Joining us from Santa Cruz in California, Yolande Harris is a practice that wants to expand the notion of sonic experience through footage.

First Works 

Lighting entering my room

 It is a piece that silently showcases the light patterns produced by the shadows of trees. “The reason I’m showing this is because of sound. Sound is more than what it appears to be. It is related to many senses.” The piece was to be projected against two walls and was showcased at the Woodbury Art museum.

Walk in the Woods 

It’s a performance piece of people using projectors in a sound walk through the woods in Catalonia. “Our perception of the environment changes with the projected images.”

The Pink noise of pleasure yachts in the turquoise sea.

It was about the noise pollution underwater, compared to the sounds that could be heard on the surface. (Balearic Islands, Spain 2009).  

Taking soundings Nativating by Circles /Sextant

“I used GPS maps systems and converted them into sounds and images”. (House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2011)

SUN RUN SUN: SATELLITE SOUNDERS (schirn kinsthalle, franfurt 2009)

Group project: satellite and GPS data with a device developed in Amsterdam that converts it directly into sounds. As people walk through the city, the sound heard changes. “You feel like you’re surrounded by something that produces this sound.” 

Displaced Sound Walks (Contemporary Art Musem, Leipzig 2012)

“Listening is crucial while we walk through the environment”. Participants wore binaural microphones were used and took an aleatoric root of their choice for 5 minutes. After that, the participants would listen back to the recordings made. And lastly, do the same walk while listening to the previous recording. Yolande referred that some participants felt out of sync.

MISSISSIPI TORNADO (2012)

This piece regards the political border around the states of Arkansas and Mississippi in the USA, produced by the Mississippi River. Yolande recorded a strange sound for her at the time. She discovered these sounds were Tornado Alarms previously used as WWII bombing alarms. The field recording was beautiful and captured in Memphis. “the sounds sounded like they were floating through the space, but no. Thats hwo they actually sound”. 

Learning from Underwater Sound

• How can listening to underwater sounds transform our relationship with the environment? Underwater is a place that we can’t access without technology.

Swim 

It is a recorded experience of Yolande swimming in South England. “It’s interesting the rhythms produced by the swimmer”. 

Sailing

It is a documented experience of a non-propellor boat going against waves in a rough sea. “The feeling of motion in high sea is quite different from the terrestrial”. 

Listening to the distance: EAGLE (Seatle, Puget Sound, Washington, 2015) 

It consists of footage of two bald eagles; at the same time, we hear the sound of an underwater sound of sea glider – A hydrophone was placed in the glider; the footage was captured with layers of lenses, either binoculars and cameras, creating halos around figures and silhouettes.

Sound Whale walks

Whaling is a traditional industry that happens in Dundee, Scotland. With a Celtic wrapping technique, she broided many headphones with ropes (which also relate to the whaling industry because whale oil is needed). The sounds heard were produced by the whales hunted by the whalers inside the boat. There’s also a lot of booming of ice and crush. Yolande made a 30-minute piece with field recordings provided by a scholar.

Melt me into the ocean. (Santa Cruz, 2018) 

It’s about an underwater canyon, more significant than the grand canyon. She collabs with a scientific group that studies the migrating animal life in that canyon. For this, this team records sound with a powerful hydrophone. Yolande requested some of these recordings and then made a piece to be reproduced in sound walks through headphones next to the neighbour beach. She experimented in places such as Arizona, Nebraska, and San Francisco. The same headphones were made in Dundee and were later disconnected from the sight-specific location, which was Dundee. 

From a Whale’s back (Radius Gallery, Santa Cruz 2020)

Every whale is tagged. This tag has a camera. She used some recordings and made different pieces. Swimming through jellyfish, or a Pod of Orcas in Antarctica, Bubble net feeding, Minke Whales surface through the ice.

He started as a jazz and rock musician and later moved to contemporary music, such as free jazz. But he wasn’t great, so he moved to electroacoustic music and field recordings. But he was dissatisfied. “As much as I love music and the sonic experience you can’t get from gigs, I felt it wasnt enough, so i needed to explore this feeling more”. 

“The stuff that matters is the stuff that bothers you.”

The sound of empty space (2015)

Basanta shows a picture of a microphone pointing to a speaker. “There is something wrong in the picture”. He mentioned that there was a sense of circularity and tools and technology (as a spectrum) that could be argued. Over that image, he built an installation about it. “Sound installations is an encounter with sound and the artist, but it doesn’t mean it has sound on it”. 

Another work was a microphone rotating over speakers, creating an exciting resonance. “I had this idea of a music box ballerina”. As he mentions, the microphone feedbacks a melody that sounds quite blissful – melodies are taken from Tchaikovsky music. 

He states that building a physical composition was rather daunting, as he came from a context that didn’t allow him to do so. This exhibit was minimal, but it allowed him to move on and create more visual art – not sound art. This exhibition, which revolves around feedback, came out as an album (sold out), but it is still available on Bandcamp.

In this project, he also performed – Basanta used feedback amplification techniques that allowed him to play with raw textures of sound. The outcome is impressive – an atmospherical ever, changing piece that resonates with feelings of melancholy.

“Composing is very hard.”

Around the first quarantine, he composed for an orchestra. The notes in the piece are a transcript of one of his favourite songs.

“Listening through a small plastic box.”

A piece that revolves around the soundscape of an art gallery. It plays back the sound of a room and invites the listener to hear the amplified signals coming from outside the box. 

Using a procedural yet nonsensical amplification chain, a live stream of the gallery soundscape is sent into a clear acrylic box containing electronic amplification components and a single speaker cone. As the sound of the surrounding room is amplified within the acrylic box, it reflects in all directions off of the box’s surfaces, accentuating and dampening various frequencies due to the natural resonance of the container. The resonant re-amplification is captured through a small suspended microphone and sent to a set of headphones which are available to gallery visitors.
Through this roundabout process, the gallery’s sonic environment is spatially displaced into the acrylic box, only to re-immerse the listener in it: an act of triple super-imposition of simultaneous adjacent spaces (the room, the box, the listener). By presenting a re-configured acoustic situation – equal parts austere, self-reflexive, and absurd – the listener’s experience of sound is revealed as a complex collaboration of natural, physical, electronic, and perceptual agencies.

Sectioning

It is a series of spatial interventions that try to separate realms of sound—for instance, creating a self-contained acoustic ecosystem. It has four interventions: the outside environment compared to the indoor one. A box that contains a fan and papers. Old fluorescent bulbs are locked inside a box with a microphone. 

Positive Vibes

Revolves around an Adolf Hitler quote. “We could never conquer Germany without the loudspeaker”. Basanta reused this idea and used balloons with helium and a loudspeaker saying “I love you all” in English and Finnish. They threw this device into the city.

Curtain (White)

Earbuds sound like nature. Aleatoric piece made with on-ear headphones (Apple), that sounds rather organic and resembles the sound of bugs or leaves rustling.

A large inscription/ A great Noise (2019)

An ode to Sisyphus’s myth. A circular figure made of rocks, with a microphone rotating around it. It’s slow and never-ending. The microphone amplifies the sound of the mic pushing the stones. It’s also a concept art inspired by eastern life perspectives – life is cyclical.

On the other hand, Great Noise is a piece that resembles a guillotine – a microphone buried in a 45kg block of concrete is pushed and thrown against another block of concrete. There’s a reverb on it. It amplifies these dramatic sounds. The footage he provided shows other blocks of concrete with destroyed mics. “The gallery floor would literally shake”.

Antye Greie-Ripatti was Born and raised in Germany but artistically prefers to be called AGF, aka poemproducer. She has never been to any sound arts schools. “Luckily you have”. In 2008 she moved to Hailuoto (FIN). She has made a lot of records, more than 30. She has constant sound production practice – works in theatre and other events. She does also fieldwork – she started in Grizedale Arts in 2010 at the FON Festival (UK). She wrote a Manifesto of Rural Feminism – the rural areas became essential to her and her practice. She also organises events with people who want a deeper connection with listening – Sound Map Hailuoto w/ Juan D. Regino; Sonic Wild Code; Sonic Boat Journey with Ryoko Akama (2013). She also works a lot with feminism – #feministsonictechnologies.

Stones [Sonic Boat journey/ Hailuoto​-​Pyha​̈​joki]

Ryoko Akama [JP/UK] undertook a 63km long open sea boat trip to play her Geiger counter-based score ‘Stones’ to the ocean between Hailuoto and the future nuclear power plant site Pyhäjoki (Hanhikivi Nuclear Power Plant).

#NUNASONIC 2018

Line of women in the rice field – a sound work that went international.

His sonic intervention took place in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, during the NUSASONIC festival – women sound practitioners of diverse backgrounds are finding spaces to play the city. A rice field, an empty school on a Sunday, and the Chinese catholic cemetery on a hill. Every day the group explores listening and music making with the environment between lengthy discussions about our experiences, culture, food, womanhood, women’s rights, music equipment … the work appears.

Participants: Asa Rahmana, Ayu Saraswati, Joee and I, Menstrual Synthdrone, Sarana, Teenage Granny.

nusasonic.poemproducer.com

KUBRA KADEMI – ZANSUSPENSION

Kubra Kademi is an artist from Kabul and also a feminist. Her encounter with AGF started from an abrupt axile to the Spanish mountains and a couple of emails. They agreed to meet in Barcelona and started to work together. The first piece was called Zansuspension – a 40 min performance on intersectional feminism, race, white supremacy and women’s movements. It premiered at REWIRE festival 2017. The 3min film shows extracts of the piece and is not complete. Some of the footage was kindly shared by @mindthefilm Black, and White stills are from Stéphane Canet, who also assisted and secured Kubra’s dangerous swing. 

This collaboration not only liberated Kubra from being more accessible in her artistic expression but also allowed AGF to collaborate with many other artists worldwide.

Kubra Khademi – Multidisciplinary Artist – kubrakhademi.org

Paris, France

The Triangle of Sound Art Creativity

Social Work

female:pressure was founded in 1998, in an international network of over 2660+ feminist artists from 80+ countries in the broader fields of electronic music and arts www.femalpressure.com

SOLU – Bioart Society: where she met Mark Peter-Wright.

REc-on – to rec-on.org archive

https://rec-on.org/index-sitemap.html

https://rec-on.org/landbacknowledgment.html

↹ audeƒenze 

AGF & Porya Hatami – Sanandaj, Iran

https://rec-on.org/audefenze.html

FEMINIST SONIC TECHNOLOGIES 

#feministsonictechnologies

https://rec-on.org/feministsonictechnologies.html

!!! strike/ huelga/ streik/ lakko! 

with aylu & agf feat. Constanza Castagnet, Buenos Aires, Argentina

https://rec-on.org/STRIKE!.html

↟ BaTonga Exist 

by Lindatumune Nyono Mudimba, rural Zimbabwe

https://rec-on.org/BaTongaExist.html

⟳ SOIL MAtris{x} ⥰⥰⥰ 

Women defend the earth

by Aly Cabral, Manila, Philippines

https://rec-on.org/soilmatrix.html

+ reader: https://rec-on.org/pdf/fst07_SoilMatrix__AlyCabral_reader.pdf

✦ JIZINGATIE MWENYEWE 

by Nabalayo @mamachanganya Nairobi, Kenya

https://rec-on.org/JIZINGATIEMWENYEWE.html

✜ DALIT FEMINIST THEORY

by Sunaina Arya @Su_philos New Delhi, India

https://rec-on.org/dalitfe

http://www.kunstradio.at/BIOS/frizbio.html

Anna Fritz is a Canadian artist who uses sound and radio art mediums. She’s worked with Canadian campus-community stations such as CITR-FM, CKUT-FM and CKUW, as well as for the CBC and Kunstradio, Austria.

Anna started in community radio in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In the early 90s, experimenting with sound and crafting sound pieces was only primarily analogue. They only have a recorder reel to reel with two tracks. Nowadays, she prefers to make pieces live in sight-specific locations.

The first piece she shared is a group installation taking place in Canada. She uses this piece to talk about ecology and voice embodiment. “When I use the walkie-talkies I dont try to avoid the capabilities of my voice”.

FOG REFRAIN

“Fog Refrain” – working with the notion of space and fog in Santa Cruz. “Fog is a important character in the County”. However, this fog is increasingly disappearing due to climate change, and the land has become dry. Now plans receive less and less water. This piece was broadcast at 2 am on the radio.

Like refrains through these field recordings are stories and live performed compositions based on a ‘score’ crafted from forces observed at critical points where fog and infrastructures meet, such as the narrows where the Pacific Ocean enters the San Francisco Bay. Based on cycling over the Golden Gate Bridge, she assembled a list of forces characteristic of the bridge, such as the fog moving over and under the deck, the rhythms of car traffic, the intense buffeting wind that one leans hard into while cycling, pelicans surfing air currents overhead, railings that sing, and fog beacons and horns sounding on the nearby headlands.

Originally sound engineer for film, and sound recordist, Felix Blume, started to do field recording to do sound libraries. He began to share his “sonic experiences” on freesound.org. The fact he started as a sound recordist for film allowed him to visit places all around the world.

Terre de Fey. Les moutons du bout du monde (Carte Postale sonore, Arte Radio, 4 min, 2012) is an example of his first attempts to make the recordings he made more personal. In 2014, he recorded Los gritos de Mexico as a way to find a sonic identity for the Mexicans living in CDMX. It’s an exciting piece about Mexican vendors who sell their products by shouting about the item and the price. Felix fuses them into a polyphonic composition. This is his first sound piece.

https://felixblume.bandcamp.com/album/disco-pirata-ciudad-de-m-xico

Afterwards, Felix Blume moved on to create a series of videos that aimed to explain this difference between point of view and point of listening. These videos show Felix Blume recording sound worldwide in different scenarios with his field recording gear. 

Thailand Biennale 2018 – Felix was asked to do sight-specific work that had to do with the natural sites of Krabi. For this project, he came across a bamboo barrier that blocks tide waves due to climate change. So, back in Mexico, he made a bamboo flute that could only be played by pushing the pipe against the water. Back in Krabi, he made prototypes and placed many bamboo flutes in the water.

Later, he conducted and directed a good project for a documentary film that surrounded the mythical Brazilian folklore beast Curupira. In the film, he invites the people of a village to describe its sound. The film results from a 3-week long relationship between Felix and the villagers, the place and the people, and the place and listening.