Y’all Ain’t Going Nowhere
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A sound piece created for Marc Weidenbaum’s Disquiet Junto Project 0647: Day Drone.
Y’all Ain’t Going Nowhere
.
A sound piece created for Marc Weidenbaum’s Disquiet Junto Project 0647: Day Drone.
Thunder Over Manhattan
French Horn Sound Collage
Megaphone
Dante Drone 03: He Stuck Me A Spell
The longest (and potentially most annoying) Dante piece (but also the best one, I think.)
Scratch Piece No. 1
Lenny Bruce - Like A Pyramid
Dante: Drone 02
Another experiment with Vitorrio Gassman’s Dante readings. Still don’t know what he’s saying, but still like how he’s doing it. Particularly proud of the stuttering part, which I created in Garageband in a roundabout and probably very amateurish way.
Dante: Drone 01
A quarantine project that started when I wanted to hear examples of the terza rima form in the original italian (a language I do not speak). The voice belongs to Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, and is taken from a series of Dante readings he filmed for TV in the early ‘90s (via YouTube of course). I don’t know what he’s saying, but I like how it sounds.
Cat-Caused Chaos
The Last Waltz of the Wales
When I was growing up, we had two records that I assume came out of the early ‘70s environmental movement. The first was a collection of wolf howls narrated by Robert Redford (I’ll post some of those tracks in the near future). The other was called “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” and featured slowed-down recordings of the calls whales use to keep in touch with each other.
One bored evening, I decided to mix “Songs of the Humpback Whale” with The Band’s “Theme from The Last Waltz” and came up with this. I didn’t plan it out; I just put both recordings on and let them play. Sometimes the whales seem to be harmonizing with the music. Other times they sound like kids making fun of the way deaf people talk. The effect is oddly pretty and vaguely disturbing at the same time.
Pat-pitter-pat-pat-pat…
A lot of the recordings I’ve posted so far were made either for my audio journal or as a way of exercising my creative impulses. This next is a recording made exclusively for the sonic moment it captures.
I was first inspired to post these recordings by a website called Audible Frequency. Created by a young Chicago sound archivist named Alicia Frantz, Audible Frequency featured recordings of unusual ambient sounds: the hum of cars driving on a particular overpass or the mysterious clanking at a building site produced by some unseen machine. Frantz was by no means the first person to do this sort of thing, but I admired her ability to capture everyday sounds and to recognize them as being beautiful and interesting in their own right.
Sadly, Frantz was killed in a biking accident in the summer of 2005. I don’t have her ear, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity when it presented itself.
(Originally posted on Audiowaves on December 30, 2009)
A Very English Bird-watching Update
“Proudly we announce…a new young ornithologist club is opening at Fakenham. Radio Norfolk Birdman himself, Chris Durden, is going there to give them a flying start.” Any relation to Tyler, I wonder?
Derek B.—Britain’s answer to LL Cool J., I suppose. I remember seeing him open for Public Enemy at the UEA auditorium. At the end, Chuck D. called him out to do a free-style, but he just sang the first couple of lines of his one hit. You’ve heard of “in the mix?” Well, that was “in the wack.”
I like what it says about British radio at the time, that with a few twists of the dial I could go from a community announcement of a bird watching club to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin singing “Je T’aime (Me Non Plus).”
Love the static between stations. There was no Internet streaming at the time (effectively no Internet at all), so you had to fight a little to hear what you wanted.
Well, I’ll be going home now to have my dinner: chicken-in-his-juices and mussels in a seaman-like manner.
(Originally posted on the Audiowaves tumblr on October 29, 2009)
Takeoff (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
This clip is an edited version of the beginning of “England Tape, #1” – an audio journal I started in January of 1988, when I left for a six month stint at the University Of East Anglia, in Norwich. I used an old Walkman that my sister had had in college (she had trouble taking notes, so my father bought it for her to record her lectures). This Walkman was about eight years old at that point, but its built-in stereo microphone recorded spectacularly well (or so I thought at the time). There’s nothing sonically interesting about this bit—I include it more because of the social interaction it documents.
Clearly, I had no idea how to do a spoken journal (I probably still don’t), but I’m fascinated by my eagerness, particularly in the conversation with David. I didn’t know him very well at this point, though we became friends during those six months and kept in touch for a few years after. It’s a quiet conversation, and the setting feels somehow intimate (in fact it took place in a hallway). It’s a bit ridiculous how we’re trying to impress each other with our knowledge of “edgy” writers, especially as Borges, Marquez and Calvino were solidly ensconced in the canon by then. But there’s something so guile-less in our enthusiasm (note how I muff Borges’ name) that it gives me a warm feeling inside.
There’s a lot of newness here—the newness of being in England, staying in a stranger’s house; the newness of testing out a friendship imposed largely by circumstance; and the weirdness of being recorded—it added another layer of self-consciousness over an already self-conscious moment.
(Originally posted on the Audiowaves tumblr on October 28, 2009)
A Froggy Evening…
Another phonographic recording, also involving rain. This was captured at the farm of my friends Dimitri & Gregor, in upstate New York. My family needed a summer vacation, but had no money to spend, so they kindly lent us the place for a week or so. Unfortunately, it was the rainiest week the area had seen in years. Everything was muddy, the house was cold and the little pond on the property overflowed its banks and crept near the front porch.
At night, the frogs in and around the water erupted into a cacophony of croaks. According to Answers.com, many types of frogs will call out either before or after it rains. Nobody knows why.
I imagined they were having yelling conversations, like people calling out to each other after a disaster. “Jesus, did you see that rain today?” “How ya doing, Frankie, did you get washed out too?” “Mama, I’m over here!”
I heard something similar once in the country, after a storm swept through in the middle of the night. The sound of the rain on the roof woke me, and after it passed there was a moment or two of silence. Then the birds started loudly singing, hours before the sun was due to rise. I wish I had recorded that.
Photo: Michigan J. Frog. If you never seen the classic Warner Brothers short “One Froggy Evening,” it can be found here.
(Originally posted on the Audiowaves tumblr on January 1, 2011)