, a trick of perspective and light turns it black, heavy, and maybe a bit menacing. (The video is silent.)

55620 on target

An orchestral strain from a 1950s suspense picture is time stretched, so that the darker sounds hidden within are artificially emphasized. And the tension of the dramatic moment is stretched out as well, perhaps to its breaking point.

55612 on a wire

The sound of heavy construction machinery in a large, resonant enclosed courtyard, with piano accompaniment trickling in from a next-door neighbor’s open window. And so we find yet again that the daily life in the city is its own readymade collage.

55579 running as rain

A handful of fleeting sound accents is culled mostly from almost forgotten ‘golden age’ Hollywood films, and then reshaped into alarming ambiences that echo at least some of their original meanings – and perhaps take on new ones.

55572 dune du pyla

At the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by Les Landes de Gascogne, on the eastern flank of the mouth of the Bassin d’Arcachon,
I stand atop the largest sand dune in Europe.

55515 locomotive

Yet another train ride, this one owing more to the imagination and subjectivity than its sources, which consist of field recordings of steam locomotives. Together with video, this sound work is part of the series of video works that we call 55505 pareidolia.

55505 pareidolia

This is a long-form motion picture compiled from the following filecasts: edge case, locomotive, ekh dorogi, and forty. In more or less this form, it has been screened a handful of times in scattered cities across Europe and North America.

55473 choral scratch

Heavy-duty manipulation. The stylus cuts the soft wax once; traveled over many times, the trough becomes brittle and details are, bit by bit, scraped away. The scratchy reminder of an angelic chorus is revived in 384 tracks spread across the pan, and smeared thru time.

55430 andijon

The sound of a detuned shortwave radio during a thunderstorm provides an apt backdrop for a poorly encoded recording of the Uzbek musician Sherali Jo’raev found on an Uzbek-language music sharing forum. Apparently, he sings of the Farg’ona Valley city of Andijon.

55396 remember