Sound Seed Transmissions was a radio show I hosted as part of my residency at Nida Art Colony and was broadcast on the local radio station, Neringa FM: http://neringafm.lt/

The Sound Seed Transmissions show focused on sound and artists who work with unique and different contexts, drawing their inspiration from nature, natural materials, found objects, temporary installations and self-made instruments. The show was meant to be a type of “stories from the field”, presenting a mix of short interviews with artists and a selection of field recordings and/or compositions.

Below is the full archive, all 6 shows:

SST #1 – 16.11.2011 – Introductory show with Greek sound artist Yiorgis Sakellariou in dialogue with John Grzinich discussing their ideas and methods for field recording.

SST#1

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SST #2 – 23.11.2011 – The second radio show was entitled the “Secret Life of Wires” where I presented my long term fascination with resonant wires as instruments and objects in the landscape and played a number of recordings over the years.

SST#2

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SST #3 – 29.11.2011 – The third radio show we explored the idea of “Sonic Traces“, how physical processes not only leave marks but also reveal something in the sounds they make. The guest was visual artist Evelyn Müürsepp from Estonia. Evelyn and John talked about and played pieces from their collaborative sound and drawing project “Sonic Scratch Cycles”.

SST#3

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SST #4 – 7.12.2011 – The fourth radio show explored the idea of “Instruments of Place“, or making sound through the construction and manipulation of objects, materials and devices and other creative means. The guest was Maksims Shentelevs from Latvia. Max and John talked about and played pieces from their self-made instruments and sonic investigations of places.

SST#4

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SST #5 – 14.12.2011 – “The Sounds of Nida” was the title of the 5th show. My residency was coming to a close and this show reflected on my discoveries and experiences in Nida. Neringa FM host Linas Ramanauskas offered to interview me and we I played various recordings made during my residency.

SST#5

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SST #6 – 21.12.2011 – The 6th and final SST show was a special solstice edition entitled, “myths as public dreams, dreams as private myths“. The guest was Andrius Rugys from Vilnius. Andrius and John shared their recordings and discussed experiences from the field working with attentive ears.

SST#6

EAR ROOM | re-sounding dialogues across the globe

# 4 Online now :: John Grzinich

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Ear Room, an ONLINE publication for developing critical DISCOURSE and debate
on the creative, and EXPLORATIVE use of SOUND in artistic PRACTICE.

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WHERE… http://earroom.wordpress.com/

This is a question I’ve been asking myself ever since I realized that “field recording” was something of a viable genre for many working with sound. Before hearing the term “field recording” (and I’ll throw in Phonography), I never thought much in making a distinction between working in or out in the field. I recorded what I wanted and where I wanted (and still do).

While some view it as a recording technique for any place other than the studio, others seem dedicated to the cause and strive to reach new levels of purity. The spectrum of approaches is wide from scientific ‘nature recording’, and commercial ‘relaxation environments’ (some may know the interesting ‘environments’ series from the 70s) to weekend hobbyists who simply like to get our and record sounds they like.

Like any term, the definition is open to interpretation. The artist Jez Riley French has opened up the discussion with his ‘four questions’ series regarding sound artists/musicians and their use of “field recording” in their work. Below is the current list of artists Jez has included in his survey which I feel is more than worthy to help promote. I’m sure more are on the way, but this should be more than enough to start with:

• Andreas Bick
• Cedric Peyronnet / toy.bizarre
• Eric Cordier
• Goh Lee Kwang
• Jean Francois Cavro
• Jez riley French
• Jez riley French interviewed by John Grzinich
• John Grzinich
• Kiyoshi Mizutani
• Lawrence English
• Maksims Shentelevs
• Marc Namblard
• Matt Davis
• noid (Arnold Haberl)
• Patrick Farmer
• Rob Curgenven
• Simon Whetham
• Thomas Tilly
• Zoe Irvine

Yannick Dauby makes and important point  in his description of “Field recording and phonography” as to why we who record sounds in the field are shaping the sound as much as we are simply capturing it:

“The couple microphone/headphone acts as a filter and an enhancer for perception. The use of these tools is absolutely not neutral : the choices of the place and the moment, the gestures, the technical limitations and the zoom/macro effects of the microphone affect the result of the recording. The recordist makes a series of decisions in his practice, and these decisions are related to his own subjectivity.”

Numerous other in depth perspectives on the practice have emerged in recent years, I suspect due to the availability and ease of use of digital technology. People like Aaron Ximm (Quiet American) and Patrick McGinley (murmer/framework) have been long term proponents of creative uses of filed recordings and seem to have inspied many through their output. As the “field recording” bug spreads I suspect we may see ever more variations and mutations on what this is about. As for listening to field recordings it’s a fertile matter for another post.

Taking sound as an artistic medium unto itself, what interests or motivates you to work with sound? Is it some form of “musical” drive or is it a more abstract and less tangible means of expressing something?

JrF: well, with this first question I already feel the weight of the limits of language for me. I find it quite odd to explain really. I just started making music when I was quite young & for me I believe I have progressed naturally to the point that I’m at now. By ‘naturally’ I mean that I gave myself time, I worked intuitively and whilst that means a longer journey than perhaps achievable by constant formal study, I feel this was the only way for me to be. So I make the music that I enjoy making. I engage in the creative act when I am moved to do so – it feels natural and a part of my way of being. I think music is a part of it all – the way I think and feel, the way I read, the way I cook and eat, the way I watch, the way I take photographs etc. etc. So I guess, going back to your question, what motivates me is as abstract and intangible as life is and as tangible as the moment to moment way we find to enjoy or cope with life. Working with music / sound & simple visual elements (photography, drawing) is the way I feel able to express myself.

What are some of the challenges in working with sound, both personally for yourself and for what you present to the public (live for an audience or as published work)?

JrF: These are good questions ! you see I really feel that the challenges, the ebb and flow of undertaking these things are private. I could say that, for example, I only make recordings when I feel ‘right’. Sometimes I come across a sound that I like to listen to but I don’t record it – I don’t feel right about it. I don’t really give myself any set expectations. I’m not someone who goes out hunting for an unusual sound. I just live and my creativity is an emotive response. That’s a term I use a lot because it’s the most descriptive phrase I can think of to explain.

In terms of releases, I simply put out the recordings I enjoy and that remain enjoyable or that I instinctively feel are right to release. Perhaps this is where the element of the unexplainable starts to make a difference – like a photographer who is said to have ‘an eye’ I suppose I trust my ear & am quite happy to stand by those choices.

Live performance has always been part of my musical life. I started out playing guitar & was in bands & performing solo from early on. I got really into music around the time that new wave / punk music hit the UK so it was all about just getting out there & playing. These days I have a fully formed set of things that cause me stress when performing, but those relate mainly to the organisational aspects. I like to have a nice, friendly time with the folks arranging the concert / event & a stress free soundcheck + an audience who respect music / sound. So all the challenges relate to aspects other than the actual music. Once I’m performing, working with intuitive composition, it all boils down to whether the piece ‘works’ or doesn’t & whilst one always hopes it does I suppose I rely on my instinct. There might be challenges but again, I feel these are private and more to the point are different with each performance.

I understand you do a lot of site-specific work, recording in particular locations and improvising with what you find. Can you talk about why this type of field work is interesting for you as opposed to, let’s say, only making studio based work? Are you attracted to certain locations more than others or do you look for certain types of locations?

JrF: it’s a simple story – I often found myself performing in spaces that I liked & wanted to record the sounds I found. I did that for a long time & avoided using the term ‘site-specific’ – by & large I have a difficult relationship with what I term ‘art speak’ but that’s a different story. I suppose when I improvise or compose live with instruments the sound of the space one is in has a direct effect & so, when using field recordings I find it enjoyable to incorporate the sound of the performance space too if possible. It’s not something I always do – again, it has to feel right.

I don’t really look for locations all the time. Sometimes I will go out with the intention of recording a church or some water (a river or the sea for example) but I often find that these more deliberate attempts result in recordings that might be ok but perhaps lack a certain something. It’s nearly always the happy accidents, the sounds one stumbles across that provide the most pleasing results.

I am attracted to the locations that I like – simple as that. What I’m trying to say is that I am attracted to places as a person & not as a field recordist.

Continuing with the topic of site-specific work and field recording… What is it you like others to hear from the places you visit and record? Why should we at all record the sounds we hear or the music we experiment with in these places?

JrF: well, putting aside the question of whether one can ever know or control what the audience hears, I always hope that an emotive impression is communicated to those who are able to listen in that way. It’s not possible if the audience is full of males who are more interested in the equipment being used than the music though ! or indeed if one is performing to fellow field recordists who are just waiting to hear something they haven’t heard before. This is one reason why I use the term ‘music’ rather than a term such as ‘sound art’ – for me it is that essential quality that makes music ‘sing’ that is the key.

I think, as I said earlier, the music and sound of places is enjoyable whether it is recorded or not of course. For me, the act of recording is a gentle intervention and I never force it – if I don’t feel right recording then I won’t.

What is your relationship to the technology you use for recording and listening? How dependent are you on technology and what kind of standards do you have?

JrF: I would describe myself as an technophobe ! I like equipment that I can be intuitive with and that is immediate. I started out using portable tape recorders back in the early 1980’s & then moved to minidisk – which I still use because I like the portability. I have never been one to rush out & buy the latest bit of kit – I prefer to fully explore the possibilities of the equipment I have. In fact I have a guitar multi-effect unit that I’ve had for about 10 years I guess & it’s still on the first patch !

However, as my interest in recording very quiet sounds – audible silence & sonic architecture – has developed I have invested in a high quality CF recorder (Sound Devices) & a variety of different mics.

I make my own contact mics & hydrophones too. I guess I’m a bit like the stereotype Yorkshireman – never spend a pound unless you have to!

I treasure the exploration & the moment of discovery so in that respect the technology involved isn’t key. I capture those moments using whatever kit I have with me & I’m really not someone who spends hours setting up a recording in order to capture some perception of a ‘perfect’ recording. For me not only do I believe that that doesn’t exist, but even if it did I wouldn’t find it interesting for long. Much of what I don’t like in terms of music, sound & in this context, field recording is technically very high quality but lacks the emotional aspect, lacks the sense of having been captured by a person with a mind and a heart, with strengths and faults – I guess I feel it is dishonest in some way. So my standards would seem lower to some other artists who value the technical perhaps, but I feel my standards are very high – you can easily buy better equipment but you can’t buy better ears or a better connection to your emotions and inspirations !

Jez riley French runs a good series of interviews with sound artists on his blog. He has posted his ‘four questions’ with me. I’ve always felt it is difficult to write about my experiences in working with sound but what I liked about this process is that somehow when someone else asks questions it helps trigger memories, thoughts and ideas.

It has been a while since my last post, which was partly due to my being away in Portugal for most of April. Something of a sister project to MoKS has started up there known as the Binaural Media residency. It too is located in a rural village setting and aims to integrate the work of visiting artists into the local social and cultural climate. Also like MoKS, Binaural is committed to hosting a number of sound artists each year in an attempt to broaden the connections between sound, culture and the surrounding environment. Consequently the residency was in line with my own work and allowed me the freedom and the focused time to make a lot of great recordings.

An overview of my Nodar Flowlines project can be found here.

Before leaving Nodar, I had the chance to talk with Maile Colbert and Rui Costa about the role of sound in the mission of Binaural Media and how it plays into the work of visiting artists. Below is a 12 minute interview that I think covers a number of these topics in depth.

Sound art and Binaural Media discussion with Maile and Rui – interview (12:00): mp3 file

…interviewed by Paulo Raposo

PR: How did you start working with field-recordings? And how did you first
start to integrate field-recordings in your music?

JG: Last month I had some childhood memories come to me that I would say are related to this question. I used to play with tape recorders as far back as I even knew how to operate one. These were playful exercises in recording made-up “songs” or secretly capturing parents conversations. The ability to record sound has always intrigued me in the way it seems to capture “something else”, more than just sound. When I was 12 or so I got a “boom box”, the kind with the built-in microphones. Sometimes strong storms would come through and I used to go out in the garage with the door open to record the heavy rain and thunder sounds. There was a certain thrill in capturing those moments of natural beauty.

Then, sometime around 1993 I began to work with Michael Northam and Seth Nehil, doing different sound experiments using what was available to us. I cant remember exactly what was our first use of “field recordings”. I don’t remember making a distinction between different types of recordings we made. For me it was simply recording sounds that interested me. There was a natural progression that came with our use of devices, objects, home-made instruments and tape recorders in improvised settings that grew from a “studio” setup into site-specific locations. We were interested not only in the sounds we were making but how they could be integrated into our surroundings. The early actions are not too well documented but Michael got a portable DAT recorder at some point, which was a significant boost in quality and we started recording everything. Recordings we made in different situations, settings or locations became integrated in our compositional works. Some of those could be defined as “field recordings”, yet they were often transformed through the composing process. For myself this slow evolutionary approach has been an integral aspect of my work. I see few defined borders in artistic techniques that approach the irony of the sound medium, in the way that you can “capture” sound while understanding the difficulty in “containing” it, while releasing it into space.

PR: Have you come to develop a grammar or vocabulary from the captured audio in your compositional techniques?

JG: I like the term “captured audio” (I think this came out of one of our discussions). It denotes a “living” quality of sound that you somehow capture this essence, process it, then set it free. The use of language with sound has always been a difficult one for me. Making experimental music and working with sound is essentially a non-linguistic form of communication. But rather than leave it at that I still try to develop an appropriate language to describe what I do in order to push the conceptual, philosophical and practical aspects of my work. Some people simply “understand” through listening, others don’t and like to have additional stories or descriptions related to the music.

PR: You studied architecture in Texas. How did it affect your compositional work and your awareness of space? I also know you are very interested in systems, behavioral systems that come from the realm biology. Could you tell me a little bit about this and how you integrate these in your music?

JG: I studied architecture in Kansas for about 3 1/2 years. That education showed me what I didn’t want to do with my life, but afterward there was still the question of what I was going to do. The actual study of architecture didn’t affect my personal approach to composition other than introducing elements of architectural vocabulary, how to shape, define space and so on. My understanding of sound and space came earlier, through intuitive listening exercises I did as a teenager. I used to do “deep listening” type exercises with certain music in order to visualize space. It was my way of “dreaming architecture” to get ideas. This type of active listening became a tool for creativity as it is inherently connected to visualization of the imaginary. I realized early on that when you limit the “input” of the visual sense (you close your eyes) the auditory sense becomes greatly enhanced. Therefor listening becomes a key for visualization. These kind of exercises I found out much later were practiced by Pauline Oliveros and others as forms of musical meditation. So “my” architecture, the personal notion of visualizing structures within space, was of course not the architecture they teach in Universities. So how then could I express this notion of space? It was eventually through my sound “research” in making experimental music that I was able to explore these understandings of how space is related to human perception. This then opens up a large discussion of what sound induced spatial relations mean. For me this is still a matter of curious speculation, but calls for continued work.

In the mid-90s while working on sound experiments with mnortham and Seth Nehil, we also often found ourselves in discussions about how to articulate verbally what we were doing sonicly. The aesthetic debates about whether the music was “post-industrial”, “electro-acoustic” or even genre related at all seemed pointless (and essentially is for reductive journalistic purposes). For this we looked to other sources for answers and and came to interesting topics in philosophy of science. At some point Michael came across the work of Maturana and Varela, the Chilean biologists, and their theory of Autopoietic systems. This at once had an appeal because it explains the role of “the observer” within the context of larger living systems. Here the observer is never a passive individual but always an active component of that which he/she is engaged with. As sound makers and composers our work has a function or purpose beyond the aesthetic judgments often perceived of as a linear progression of a defined historical lineage (that experimental activity being “ahead” or “advanced” leads to proven “results”). Sound is much more an aspect of something we can’t immediately understand, because it induces phenomenon such as visions (as I stated before) and physical matter (known as Cymatics). As the quantum physicist David Bohm has stated there is an inextricable relationship between thought and matter, that both are aspects of an unbroken process. So from these principles I began to consider my sound work more as a signification medium, a generator of meaning, and particular form of communication if you will. Like language, sound can also send messages, express structures and make statements but on a more abstract level. Systems theory helps describe this far more than than terms and concepts used in the disciplines of art and music. Again this has to do with language used to describe what I do, but this looks different in practice which is not very scientific at all.

PR: Someone, I think Barry Truax, said that in soundscape composition it is precisely the environmental context that is preserved, enhanced and exploited by the composer. What is your position regarding this subject? What is, if Lamy says so, the moral status of the captured audio inside your work?

JG: It depends how you define “soundscape composition”. These terms are relative. I don’t think you can preserve, enhance or exploit an environmental context any more than you can an FM signal from a synthesizer. There isn’t anything moral about this view other than I prefer to use self-induced or naturally occurring acoustic sounds in my work over electronically generated sounds. Acoustic sounds being what they are, are inextricable connected to a context, but of course once captured will be released somewhere else in another context (something like a zoo for sounds?). To put it more simply, for composing, I use the sounds I want to. I’m usually not trying to preserve or enhance the context as much as I am the experience of being in that context. Its much more ephemeral and subjective. In this way I enjoy transforming and obscuring my source material, to shift between an original context and an imaginary one. This is why environmental sounds are more interesting because of the richness and “complexity” of their original nature. Of course if you want to “preserve” a soundcape then it’s a scientific matter and not an artistic one. One needs to decide the “best” devices to record, store and reproduce those sounds and figure out how to get the resources to support your work.

this interview was originally conducted for the Binaural Media website.

website of Paulo Raposo.

Last autumn I was asked 15 questions by Tobias Fischer of Tokafi about my current work and views. Tokafi is a nice site that covers all kinds of “new” music; experimental, composed, improvised and occasionally rocked.
The interview has now been posted on the Tokafi website.