found sound

Sonic Heritage Project Out Now by James belflower

I really enjoyed this project. I’ve composed a short sound piece for Cities and Memory’s Sonic Heritage event. It’s out now!

Image courtesy of Cities and Memory

Project Description:

The world is not this world when heard through the auditory spectrum of a snake. It follows, then, that history itself might also shift if perceived outside the limits of human hearing. Naja Nostalgia is a sound work that employs field recordings, geophone recordings, analog synthesizers, and an improvised Viridu performance to recreate the experience of walking through Sri Lanka’s Galle World Heritage Site—but imagined through the auditory perspective of a cobra. With a limited hearing range of approximately 50–1000 Hz, the snake’s acoustic world offers a radically different filter for understanding space, time, and memory.

What became clear during the compositional process was the surprising resonance between the snake’s frequency spectrum and the emotional texture of human nostalgia. The emphasis on low frequencies—vibrations, sub-bass tones, speaker resonance, and analog hiss—echoed the affective registers of longing and melancholia. In this narrowed spectrum, faint auditory artifacts emerged with heightened poignancy: whispered Portuguese and Dutch fragments, brief bursts of laughter, and fleeting exchanges between tourists and snake charmers. These sonic residues surfaced as spectral memories, suspended in the soundscape like half-remembered dreams.

By deliberately using the speaker’s voice to cut the 50-1000hz frequency range, the soundscape  sways been human and snake hearing and resemble an analog past—one evoking the tactile, time-worn quality of cassette tapes, LPs, and perhaps even earlier recording technologies. This sonic filtering became a metaphor for how nostalgia operates: not as a complete recollection, but as a selective and often distorted echo of what once was.

This approach to listening brought me back to the idea that tourism itself is a complicated engagement with the past. It can often be a reductive encounter in which one culture experiences another through a narrow, mediated spectrum—visually, aurally, emotionally. My improvised Viridu performance sought to engage with this complexity not only through sound, but through the act of listening itself: as both an intervention and an act of attentiveness.

Like nostalgia, the auditory world of the snake distorts, condenses, and reorients. It is a form of hearing that vibrates through the body, bypassing the ear and settling somewhere deeper. It does not seek to reconstruct a full historical narrative, but instead evokes fragments—sensorial, partial, and affectively charged.

Audio: Ronald Johnson’s “ARK 38, Ariel’s Songs to Prospero” by James belflower

I’m very excited to see access to the audio file of Ronald Johnson’s ARK 38 “Ariel’s Songs to Prospero” available (thanks Peter!). I was looking for this during my dissertation chapter on Ronald’s cookbooks! This is a wonderful addition to the recent reissue of Ark by Flood Editions.

Ronald Johnson's papers are held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Collection at the University of Kansas Libraries. His books are published in the U.S. by Flood Editions. Send all inquiries to peter [at] luxhominem [dot] com.

Below is a link to the recording of “ARK 38, Ariel’s Songs to Prospero,” for Dorothy Neal, recorded with Roger Gans at KQED in San Francisco in the early 1980s. It is “constructed out of recordings of songs of the birds of eastern United States,” according to Johnson.

A God In Drone by James belflower

When I think of the Old Testament the first thing that comes to mind is not rich, textured, drone music. However, AMULETS, the tape + electronics moniker of Austin based audio/visual artist Randall Taylor, crystallizes them beautifully. On his album The Old Testament, AMULETS repurposes Old Testament books on tape. So, if you spent much of your childhood punching play on various bible versions recorded on poor quality TDK or Maxell cassettes, then the stretched, looped, and collaged stories will melt into biblical soundscapes that not only bring to mind those moments but pleasantly subvert them. What I love about Old Testament is that there remains a god lurking in these warm sonic clouds, but it is not the angry, vengeful god the Old Testament leads us to expect. Instead, AMULETS finds a human heat in the ambient tape scrub, a viscous and sensuous cumulus of biblical proportions. Check it out and enjoy!

 

Find other AMULETS offerings here.

 

 

 

Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics - Part 1 by James belflower

At the Disembodied Poetics Conference: Writing/Thinking/Being at Naropa University, in October, 2014 David James Miller, Maryam Parhizkar, and myself discussed the influence of music on our critical and creative writing practices in a panel titled "Echo Locution: Aural / Environment / Body / Poetics." The conversation afterward was very rewarding and there were many questions about the various textual and musical sources referenced. To say thanks, and to keep that conversation going, we've posted a brief summary of our talks and a list of resources from our papers. This is the first of three parts. We hope you enjoy!

To Know Noise Is to Know Another: Luc Ferrari's Sound Newspaper Far West News

James Belflower

The Italian-born French composer Luc Ferrari was pivotal in the musique concrète scene emerging in Postwar France, which was characterized by the use of found sound, tape manipulations, and extended instrumentation. From one of his first found sound experiments in Danse Organiques (1971-73), which recorded two women making love, to his extended aural travelogue of he and his wife’s tour through the Southwest in the late 1990s, Far West News (1998-99), Ferrari provocatively pulled intimate noise into an historical period where abstract methods of music composition dominated the European and American scenes. In Far West News, Ferrari employs found sound, minimalist editing, and a variety of innovative compositional techniques to create a Sound Newspaper, a haunting "ambiguous realism" composed from recordings of his sightseeing tours, conversations, and ambient audio during their trip. Contrary to the alienation noise typically provokes, Far West News suggests that an encounter with noise is instead a form of communication rich with intimacy. Ferrari's meticulous, sensitive, and hands-on approach to collecting and composing with found sound demonstrates that when we consider noise as deeply relational it allows us to practice non-referential and comparitivist approaches to reality through our senses. Ultimately, noisy encounters encourage us to understand how resonances of all varieties inflect materiality by engendering sonic affinities between human and non-human players in what Ferrari called the "dialectics of the everyday."