Sou'wester and beyond: ephemeral sound, image, moving image
Ephemeral Sound > Captured in a recording > preserved on tape loops > repeating & repeating > processed through electronics > back to ephemeral/ not easily reproducible.
This is an idea that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Back to this later.
I spent a one week artist residency at Sou’wester near Seaview, OR with about 30 other artists during the annual Arts Week. For those that don’t know, the residency starts on a Sunday. Artists work on their projects for a week, up until Saturday, where they present their work. Some works were performances, some installations, other artists opened up their studio to simply show their work. So many artists came from different backgrounds, with many different mediums. There really didn’t feel like any kind of overlap with what people made. There were artists who worked with metal, filmmakers, bookmakers, writers, land artists, and so many others. Being around all of these sweet people for a whole week felt like a special dream. The kind of community that I wish to exist in for the rest of my life.
There wasn’t any kind of competition, just each artist working on their own practice or lending a hand where it was needed, if they could. It felt so warm. One artist made me a crayon out of my charcoal bits and beeswax, after I had told her that my charcoal was too loose to collect rubbings of different textures. The same artist even took me to a rock jetty near a lighthouse in Cape Disappointment, to find this droning sound that we kept hearing back at Sou’wester. We couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from, but it felt special to chase the sound and try to capture a recording of it. You can hear it ever so quietly in this recording (shrouded by the harsh wind of that day):
My intent for the residency was to focus on my art practice, and explore what that means to me. Over the past few years, I’ve really enjoyed this process of exploring places and being present: listening to what is happening around me, finding objects to take home, taking photos and video, gathering rubbings of textures that could be interesting. In the past this has looked like collages of word and image to make new works. That week, I spent a lot of time just walking around listening and gathering sounds. I took some photos, and video too, and collected charcoal rubbings of textures.
To be honest, I just did this collecting and exploring as a way to get started with the project. I didn’t know what I was going to make, but I had some idea. I wanted to explore the medium of tape loops, gathering sounds and preserving them on repetitive 5-15 second loops. I used a Tascam Portastudio 4-track to record everything. I didn’t use a computer at the Sou’wester for recording music, I wanted it to all be analog. By working with tape loops, I was able to think more about how I would “perform” these loops at the end of the week, rather than what an album or recorded work might be like.
Here is a tape loop demo from the first day of collecting sounds. (my first ever attempt at trying to use a 4-track cassette recorder):
Over the first few days, and after talking through my ideas with Jakee (who worked on a very wonderful book project at the Sou’wester the same week), and with others, I started thinking about the idea that I started this letter with:
Ephemeral Sound > Captured in a recording > preserved on tape loops > repeating & repeating > processed through electronics > back to ephemeral/ not easily reproducible.
I really loved how so many of my tape loops were these sounds that were hard to replicate and completely ephemeral. Perhaps that’s what all music is? But to me this project felt like it turned “non-music sounds” into music just by using tape loops as a medium: by looping over and over these non music sounds. This is no new idea, but it felt new to me in my own practice.
As I kept exploring this idea in my little studio trailer space, I started to think about the ephemeral nature of charcoal as a medium, and made collages for each of the 6 tapes that I made:
Each tape has its own quality, and therefore each collage became an abstracted interpretation of what I put on tape.
Here are the tapes, named:
Some of the tape names are as follows:
Wind Piano
Forest Thought
Wooden, Heavy
Water (Time)
Swallowed by the Rain
Campfire (Time) (Warp)
I also used footage that I collected in a 7 minute looping video that would be projected while I performed these 6 tapes on that Saturday night in the Sou’wester lodge. Here are some stills from the video:
I feel so grateful to have had the week to explore some parts of my practice that I otherwise wouldn’t have. Here is a video recording of my final performance (only the first half) with the looping video projected in the back:
By Friday, I had decided that I wanted to call the project “untitled sound art project about the ephemeral quality of natural elements processed through hardware and temporarily preserved in loops until they wither overtime,” …
But I still will probably change the title overtime as the idea becomes clearer.
The Sou’wester residency feels like just the start to a much larger project that I am excited to explore.
I’ll be performing these tape loops again, in a different way, this Saturday, March 29th, at Barn Radio in Portland, OR. with James K.
Please come and hang out!
Here are a few photos and videos that I took during my walks on the beach and in the forest:
you are sooooo smart and cool