REVIEW: CATHY LANE & ANGUS CARLYLE, IN THE FIELD: THE ART OF FIELD RECORDING

"For several reasons I have a rather ambivalent relation towards field recordings. This ambivalence is not necessarily annoying, disturbing, or irritating; it is simply that I am often puzzled, confused, and full of questions after having listened to field recordings. One of these questions that regularly arises is: To what have I actually listened? Let’s say that on one side of the spectrum I could consider those recordings as something like sonic documentaries, introducing me to unknown, lost, or past soundscapes; on the other side, I do not attempt to situate or identify the sounds, but perceive the recordings with a more or less purely aesthetic attitude. Or, to reformulate this, the former raises questions about the representational value, including ideas about “sonic journalism” or “docu-music” as Peter Cusack calls it, whereas the latter is inviting me, first of all, to attentive listening, to perceiving, without too much reflecting, the richness of the sounds, their individual layers as well as the complexity of their potential relations and combinations, close to Pierre Schaeffer’s acousmatic listening. Choosing between, let’s put it boldly, the rational and the aesthetic or between “truth” and “beauty,” is often codetermined by the additional information accompanying the recordings: abstract or no titles usually seem to demand a listener who is primarily interested in “the sounds themselves”; Conversely, lots of information on the exact time and space of the recorded sounds gives me the idea that the “composer” (also) wants to share knowledge and give a concrete impression of a particular sonic environment."
http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol06/nr01/a09

The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE)

http://wfae.proscenia.net/


The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), founded in 1993, is an international association of affiliated organizations and individuals in Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia that share a common concern with the state of the world's soundscapes. WFAE members represent a multi-disciplinary spectrum of individuals engaged in the study of the social, cultural and ecological aspects of the sonic environment.

WFAE'S Mission:

WFAE works in collaboration with its world-wide network of Affiliated Organizations to promote:

Education - in listening to the soundscape, sharpening aural awareness and deepening listeners' understanding of environmental sounds and their meanings

Research and Study - of the social, cultural, scientific and ecological aspects of the sonic environment

Publishing and Distributing of information and research on Acoustic Ecology.

Protecting and Preserving existing natural soundscapes and times and places of quiet.

Designing and Creating healthy and acoustically balanced sonic environments.

Ernst Karel - Location Recording

http://ek.klingt.org/

Helen Mirra and Ernst Karel’s quadraphonic sound installation Hourly directional sound recording, Mata Atlântica, Brazil (2012) is composed of location recordings made during eleven days of walking in remnants of coastal rainforests in southeastern Brazil.

For a number of years, Mirra has been walking in different parts of the world as a means of generating works. Often the materialized aspect has been a kind of paced printmaking or terse field notes made at intervals over the course of the day, and in some cases, in collaboration with Karel, hourly location recordings. These works are nestled into a cycle of exhibitions that perpetuates the ongoing project.

For Hourly directional sound recording, Mata Atlântica, Brazil, Mirra and Karel stopped once each hour, using a compass to locate magnetic north. With microphones held at the ends of outstretched arms, they made two sequential one-minute two-channel recordings, the first with arms out to north and south, and the second towards east and west. At a distance from the microphones that increases each hour, the sound of a triangle, rung with a wooden mallet, indicates the direction of the path at that moment. The triangle sounds for one second in the first hour, two seconds in the second hour, three in the third, and so on, and at the start of the minute in the first hour, after seven seconds in the second hour, after fourteen in the third, and so on. These two-channel recordings were then paired for quadraphonic playback.
http://listart.mit.edu/node/1077#.Ut01pPYwe2y


Swiss Mountain Transport Systems
Swiss Mountain Transport Systems was released on CD by Gruenrekorder on 1 September 2011. The album consists of location recordings made during the summer and fall of 2008 of the various transport systems which are specific to mountainous terrain -- gondolas (aerial cable cars), funiculars, and chairlifts -- of different types, of different vintages, and accessing different elevations, in different parts of Switzerland. In this way the album is a sonic investigation of the integration of such technology into the Swiss social-geographical landscape. Recorded from within mostly enclosed mobile environments, this emergent music includes quasi-harmonic mechanical drones, intermittent irregular percussiveness, and transient acoustic glimpses of a vast surrounding landscape inhabited by humans and other animals. 


Video, short doc:
http://www.silenceopensdoors.com/2010/04/21/new-england-phonographers-union-micd-3/


Ernst Karel's multidimensional audio work includes electroacoustic improvisation and composition, location recording, sound for nonfiction vilm, and solo and collaborative sound installations. Using analog electronics and location recordings, either separately or in combination, Karel creates audio pieces that move between the abstract and the documentary. Previous work has involved fieldwork-based research in the anthropology of sound, live engineering for Chicago Public Radio, other audio engineering, CD mastering, etc.


Interview by Max Goldberg in Moving Image Source, February 2013
Interview by Mark Peter Wright in Ear Room: Exploring sound in artistic practice, February 2013
Feature in The Wire #344, October 2012
Material world: Ernst Karel sorts through the sounds of recycling
Feature in Pitchfork's The Out Door, October 2011
Turning the World Into Art: The world of field recordings with Chris Watson, Ernst Karel, and Art Rosenbaum

David Grubbs on 1960s recordings

Quelle: The Wire, January 2014, Collateral Damage: David Grubbs on 1960s recordings, http://thewire.co.uk/in-writing/collateral-damage-28138/collateral-damage_david-grubbs-on-1960s-recordings

Newly released recordings of experimental music from the 1960s say more about our own time than the moment of their creation, argues David Grubbs. 

[...] When encountering this music in the form of new releases of archival recordings, we are and we aren’t listening to experimental practices from the 1960s. Access to previously unavailable recordings makes for a listening experience that’s often unrecognisable to the originators of such activities. With archival recordings, it’s not only a matter of being outside of the time of its creation (the joint is out of time); older recordings – accessed now, resuscitated now – actively participate in our present moment. [...]

The Noisy Reef

"The noisy reef takes us under the waves to the reefs of New Zealand to explore sound and noise under water. Using this unique habitat, we look at what sound is, how it travels, what changes under water and how animals use sound in their world."

http://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/Contexts/The-Noisy-Reef/NZ-Research/The-Noisy-Reef