Quiet American is the manipulation of sounds Aaron Ximm hears and records. The project began as he grappled with what it meant to be a tourist in another culture. It continues as he grapples with what it means to be a tourist in his own. The opportunity, the thrill, and the risk of travel is being present to the world. Ximm’s goal with Quiet American is to sketch in sound the experience of being in an unfamiliar place.

Ximm made his first work from field recordings in the fall of 1998. While traveling in Vietnam, he recorded musicians, trains, moving water, crickets, monks, markets, metalwork, tired animals, and drunken tourists. The earliest work on the site is the result of his discovery of ways of working with that sound as sole medium. Later it became clear that it was important for him to apply the techniques he was learning to the sounds that define his home, the San Francisco Bay area. In 1999 he recorded during a trip to Fiji.

Ximm has worked with material gathered in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Tibet, China, and Japan. Recordings are added as he works with them.

Quiet American has been played on numerous radio programs and streaming internet stations. Ximm’s perpetually-popular one-minute vacations project was featured on WNYC’s The Next Big Thing and is regularly cited in blogs and portals. Recordings from that project were featured in Montreal’s Canadian Center for Architecture’s year-long exhibition Sense of the City in 2006.

Ximm’s collaboration with his wife, Annapurna: Memories in Sound, was awarded the Director’s Choice Honorable Mention at the 2002 Third Coast International Audio Festival. The concert series he curated and hosted from 2001-2005, Field Effects, was awarded a Best of San Francisco award from the SF Weekly and a Best of the Bay award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His recordings have been used in a variety of other projects, including albums by Shuttle358 and Noe Venable.