A Shipwreck in an Underwater Storm

Barn Woodwind Iron; Strong gusts pull at the roof of a big wooden barn. Doors bang in rhyme. A violin and a saw in a grain silo follow and sticks thrum responses on anything that will make a noise before all is returned again to the wind.

PHANTOM

What befell Princess Nicotine (1906) during a Phone Call From a Stranger (1952).  sound collage. 2014

Kowloon Shopping

 Using two recordings, the first a modified music box playing an irregular and intermittent tune. The second a radio announcer reading shipping weather for the areas around England and Ireland. Both imported as samples in Absynthe, in two oscillators which modulate the sounds with envelopes and various start points producing complex and largely unpredictable results when played with a keyboard. The rhythmic piston of tape hiss accompanies the music box and the hesitating weather announcer reminds me of being half asleep in an airport or shopping mall. 

 Subconscious

Made with, among other things, optical sound fragments from the footage contained in Conscious (1995), this sound collage begins with a few moments recorded in the elevator at Stephen’s Green Shopping Center, Dublin, Ireland. It is an unusual voice which adds a little melancholy to the business of going down and doesn’t make going up feel much better, either. The fragmentary nature and the abrupt changes in the sounds are an artifact of the priority originally given to the image during editing of the footage.  An additional element of chance occurs because of the displacement of the sound in relation to it’s corresponding image on the film ribbon itself, a normal technical aspect of a composite (picture with sound) printing process.

 Alabaster Alibi

A live translation of a statement issued by Berlusconi’s govt following an attack on him in Rome, 2009. The bureaucratic text, dryly delivered and devoid of intonation is transformed through the immediacy of the live translation, unintentionally invested with a more expressiveness. Perhaps it is the suppressed amusement of the translator at the projectile being identified as an “alabaster model of the Cathedral of Milan”, it being potently symbolic in it’s guise of cathedral-as-brick.

The pauses are as they were spoken. The piece begins with a recording of a vintage Viewmaster device playing a miniature record narrating the lovely 3-D pictures of predatory fish. The grind of the playback mechanism is a driving rhythm which, in time gives way to stretched, filtered looping samples, layered and foamed in an endlessly unfolding conclusion.

 

A long, drifting meditative sound

Colorado Field

Environmental sounds recorded in foothills of the Rockies, CO. Frogs gasping and insects whirring in the less populated 2nd half. (gently cross your eyes merging left and right image)