Category: Sound
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More Light As Sound
Earlier posts have referred to the sound of the aurora borealis: the review of Ann-Helén Laestadius “Stolen”, a diaristic account of borealis hunting with Britta and a report from the deck of the French ship La Recherche that Himali Singh Soin quoted. I was in the library earlier today and was happy to find a…
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Surrounded by Deep ‘Silence:’ Tété-Michel Kpomassie
Recovering from a snakebite, the sixteen year old Togolese Tété-Michel Kpomassie discovers Robert Gessain’s book The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska lying face up on a shelf of an evangelical bookstore in Lomé: “was it the author’s praise of their hospitality that triggered a longing for adventure, or was it fear of returning to the sacred forest?…
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The Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2022
It has taken me, I realised as I sat down at my computer, almost a year to get round to writing this. 320 days have passed since I visited the Venice Biennale with the express intention of spending time in the Sámi Pavilion, a historic reconfiguration of the building that had been known as the…
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“Journey’s North: Pole to Pole” (2009)
To the John Marchant Gallery in town to see Grace Ndiritu’s “Pole to Pole,” screened as part of the “Light Years Ahead” exhibition curated by Alison McKenna. The film by the Kenya-British artist presents two kinds of images shown side by side and shifting from left to right: short simply-rendered sentences and sequences of black…
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Matthew Henson
Black explorer Matthew Henson’s autobiographical account of the first voyage to the North Pole in 1909 – after six Arctic voyages in the previous 23 years – doesn’t quite equal the excitements encountered by his fictional double in the pages of Gary Phillips’ The Ice Temple of Harlem, but intrigues nonetheless, not least because of how…
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“Tuning into the Norwegian Landscape”
Embossed on the grey cover are a range of dates (“2018 – 2021”), the name of the author (“Alexander Rishaug”), a sub-title (“Tuning into the Norwegian Landscape”) and, shifted to the right margin, the legend “Field Notes.” Although this constellation of information suggests an orientation towards familiar territories, this implication is deceptive: the book is a…
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Innspilling
I arrived in Tromsø a couple of days ahead of our Arctic Auditories schedule so that I could spend the weekend recording, trying to test an idea that has been gestating ever since my ears were pricked by a comment from Annabelle’s March 2022 soundwalk. Just a casual remark during the debriefing, but the idea…
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The Lights of My Listening / Eva Saulitis
Eva Saulitis’ Into Great Silence is so intricately constructed from such thoughtful materials that it can ably withstand the weight of any cliché loaded on to its shoulders: profound, poignant, it holds a poetry to change lives. A field biologist who devoted her research to orca populations in Prince William Sound, Alaska, site of the 1989 Exxon…
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On Time and Water
Andri Snaer Magnason deploys a number of acoustically-attuned devices in this book, including an early foray that seeks to make metaphorical meaning from the notion of ‘white noise’: “Compare it to trying to record the sounds of a volcanic eruption. With most devices, the sound becomes muddled; nothing can be heard but white noise. For…
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Lichen Memories
I remember an outing in Autumn 2019, when Katrin, Britta and I turned left at the top of the unmetalled path that led from our fjordside cabin and followed the wet tarmac through the dripping pine woods, past the baying sledge dogs and along another coastline before heading home. The trip was partly punctuated by…