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Re: [microsound] the landscape(s) of microsound



pelagius pelagius wrote:
> It's like I had to
completely relearn how to find creative energy in my environment. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you mean though.

Yeah, that's part of it. I'm also interested in specific work about specific place. I'm thinking of j.frede's work with the desert windmills, or some of the things Trace was curating in the A:D:A:P:T Festival: "music and media for ruins." Gregory's post about how the digital influences the experience of audial space was very interesting, and made me think about it in ways I hadn't thought of.


My own work is about a walk I take to work each day (variations of which I've walked for the past fifteen years), and so I'm always going back and forth between the artifactual residue of digital sound in some of my compositions and the very real, haptic experience of the sound of my local neighborhoods in the morning. I want to be aware of everything around me, the palimpsest of inhabited space/place (Debord's derive and Chtcheglov's urban ghosts, the flaneur), and the de-romanticized idea of watershed (Gary Snyder's meditations on watershed aesthetics). For me, subatomic physics, particularly string theory, serves as an inspiring metaphor for river ecology and rain cycle and other macro systems. The micro of microsound meets the macro of analog field recordings, and the hybrid is something different altogether.

So, place not only influences and inspires my work, it IS my work (Richard Long being a huge influence, and, to a far lesser degree, Hamish Fulton). (And of course Solnit's book on walking, Lippard's Lure of the Local, Buell's treatment of ecocriticism and bioregionalism, Thoreau, Whitman, Olson's Maximus Poems, Williams' Paterson, Eliot, etc.)

G.


P.S. Thanks to Tobias for the link to the .walk thing--will check it out.

P.P.S. Congratulations, Phil, on the article! It's a very well-written piece, and I hope all microsounders can get a chance to read it.


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