Forty miles off the coast of Scotland lie the Outer Hebrides, an archipelago of islands whose populace have seen some harsh times yet still endure.  Over the past three decades, Cathy Lane has enjoyed a love affair with the archipelago. The Hebrides Suite is her sonic love letter to the land and people.

As a mixture of field recordings and interviews, the album has the feel of a television show without the sound.  Soon one begins to realize that the images are conjured in the mind, and perhaps appreciates the old radio shows a bit better.  Those shows captured the imagination and inspired generations to picture their own images.  While it helps to have the physical edition (with beautiful, extensive liner notes), it’s fascinating to simply listen and to be awash in sounds.  Awash is the key word, as the ocean is never far from the foreground.  Sea salt…

Eastern sounds are unfamiliar to most Western ears, and vice versa.  What seems innocuous in one territory may be misinterpreted in another.  Never is this more apparent than on the opening selection of Mosaïque Mosaic, as what seems at first to be a militant speaker turns out to be the voice of a church evangelist at a Sunday service.  The difference between expected and apparent timbre would be a wonderful subject for study in international relations.  Do we really understand each other?  If not, what would it take?

For the sound artists involved in this recording, it took a pair of visits to Cameroon.  The seeming abrasion of amplified speech and music from outdoor speakers (not exclusive to Cameroon) masked a deep appreciation of musical tradition among the residents.  The West manipulates music as well; the amplified bass and distortion in dance music and the removal of “non-essential” sounds…

Let me say first of all, I just about barely know who Rick Stein is.  A quick google search tells me he is a fairly well known celebrity chef- I didn’t check if American or British or other.  For the purpose of this post: not important.   Anyway, this gentleman here:

Photo via radiotimes.com

So how do I get to him? Indirectly via cable tv, which generally tends to give us precisely nothing intetesting to watch.  Skipping through the hundreds of channels the other day, I come across what could have been a National Geographic documentary- except the channel is named ‘Food‘ something-or-other, and the elderly gentleman is not Attenborough.

The scene is idyllic: lush greenery everywhere as Stein himself and his local guide, a young man who is steering the boat, are quietly gliding through a mangrove forest.

Photo: Barry Skipsey, australiangeographic.com

They are having an exchange about the endagered state of the forest, and about the…

Dawn Scarfe is an artist whose work investigates resonance, perception and environmental atmospheres. She works across a variety of media and contexts including site-specific installation, performance and field recording. Recent exhibitions include Klinkende Stad Kortrijk, ZKM Karlsruhe, Q-O2 Brussels, La Casa Encendida Madrid, TONSPUR Museumsquartier Vienna, Bios Athens and 176 Zabludowicz Collection, London. For comprehensive information please visit: http://www.dawnscarfe.co.uk
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ER. Can you describe some of the main themes and pre occupations behind your work?
DS.’Sensitivity’ is an ongoing concern, how people or things respond to changes in their surroundings. I’m interested in how the sound of particular atmospheres can seem to convey an emotional charge, and I’m drawn to instruments that are thought to extend the senses.

ER. Do you know when/where this interest began?
DS. It’s partly because I’m aware of the quirks and limits of my own senses that I find the detail of how we hear…

1 | Thoreau.
Put Walden down, now. You haven’t ‘just discovered’ how Thoreau was, like, totally ahead of R. Murray Schafer.  That pond is teeming with hydrophones at this stage.

Unimpressed: Thoreau

2 | Contact microphones and melting ice, or the go-to first timer experiment the moment the kit is unboxed.

3 | The pensive, looking-in-the-distance-while-monitoring biog shot. This one’s fairly unavoidable. We’ve all been there.

4 | Soundmaps. As apps and GPS make the collection of a ginormous amount of mediocre-to-atrocious quality sounds possible from all conceivable sources including your granny’s Nokia, this really isn’t worth pursuing any further. Moving on.

5 | Tweeting exclusively about your ‘Upcoming Releases’ on that label (what was it again…oh, right. The one set up by you.)  Zero likes.

6 | Bells. In the wise words of professional recording Gandalf Mikael Fernstrom: ‘Every sound student has his Quasimodo moment’. Let it…

Many of you will be familiar with John Cage’s famous 10 Rules for Students and Teachers from 1968, which are a constant source of inspiration.  Recently I have come across a similar set of good advice through a different discipline (painting). This blog post recirculated the advice of Irwin Greenberg, a teacher at the High School of Art & Design and the Art Students League of New York who passed away in 2009 age 87.  Although we work with audio and not visual arts, I believe some of the best tips and advice can come from cross-pollination with other disciplines, and as such I dived into the long list (100!) to find a lot of advice easily applicable to any creative pursuit. Some I don’t necessarily agree with, but others are great.  The 10 I have picked and listed below are the ones that in my opinion are wonderful advice and encouragement for us sound artists…