Last March, the two Spanish sound maps madridsoundscape and soinumapa were presented in an event at Studio Loos in Den Haag, Netherlands. It was a collaborative concert which merged sounds from Madrid area and Leitza (Navarra), imagining an (im)possible soundwalk through both regions.

HOTS! Soundscape Radio has just released the recording of this event as its podcast number 25.

Download audio file (025_soinumapa_madridsoundscape.mp3)

HOTS! Radio PODCAST #25: MADRIDSOUNDSCAPE + SOINUMAPA
Pablo Sanz + Mikel R. Nieto
Acknowledgments: Yolanda Uriz, Angel Faraldo, Manuel Calurano, Juan Carlos Blancas, Xabier Erkizia.

Periféricos. Arte Contemporáneo en la Provincia de Córdoba
Opening: 7 April, 2010
Place: Sala Puerta Nueva, Córdoba, Spain

Exhibition in Córdoba with the participation of the International Creation Meeting Sensxperiment, a project on which I am working as part of mediateletipos. Our main contributions to this exhibition of artistic and cultural initiatives of the region of Córdoba has been a Dreamachine and the projection of FlicKeR, a documentary about Brion Gysin and the history of this amazing device.

This is a mix I made to accompany the Dreamachine experience in the exhibition.

Download audio file (Dreamachine-MIX.mp3)

donwload (mp3)

Gysin / Burroughs / P-Orridge : “Interviews & Readings” // Cold Spring Tape (CS006, 1989) · Daniel Lercher : “Resonanzen” // Alg-a (alg046, 2008) · ZLB : “I Was Vaguely Aware of Something” // Friendly Virus (T4, 2008) · William Burroughs / Ian Sommerville : “Silver Smoke of Dreams” (early 1960s) · C.P. McDill : “Introspection”, Webbed Hand Records (wh104, 2008) · Kenneth Kirschner : “070905” // 05 compositions, Alg-a (alg018, 2005) · Adrián Juárez : “Cenit” // Split series # 3, Mirakelmusik (mir024, 2007) · Brion Gysin : “3 Permutations [Recalling All Active Agents]” (1960) · Pablo Reche: “Constelación D” // Constelación, Conv (cnv06, 2004) · Sustainer : “Vértice 2” // Vértice, Escala (escala 1:5, 2010) · Minimal States : “Stereopsis” // Like A Photograph, Test Tube (tube187, 2009) · _blank : EXT [procura interna] // Alg-a (alg043, 2008) · Gysin / Burroughs / P-Orridge : “Interviews & Readings” // Cold Spring Tape (CS006, 1989) · Bryon Gysin : “Pistol Poem” (1960) · Gregory Taylor : “Seismic Profile” // Two Maps of Danaraja, Stasisfield (SF-6005, 2008) · Night Drone : “Drift1” // Drifts 1-4, Petcord (pc1108-01, 2008) · Brion Gysin : “3 Permutations [No Poets Don´t Own Words]” (1960) · Shinkei : binaural frequency // Koyuki (koy000, 2007) · Out Level : “Water” // Water Recordings, bypass (bp012, 2008) · ZLB : “Neuronal Adequacy” (2010)

Duration: 132 min | All the included contents released under copyleft licenses.

Escribir, pintar, bailar, componer obras musicales, no para comprobar el propio talento o para decir al mundo o para ayudar a los semejantes a dar un sentido a su vida, sino para tratar de acercarse a uno mismo y no “desperdiciarse” durante toda una existencia. En efecto, ni la introspeción, ni siquiera un análisis son suficientes. Habrá que tener paciencia y humildad. Nunca tendremos nada que ver con un ser substancial, visible, manipulable. Como mucho podremos presumir que esta vez estábamos más presentes ante nosotros mismos y que, a partir de ahora, no volveremos a dejarnos engañar por las apariencias que confundimos con nuestro ser más real. Esta experiencia, si le concedemos algún crédito, no nos entregará jamás todo su misterio. Este sí mismo esencial no es una pura invención nuestra; sin embargo, adquiere forma según nuestros esfuerzos, nuestros tanteos. Entonces, ¿es la obra el fruto de una lenta maduración o de un fulgor insensato?

- Del buen uso de la lentitud, Pierre Sansot

Participating with three sound pieces in the latest edition of the call Puentes Sonoros-Catenarias Digitales, part of the activities of the International Image Festival which takes place in the city of Manizales, Colombia between 13-17th April 2010.

Initiative inspired by the Tower of Herveo, located in the city of Manizales, with the aim of using the tower as a meeting point for sounds received from different parts of the world, contributing to the idea of Manizales as a crossroads intersection for information and knowledge and promoting this city as a point of special interest for dialogue.

Herveo´s Tower was initially situated at a distance of 7km from Manizales, and its now a relic of a 73km long aerial cable way which between 1922 and 1961 constituted the main commercial transport system in the area, mostly used to export coffee to the rest of the world. This 52m and 42 tons wooden tower is the tallest of all which formed part of the system. It was suppossed to be made of steel as the rest of the towers, but the English boat which was transporting its pieces got sunken by a German submarine during WW1. The responsible of its construction managed to built it with 400 screws and 1800 pieces of wood of cedar, cumin, laurel, guayacán and other native species. In 1984 it was transported to its actual location within the city and declared national monument.

An eight-speakers system distributed helicoidally within the wooden structure of the tower will diffuse the sound in the surrounding area. A selection of the sounds received will be played by a software application specially designed, generating a collective work in constant (re)construction. The system will take decisions about the reproduction, combination and spatialization of the sounds, taking also into account the urban surroundings and the diurnal and nocturnal habits of the community, using the surrounding sound level to control its own intensity, keeping a balance between the work and its context.

Siren City Test (7th Nov 2009), Den Haag, Netherlands
Download audio file (DenHaag-SirenCityTest-2009-11-07.mp3)
The Netherlands test its air-raid civil defense sirens system every first Monday of the month at 12h. This tests seems to pretend keep the citizens aware of the system itself, its safety and possibly also of the possible threatens it conjures. All over this country there are installed more than 4200 sound devices of this kind.

Frontera05: Entre valla y muro
Download audio file (Frontera05-Entre-valla-y-muro.mp3)
In October 2005, a Spanish media made public recordings of conversations of the Spanish Civil Guard duing an assault to the boder of Ceuta with Morocco on which 600 subsaharan immigrants were trying to cross it ilegally. In Mediateletipos.net there was a call to make a sound action creating a sound work with those recordings.

ElectroMagneticScape, Porto 2009
Download audio file (Porto-EMScape-2009-07.mp3)
There is a continuous layer of inaudible sounds which also forms part of the contemporary urban soundscape. This is a short track based in the sonification of the electromagnetic spectrum of the city of Porto, made in July 2009. What we listen to could be regarded as a byproduct or a residue of our electronic devices and communication systems. However, could this ‘noise’ also be appreciated as an aesthetically interesting experience?

Last December I participated in a field recording workshop given by Justin Bennett at the Institute of Sonology. As a collaborative project, the participants made a sort of combined audio diary, recording sounds from our everyday environments during 24 hours. In Everyday Life we reconstructed and reinterpreted these 24 hours, compressed into a 30 minute-long live performance. The performance took place on Saturday 20 February 2010 at Studio Loos. As support-act Justin performed his new piece Raw Materials, which he premiered just a couple of weeks earlier during Transmediale in Berlin.

Almost nothing has been posted on this site for a few months, the longest hiatus on its short history. I guess it has been one of the effects of life keeping me quite busy lately, with my attention being sucked into other demanding areas. The same goes for Mediateletipos, project on which in the last few months I continued working, but paradoxically not posting so constantly as before.

This comes to the point that among other major existential thoughts, I have been ruminating recently the idea of restructuring my online space one more time. I considered several approaches about how to interconnect my somehow fragmented activities, ongoing projects and ideas under the same domain. My thoughts were aimed towards finding strategies to make all this online experience simpler, clearer and more useful. For visitors and for me too, since I consider this a tool for research, personal development and communication, not purely a showcase.

Among the many possibilities, I thought about things such as breaking my online presence into several monographic blogs, creating a separate portfolio style web just for ‘artistic’ projects, opening a tumblr or an indexhibit. In the meantime I got into twitter, which is nice to limit the length of my posts and keeps me updated about the thoughts of a bunch of cool friends and some other nice input, even though I do not check it a lot. On the other hand, my experiment with Facebook ended in a liberating Suicide 2.0 during Xmas. Nothing against social platforms in general (they are just tools) but in the end I guess the weird feelings of being overexposed, its alienating machinery or the time-hole / demanding pet effects, took over the other great sides it might has. Maybe in any of my future lives I would reconsider that decision!

In another department, questions about which language(s) to use on this site also came to my mind, since this situation of living somehow in a bilingual mode is still pretty much new to me (yes, STILL after three years of being an expat!), but in that regard I decided to think global and stick to Shakespeare´s mother tongue as my main active communication language, which also I think keeps me improving on my faulty language skills.

For the rest, I had not arrived to very definitive conclusions yet, but it happens that following an unexpected series of events on which Mediateletipos got hacked by an anonymous ocularcentric command and my own site was screwed up during a rutinary backup, I decided that it is the moment to undertake the change. All in all, being confronted again with such tiring technical issues, I decided that it must be healthier keeping just a site for all my explorations. Design-wise, after a late-night session of browsing and trying-out themes I got seduced by the possibilities of Thematic, a WP Theme Framework which I still need to devote some time to in order to learn how to customize properly accordingly to my own necessities. For now, even if there are many things to be changed, I am quite happy that the out-of-the-box theme is not horrible to my eyes, so I can take my time for renewing the site progressively in a longer period and also focus in the content. Just for the record, my choice more than one year ago for the previous incarnation of this site was ‘IMPATIENCE‘, which I chose in a sudden epiphanic outburst (for obvious reasons).

Anway, one of my secret plans for this Spring was posting a few updates about recent activities, continuing my modest project of keeping a sort of sound diary with my field recordings and also maybe taking some time for blogging in a little bit more personal and ‘ellaborate’ way than I usually do. Since the flu visited me yesterday, I spent part of my recovering day looking into this matters, getting started with this nth online (re)construction and writing this. As Pascal said: “Men have only one problem: that is, they don’t know how to rest in a quiet room”.

Last February I developed a mini-project in collaboration with Juan Cantizzani, during a Smell and Art course given by Maki Ueda at the ArtScience Interfaculty. The theme proposed by Maki was to create an olfactory game based in the use of smell and communication.

Juan and me chose to explore the connections between sound, smell and place, using the building of the academy as the location to interrogate with our ears and noses. We extracted scents in the different departments and made non-combustible (Neriko) inciense with some of them. Our game consisted in matching these scents with recordings made in the corresponding locations.

The course was a great opportunity to undertake some nose training and reflect a bit about our olfactory sense, in addition to get practically introduced into techniques for smell extraction and diffusion. Kate Fox´s The Smell Report gives an overview on the human sense of smell. This is an intriguing article about smounds, the combined perception of smell and sound. And don´t forget to check Maki´s Scent Laboratory blog to know more about her artistic research.

Existe, me parece, una afinidad entre la pequeña ciudad de provincias y la llovizna. Reservaré los tornados para el campo y todavía más para los grandes espacios que asola la tempestad. Las cosechas están en peligro, las granjas pueden quedarse aisladas. El viento dispone del espacio suficiente para tomar impulso y arrollar todo a su paso. Una lluvia diluviana en una ciudad pequeña estaría fuera de lugar y correría el peligro de introducir lo sublime, lo catastrófico, en donde no tiene ninguna razón de ser. Una ciudad grande acepta mejor los asaltos del cielo. A su desmesura se añade la de la megalópolis. Los transeúntes, los vehículos están en un estado de furor antes de que caiga el rayo y retumbe el trueno. El desorden (el caos) es simplemente más grande y los transeúntes aceleran el paso, ya rápido de por sí. La llovizna permite a la ciudad de provincias ser un poco más púdica, subraya apenas los rasgos de su graciosa cara. Cae sobre las fachadas, sobre la frente de los niños, se posa delicádamente sobre sus capuchas y la pequeña ciudad se recoge en sí misma con más intimidad y alegría. Cierra más temprano los postigos de las ventanas, los comercios, el ayuntamiento. Sus habitantes comienzan a soñar, toman asiento, se desembarazan del futuro, piensan en lo que habría podido ser: una pasión romántica, su infancia. La luz es tenue para no malgastar, pero de esa manera las mentes se sustraen al presente. La lluvia rodea la ciudad con una inmensa y húmeda esclavina, y el resto del mundo, ya imperceptible en la vida normal, se desvanece.

- Del buen uso de la lentitud, Pierre Sansot

LOOS SPRING CONCERT | Fri 26th March | 20:30h | damage: 5eu
Studio Loos, de Constant Rebecqueplein 20-3, Den Haag, Netherlands

flyer + program

line up:

Yolanda Uriz
Clouds

Stephanie Pan
Our Lady of Late

Steilos Manousakis
Fantasia on a Single Number

Mikel R. Nieto, Pablo Sanz
madridSoundscape + Soinumapa

SOINUMAPA and MADRIDSOUNSDSCAPE are two platforms devoted to phonography and the appreciation of the acoustic dimension of our experience. Both work as online sound maps where anybody can participate uploading their own field recordings, which are located in a map and shared
publicly.

Soinumapa was created in 2005 by Luz María Sanchez with the support of Arteleku´s Audiolab and since then, the project has evolved and continues growing. It has been present in different contexts in Spain and also internationally, such as in Tuned City in Berlin.

Madridsoundscape is a younger project, born in 2008 following a collaboration between the Association CRC, La Casa Encendida and Escoitar.org. The project is currently maintained by Manuel Calurano.

This is the first time that both soundmaps make a joint presentation, which will consist in a concert based on field recordings from the two regions.

Come and listen!

Download audio file (Barcelona-Port-Vell-Walk-2006-05-bin.mp3)

listen at radio aporee

Walking in Port Vell, Barcelona. May 2006.
(Binaural sound, better on headphones).

Download audio file (Scheveningen-North-Sea-2009-03.mp3)

listen at radio aporee
photos of the area

Location: Scheveningen – The Hague, NL
Date: March 2009
Mics/Recorder: Rode NT-4 + 2x DPA 4060 / Fostex FR-2LE

What? What are you talking about? the Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. I can´t remember any technological experience since that was quite so wonderful as being able to take music and move it through landscapes and architecture.

- William Gibson, Time out, 6 Oct. 1993: 49

The World According to Sound. Investigating the World of Walkman Users
Michael Bull, New Media & Society, Vol. 3, No. 2, 179-197 (2001)

The Sonic Composition of the City
Jean-Paul Thibaud, The Auditory Culture Reader (2003)

Walkman cumple 30 años @ The Ratzinger Times (I, II, III y IV)

Headphones: Sound Without Space (Aair.fm, 2009)

LIGNA