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Karosta Project: new field recordings posted



Dear [microsounders],

The Karosta Project is a one month residency by artists Sara Kolster and myself
in the former Soviet warport of Karosta, Latvia. The project centers around
audio and video explorations of locations, objects and buildings found here.
Field recording, video, animation, cartographic and electroacoustic techniques
will all be employed to create a new image of this very unique place. 

I have just posted some new field recordings tonight, and I would be happy to
have you all as guests. Drop by any time!

Best,
Derek

http://karosta.edworks.net

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from Karosta Project: Day 13

Day Thirteen: In The Zone

Updates to the site become a bit less frequent, but our explorations increase.
Latvian winters can be archetypal in their elemental power, and in the past
several days we have been exposed to wind, snow, rain and ice. All of these
elements carry their own distinctive acoustic signatures, and I have been
struggling to keep up with the amazing array of sounds each new day presents.

Equally amazing are the buildings and structures which surround us. Today's
explorations took us to the heart of the "Kara Osta", or "War Harbor"--a place
more tangible than "The Zone" of Tarkovski's "Stalker", but just as surreal.
Liepaja was a major naval installation for the Soviet military, and its
western-most European port. Now, all stands in ruins: barracks, offices,
workrooms, libraries, docks, training grounds, swimming pools...all stand empty,
strewn with debris, ankle-deep with melting snow-water, sabotaged by departing
militaries or half-demolished by Latvian workmen. Walking through this place
which was the end-point of the Soviet war-machine [an industry which ran that
country's economy into the ground], I am reminded of the war fever of my own
former home country, the US. On the verge of economic disaster at home, on the
verge of military atrocity abroad, I wonder if anyone there would find a lesson
in this place or not. What if, instead of finding old Soviet army songbooks,
painted slogans from Lenin, USSR rubles and scraps of 8mm propaganda films, we
found Big Mac wrappers, Pepsi cans, Magnavox televisions and People magazines?
Would the resonance of such a place--after the USA has gone the way of the USSR
and dissolved into a collage of economically unstable territories--still be the
same? I think so...

The single most astonishing structure left standing is the submarine tank.
Twenty meters or so wide, and easily over a hundred meters long, this concrete
tube was used to repair the Soviet submersible fleet, and to protect it from
aerial surveillance at the same time. Today it was windy, covered in snow,
filled with greenish ice and quite dangerous due to large holes in the slippery
walkway. In the summer, local children play there when not chased off by drunken
security guards. The acoustics inside are sublime. Spacious but resonant, unlike
any other building I have been in. Tomorrow I hope to capture some of this
atmosphere by introducing new sounds into it.

The field recordings I present today are some of my attempts to document the
Latvian winter, as well as to acoustically map the area. I am tagging all of my
recordings with GPS coordinates in the hopes that we can design an interface of
some kind that offers a new representation of the city. In the meantime, they
will live here, in this webjournal. The recordings of trees, bushes and grass
are all made with binaural contact microphones. The water sounds were recorded
with a stereo condensor mike. Reinterpretations from myself are forthcoming, and
reinterpretations from you are welcome.

---derek

AUDIO >   
tree.branches.in.wind [OGG 4min8sec 1.59Mb] N56*33.170' E021*00.533'
small.bush.rustling [OGG 3min9sec 1.61Mb] N56*33.095' E021.00.501'
small.bush.rustling.2 [OGG 1min4sec 787Kb] N56*33.095' E021.00.501'
tall.grass.rustling [OGG 2min36sec 2.18Mb] N56*32.760' E021*00.406'
rain.on.broken.bricks [OGG 2min39sec 1.63Mb] N56*32.840' E021*01.387'
baltic.ice.hole [OGG 4min43sec 3.03Mb] N56*33.187' E020*59.912'

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