It was a busy week in Berlin but one of the nice surprises was a visit to Teufelsberg, a former NSA ‘listening station’ that has been abandoned since the wall came down. This small complex of buildings sits on top of an artificial mountain of rubble left over from the second world war. A group of us went to listen to something else, the space itself. Actually there were multiple spaces that included some old concrete military buildings and a series of geodesic domes, which I imagine, must have housed the surveillance equipment. The highest dome, sits at least 7 stories up, has a fiberglass shell that offers many sonic possibilities with its unique acoustic properties. The video below is composed of a few clips I filmed (in very windy conditions) while the sound is excerpted from a straight recording of a 40 minute improvisation of 5 people. Special thanks to Natalia for suggesting this and for Dusan to drive us out there in the snow.

Click here to view the embedded video.

just a short report on the workshop at CTM which went very well considering the various weather conditions in Berlin this week. Udo Noll the creator and developer of Radio Aporee Maps has revived the possibility of integrating a GPS locating function that works with the main website. A small application loaded onto a GPS enabled mobile phone can track your movement when enabled. Your path is then recorded and when played back, is synchronized with the existing sounds on Radio Aporee Maps. The different data layers (sounds, GPS track) are then mixed to create something of a fictional “sound walk”. While the recorded paths may stay the same the mix of sounds will continually change as new sounds are added to the map. To hear some examples, visit the Radio Aporee Maps Mobile page. Click on any of the files with ‘ctm workshop’ in the title and see some paths. Also, a number of new sounds were added during the week, particularly around Alexanderplatz, Rathauspassage and Klosterstrasse by myself and other workshop participants.

January 23 – 29
Sound workshop for Art Pedagogy students of Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Keil

January 31 – February 2
radio aporee ::: sound/tracks workshop, CTM Festival (assisting Udo Noll)

February 5, 19:00
Panel Talk: “Put Your Ear on the Wall – Tuned City: Platform for Examinations in the Field Between Architecture and Sound” CTM Festival, with Carsten Stabenow [DE] / Sam Auinger [AT/DE] Derek Holzer [US/DE]

February 6, starts 21.12 ends 23.30
Das Kleine Field Recordings Festival mid winter edition, performance with Paulo Raposo and murmer at K77

February 8 – March 8
X-OP Residency at Apartment Project in Istanbul. Conducting second edition of “New Maps of Time” workshop/project

April 2010
Portland, San Francisco, Calgary (details coming soon)

Monday, January 26, 21.00
*Electropera Act 1: Parahouse_12
self-evolving participatory environment
by Egon March Institute and partner productions
Studio Martina Schumacher & Joulia Strauss in Ullsteinhaus

Monday-Thursday, 26th – 29th of January
X-OP- Conference Berlin
„True Art / Truely Merchandise“
at ConcentArt

Friday, January 30th, 21:47
Das Kleine Field recordings Festival
with: Paulo Raposo, Baruch Gottlieb, Feedbacksociety, John Grzinich
loophole – boddinstrasse 61

coming up next, Bytom-Wroclaw Poland…

Next week I will be in Berlin for the Tuned City - Between sound and space speculation event which involves 5 solid days of conferences, exhibitions and performances. I will be exhibiting video material compiled from my ongoing Location Sound Films project. I have put together two short films, one based on recordings from Estonia and Portugal over the last 2 years and another from the Riga Sound Locations workshop we held last August. While this is just a small sample of the films I have made it should give people some insight into what I’ve been working on.

As for the rest of the event, there is too much for me to comprehend at the moment but Derek Holzer has just posted an interview where he gives a good rundown on the program highlights.

I just uploaded a bunch of sounds to radio aporee ::: maps, one of the many interesting projects by Berlin based artist Udo Noll. Udo has done what I thought google would have already done with its maps or earth projects (but has not), which is to construct an interface for allowing people to upload and share sounds based on where they were recorded (Freesound has a similar geo-tagging function which I use). Not only that, there is a phone number you can call that will automatically record and tag sounds from a live phone call. This is one of those projects that has real potential to develop because there is the possibility to create a large scale sound map, something akin to a visual map, where conversations can run together and build stories or where layers of sounds can build up creating non-linear compositions that cross space and time. I’m looking forward to see where this goes. If you are a sound recordist or just what to record a discussion, then give it a try. Its open and easy to use.

some of my points: mooste hydrophone recording, market in Istanbul, seashore in France, fields in Portugal