isomer.nula.cc

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. …