The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight but hurt not

[imomus]

I love radio that uses sound evocatively. For instance, this excellent Radio 3 Sunday Feature about the artist Donald Judd, or the programmes made by Arte Radio. Inspired by examples like these, I've decided to do an audio blog today. It's basically all the little lofi sound files I've been capturing with my digital camera since coming to Japan in mid-July, dropped into iTunes randomly then cross-faded. It gives a rather evocative sound picture of the archipelago, I think. I've concentrated on street cries, children's songs, the sounds of nature in summer, and all the little electronic melodies that float in the air in Japanese cities, accompanying activities as banal as collecting rubbish or crossing the road. The isle is full of noises...

Japan Sound Collage, Summer 2004 (24.72 MB mp3 file, 21.35 minutes, 160 kbps, mono)

Comments

Realism, reborn?

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine much more "into" the area of music than me told me lately about the original, what was it, "musique concrete"? When we felt music by instruments had been completely exhausted and the only way to create a unique sound was to use noises around us...

It reminds me a bit of the suprematists and abstract painters around the same era, with the same thought-process. Realism was over and the "Will" as Schopenhauer put it was best expressed choppily through images without even direct symbolic value.

Nowadays we've passed through reactionary irony to a post-modern view of realism. Capturing the beauty of the natural world (even the natural industrial world) by expressing it through itself directly isn't new, but somehow you render it so by your medium... I've seen it done with painting, but not really with "music."

It's very interesting to see this, as it is in metaphysics, "neo-realist" perspective in sound. Truly, you are a pioneer!