As part of an ongoing series of recordings of unusual sounds of the Venice lagoon, these tracks were made on 29th april 2008 at 2100 in a night-depot of boats of the public transport service at “Riva dei Schiavoni”, not far from San Marco square.

You can listen here: http://www.mediateletipos.net/archives/7531 Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/96, with binaural stereo mic.

“Sapientum super acquis” is the title attribuited to the “Magistrato alle acque” of the Serenissima Venetian Republic, an organ instituited on 1501 by the “Council of ten”, that had the job of keeping safe the delicate natural/artificial balance of the lagoon, and looking after the “health” of the water.

Today the water is mostly polluted because of Porto Marghera, one of the biggest industrial areas in the whole Europe.
The burbling of water provides a thick scrim through which are heard industrial noise, conversations, the creak of waterborne structures, footsteps and more. It’s the perfect background music for an afternoon spent reading a China Miéville novel, the sort of tale in which the dank urban setting exists thanks to a tentative compromise with the fetid mote that surrounds it.
Thanks to Enrico Coniglio and http://disquiet.com/ The track was originally posted at touchmusic.org.uk.

David Tagg - Waist Deep Seas of Milk (review) New York musician, David Tagg, has seen The Future of Modern Guitar. And this sonic seer’s astral projections are sumptuously spread across the ambient expanses of Waist Deep Seas of Milk, though all trace of twang, pluck and strum is dissolved in FX haze and spun out in endless echo returns. Review by Alan Lockett.

Favourite Places (review) Everyone has a favourite place, whether cosy internal retreat or cherished patch of Great Outdoors. Forest, bathtub, museum and alley find common cause on this audio-document from Audiobulb, compiling ten pieces representing selected artists’ Favourite Places. Captured field recordings blend with musical treatments to make mementos enfolding inspiring source within inspired composition. Review by Alan Lockett.

Hectic Tenuous - Chic Nerve (review) Starting with flanged, panned scratching (ala fingernails, not decks), this solo CDR from The Caution Curves laptop lady Rebecca Mills, is an eleven track melange of textures, echoes, drones, processed field recordings and even the occasional bit of singing! Review by Mark Francombe.

La Ciutat Ets Tu - Tomasz Krakowiak (review) La Ciutat Et Tu surrounds the listener with evolving percussive transformations in timbre. The compositions have a circular unwinding quality, never abrasive and utterly hypnotic. Tomasz Krakowiak is a Polish-born percussionist now living in Toronto, Canada. Having collaborated with the likes of Kaffe Matthews, John Oswald, Phil Minton, Otomo Yoshihide, Gert-Jan Prins among other. Review by Derek Morton.

Love City by Dsic (review) Dsic, also known as Greg Godwin, is a Bristol-based noise artist that employs a wide range of influences and sound sources. Love City and the miniDsic EP, both released through Lf Records, weave their way through noise, drone, glitch, ambient and microsound. Review by Alex Young.

Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn - Still Life (series) (review) The internally themed Rothko-esque cover art of the Still Life series could stand as a semiotic of Nelson Foltz and Tom Lynn’s sound, with its slow-shifting tones that spread across a spartan canvas - ostensibly static swathes that reveal micro-variativity on deeper insertion. Review by Alan Lockett.

Of Memory & Dreams - Bill Thompson (review) There is a trajectory that many improvised electro acoustic performances reach, which although unique in every given context, often manage to take you to a zen like point where you become one with the signal and phase in and out of listening to the development of structure or dynamic of the work. Review by Roger Mills.

Three Rooms - Steve Peters (review) Sound artist Steve Peters’ recent CD, Three Rooms documents three of his site-specific installations. The three pieces succeed without reference to the installations for which the pieces were originally composed, capturing the quiet reflection of the original locations. Review by Caleb Deupree.

The whole piece is based on field recordings from: Mamori Lake, Amazonia, Brazil; Alphios Bridge, Ancient Olympia, Greece; Vibrations from the bridge which connects Denmark with Sweden; A bottling plant in operation and hydrophone recordings from Mamori Lake. Also used were sounds and notes from a church organ. Output signals have been manipulated and electronically treated.

Dramazon is made in memory of a long rainy night in Amsterdam… In the era of 01110011000111010110, one thing remains stable and it will remain stable and non-mutated for eternity. The way people kiss, the way bodies are connected…
Listen >>

TouchRadio is internet audio broadcast streaming direct from the server. To listen you need a mp3 player app. that supports streaming such as Apple’s iTunes for Mac and PC. In the archive >>: Jana Winderen, Guðni Franzson, Lasse Marhaug, Chris Watson, Steve Roden, Leif Elggren, Scott Taylor, The Skull Defekts, Daniel Menche, Fennesz/Rehberg/Toral & Feliciano, Brandon LaBelle, Stephan Mathieu, Leif Inge, Jacob Kirkegaard, People Like Us, KK.Null, Peter Rehberg, Toshiya Tsunoda, Philip Jeck, z’ev, Christian Fennesz & Max Nagl, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, BJNilsen.

During these travels, she has often been struck by the similarities between Cleveland, a city of the Rust Belt, and New Orleans, a city of the bayou. Both cities dwell on the shores of bodies of water with global reach: Cleveland on Lake Erie, New Orleans on the Mississippi River. Both cities have seen the boom and bust of industry and population throughout their histories – past and present. Cleveland and New Orleans look remarkably different, but Christensen has often noticed that they have sounds in common: industry, birds, water, tourists. Rust Belt / Bayou offers an interactive document of aural snapshots from recent trips to both New Orleans and Cleveland.

Rust Belt / Bayou is a 2007 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked Music Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney General at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

BIOGRAPHY

Julia Christensen is an artist whose work treads on the thin line between art and research. She also likes to tread on most of the thin lines between various media, between the electronic and the non-electronic, and between audience and performer. Julia is the author of Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, Fall 2008), a book about how communities are renovating abandoned Wal-Mart and K-Mart structures for creative new uses. Her photography, sound work, and electronic installations have shown recently at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Lincoln Center in New York City, and the DUMBO Art Center in Brooklyn, among other venues. Julia lectures widely about land use, art, music, and interdisciplinary research. She likes hearing stories, playing with her rock band in Troy, traveling in the depths of the United States, and thinking about the future.

The data stream is transmitted via wireless LAN from PALAOA to the German Neumayer Base. From there, a permanent satellite link transmits the data to the AWI in Germany. A constant hiss pervading the signal is the natural, isotropic background noise made audible here through the use of ultra sensitive hydrophones. Additional broad band noise caused by wind, waves and currents adds to it on occasion. Due to the limited bandwidth of the satellite link, jamming of the WLAN link due to storms, or energy shortage, the connection might temporarily be down or scrammed.”

You can listen to the underwater sound of the Antarctic Ocean with a delay of a few seconds. [MP3 audio stream. OGG-Vorbis audio stream - provides better sound quality at a lower bitrate, for a list of compatible players please check out www.vorbis.com.] [via]

Newcastle-based Chris Watson — who Stephen Vitiello calls “a brilliant master of environmental and field recordings” in his recent interview with Peter Traub for NMR — is one of the world’s leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena. A former sound archivist for the RSPB, Watson was a BAFTA award-winning force behind David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds, The Blue Planet and The Life of Mammals.

“I love the sounds of these parallel worlds,” he says - “spaces we occupy alongside other animals but rarely tune into.” On location he explores his experiments in sound, then weaves them into haunting recordings.

Watson has made three solo albums and also takes his field recording into the performance arena, producing surround-sound installations in the UK and abroad.

Watson has been working with sound since 1972. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was a member of the early English industrial music group Cabaret Voltaire. After departing C.V., he co-founded The Hafler Trio, an experimental music project. In 1987 he formally began his present work as a sound recordist.

You can listen to some of his work here:

Wild Song at Dawn

Blessing

Celebration

Soundpocket 1 — created for Urban Interface, Oslo (2007) — was installed in a narrow passageway connecting two parts of the city. The soundbeam, which can be as narrow as 50 cm in diameter, was mounted on a pan/tilt head which made it possible to place the sounds very precisely in the passageway. By bouncing the sound off surfaces, it seemed as if the sound could be coming from a window, door, elevator, or a poster on the wall. Most of the sounds seemed to belong to the site; others were slightly out of place, like the sound of a chandelier blowing in the wind.

I wanted it to be slight distortions to the regular soundscape of the passageway, and was pleased to see that the people who used this passageway regularly were noticing these disturbances. This could be described using the first of Barthes´ three listening modes: hearing involves “evaluation of the spatio-temporal situation“ and thus, it is linked to a “notion of territory“. It places the listener on alert when new sounds which don’t “fit in” are heard. By adding an extra layer of sound if also made people focus on the sounds which were already there.

For Soundpocket 2, HC Gilje set up an Internet radio station (using Nicecast), and played sounds from his library of field recordings. He found three locations in Oslo to serve as local radio stations. They were connected to visible cues: a huge oak tree, a small sculpture, and a small pond in the roundabout. The range of the local stations more or less corresponded to these visual cues: if you saw them you would be able to pick up the signal. Gilje used AAREFF FM transmitters placed with the three hosts, who allowed him to pick up their Internet radio streams. The result was three very local radio stations sending out a continuous soundtrack from other places, so somehow these recorded locations came in dialogue with the physical locations of the radio stations. The listening involved active participation from the public as you would need to tune in on your own radio to pick up the broadcast.

HC Gilje works with realtime environments, installations, live performance, set design and singlechannel video. Gilje has presented his work through different channels throughout the world: in concert-venues,theatre and cinema venues, galleries, festivals and through several international dvd releases, including 242.pilots live in Bruxelles on New York label Carpark and Cityscapes on Paris-label Lowave. He was a member of the video-impro trio 242.pilots, and was also the visual motor of kreutzerkompani. In october 2006 Gilje started a 3 year position as a research fellow at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, exploring how audiovisual technology can be used to transform, create, expand, amplify and interpret physical spaces. He blogs at Conversations with Spaces.

Close your eyes and listen. It is the Age of Noise: hums, buzzes, whines, traffic, ventilation systems, disc drives, cell phones, sirens, aircraft, muzak, televisions, radios, car alarms, leaf blowers, jack hammers, compressors — biproducts of an overheated visual culture bombard us endlessly. It’s no surprise that many people withdraw from our public hearing space and retreat into iPods or buildings with windows that don’t open. Harmony in the Age of Noise intends to empower the sense of hearing and deconstruct this sea of noise. In transforming this barrage of sounds into information about the way we live, the piece attempts to restore harmony and balance to the senses.

Anthropologist and poet David Guss invited sound artist, Bruce Odland — sonic thinker, composer, and sound artist known for his large scale, public space sound installations — to create Harmony in the Age of Noise. Along with sculptor Mark McNamara and media artist Michael Luck Schneider, they will collaborate with over 80 undergraduates and grad students as well as professors and staff at Tufts University. Together they are designing and building a sonic observation post that will allow visitors to navigate through sound maps of the campus and surrounding community. Harmony in the Age of Noise will be a parabolic gazebo where the hub of students and traffic are harmonized through a mix of a real time feed, a collection of stored psychoacoustic maps, and visitors’ sounds programmed to play like hourly chimes.

All students and the public are invited to participate and attend.

Read more here.

Soundcities is an online open source database of city sounds from around the world, that can be listened to, used in performances on laptops, or played on mobiles via wireless networks. Initially all of the sounds were by Stanza, but you can now contribute your own found sounds. This is was the first online open source found sound database. First version 2003.

European Sound Delta is a mobile project on the Danube & Rhine Rivers focusing on radio-art using sounds of European cities. Two teams will be travelling on both rivers this summer, recording sounds, producing live performances and radio broadcasts with local sound-artists. A final exhibition is scheduled in Strasbourg by the end of September 2008 as part of Ososphere. International sound artists are invited to apply with a project meant to be created on one of the trans-European floating labs.

Main Objectives:

–> To give young people the experience of a professional mobile project
–> A documentary artistic research on cultural identities of European cities
–> Built a new european network in the field of sound art
–> Experiment ICT via innovative artistic practices

Participating countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Romania, Serbia & Slovakia

Associated curators: Valerie Vivancos and Joachim Montessuis.

Participating artists & residents (list not closed): Aymeric De Tapol, Tonic Train, Dinahbird, Jopo Stereo, SIC: Hori Cosmin Samol, Ewen Chardronnet, Alejandra Perez Nunez, Julien Ottavi, Chris Watson, Vincent Epplay, Alejandra & Aeron, Robert Hampson, Kassel Jaeger, AGF, Jorg Piringer, Yannick Dauby, Christian Zanesi, Phil Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine, Jean-Philippe Roux, Gael Segalen, Philip Griffiths, Joachim Montessuis.