stopGOstop: field recordings, sound collage, and sound art

A binaural recording of a walk from our house to the Mount Vernon Public Library. The library was a gift to the city from Andrew Carnegie and opened in 1904. It is located in downtown Mount Vernon, across from the Post Office and up the hill from the Mount Vernon East Metro North Station. I returned the second book in Rachel Bach’s Paradox trilogy, Honor’s Knight, and picked up Jonathan Franzen’s new book Purity. Space Opera for Literary Soap Opera. There is a little feedback in the recording from the headphones that are built into the binaural mics. It happens sometimes when the wind blows…

On January 9, 2005, the blind spot radio program filled the on-air studio with as many balloons as Eric, Jake and I could blow up (which happened to be 1,190) and then entered the room and popped them one at a time with a needle taped to a stick.

Conceived by Eric Humphrey and John Wanzel. Performed by Jake Quickel and Eric Humphrey, engineered and produced by John Wanzel.

This is the first time the complete recording of the program is available. I had hoped to fill the studio with 3,000 balloons, but my budget and the 2 hours we had to blow them up were the limiting factors.

I am repackaging a few radio works from the 2000’s and re-releasing them on the podcast.

Episdoe 44: The Falls – A three hour composition for headphones.

In December 2008 my wife and I took a trip to Niagara Falls. This composition uses some of those recordings as its base. I processed them a lot. The only bit field recording that remains ‘clean’ is a short recording from inside the Niagara Falls Welcome Center. There are three other field recordings in the piece, one a microphone that I dangled down into a jetty on the gulf side of Florida, a short recording from a picnic area just off the beach, also in Florida, and the other sitting near the Horace Mann football field in the Bronx, I was resting after a long bike ride. Besides these brief respites, the piece is tones, grumbles, wa-wa’s, groans, beats and other sounds created through digital signal processing of Niagara Falls. The piece is made at a personal scale, three hours, a duration that is easy to imagine, but hard to hold onto. Ideally, The Falls is to be listened to while at work – doing tasks that you may not want to do or monotonous tasks you like. I would suggest gardening, raking leaves, doing dishes, painting a wall or changing light bulbs.

Episode 43 of the podcast – a short hike on the Colorado Trail. The recording was made from Molas Lake back to our car parked just off Highway 550 between Durango and Ouray. The part of the trail we hiked is just below 11,000 feet in elevation. The Colorado Trail is about 500 miles of trail that weaves throughout the Rocky Mountains. We only hiked about 2 miles of it. It was mid-August, around 90 degrees and very sunny, I forgot to put sunscreen on the tip of my nose.

Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, a new composition for headphones. Whining, electric buzzing, hissing, humming, tinging, and whistling sounds.

A binaural field recording of a walk from the parking area around Swan Lake (not pictured above, but it looks kind of the same) in Rockefeller State Park Preserve. I did not see any swans, but there were lots of joggers. This episode is about 25 minutes long.

This week on the program- writers block, excel, and drawing a link between Atari and using drones in battle – a fictional conversation entitled How to Kill a Yeti. Featuring field recordings, singing, digital signal processing and the voice talents of Brian Taylor and John Wanzel, it was written and produced by John Wanzel.

This week on the program – listening to how we represent ourselves while thinking of openness – vlogs, opensource, and, your personal brand, an audio collage entitled I had an epiphany on the first page or sharing with your friends even if you don’t know who they are.

If you want to hear the full interviews and more please visit the footnotes.