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[microsound] the landscape(s) of microsound



I have a question for the group. How many of you practitioners are influenced or inspired by a sense of place in making your work? By place I mean a specific geographical location (the city or town in which you live or were born, or visited), a dialogue between general and specific space (desert ecology vs. Joshua Tree, CA), or a sense of the vernacular landscape (apartment buildings, public plazas, billboards, freeway overpasses, storefront signage, etc.)?

The timbre and structure of microsound and its related tributaries generally suggest an abstract non-place (no there, there) or interstitial subatomic realm, as opposed to, say, phonography and field recordings, which are sonic snapshots of specific analog locales and which can also stand for a "type" of landscape (barking dogs recorded in rural Kansas, for instance, may also suggest a similar sound experience in a suburb in New Jersey). (Apologies for the U.S.-specific references!)

(As an example, one of microsound's predecessors, Detroit Techno, has been interpreted as reflecting in some ways the stark and industrial landscape from which it emerged. Does this carry through to its evolutionary/devolutionary strains? Tobias?)

Is this something that you think about--your work being grounded in the place it was made? Or is the "utopia" of the internet and its absence of material geography (although signals are filtered through servers and routers that sit in air-conditioned rooms that exist SOMEWHERE) a model for a disembodied aesthetic? A combination of the two? Neither? Other?

G.


Kim Cascone wrote:
have all the microsound philosophers been driven off the list
due to the noise?


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