Formerly known as Jasmina Maschina and Minit, Jasmine Guffond comes to this ball under her own name.  While her music has been (fairly) compared to that of Grouper, her work is primarily instrumental; impressions are formed by sound, rather than lyric.

One amusing exception appears in the center of track two, as Guffond sings about an elephant in her room; yet we’re at a loss to name it.  This curiosity underlines the compelling nature of Guffond’s work, which retreats the more it is played.  Each signal hides another signal, each layer another layer.  This elusive quality draws the listener in like the frost giant’s daughter.  Danger may lurk, yet the listener is blissfully unaware.

The first such segment is found in the waning minutes of the title track: a whispery drone that descends into a whorl of conversation-masking fog.  But the track doesn’t start that way; it begins with…

Return to New Caledonia is an EP about remembrance, even if the remembrance is skewed; flashes of insight mingled with déjà vu.  The music itself is a return, a reinterpretation of things heard on holiday: a return of the mind and the heart, a translation of the real to the impression.  Is this exactly what it sounded like to be there?  No.  Is it true to the mind’s eye?  Only Kate Carr knows for sure, but one would hazard that the answer is yes.

The field recordings and lighter sounds provide the highlights:  the reef fish (who sound somewhat like frogs and woodpeckers) on “La piscine naturelle” mix well with the trickle of water and the occasional shh-shh of a shaker.  A soft synth surfaces slowly in the background, then sinks to the depths.  A dominant drum noise is the only distraction; as the sound of least interest, it would…

A certain irony rests in the fact that I’m listening to the work of a New Zealand artist who traveled across the sea to record the sounds of a river near the home where I was raised.  Even as a child in Connecticut, I used to love spending time by the riverbank, listening to the sounds of running water, the plopping of frogs, the twittering of birds and the rustling of the wind in the wheat around me.  Knowing that this is the same river lends listening a strange nostalgia; we never cross the same river twice, but thanks to Annea Lockwood, we can listen to it multiple times.

A Sound Map of the Housatonic River began as a quadraphonic installation and has recently become Lockwood’s third river study to be released for public enjoyment.  A real map is enclosed so that listeners can trace her path – and…

Hildegard Westerkamp is a composer, radio artist and sound ecologist. 
She is a pioneering figure within the field of soundscape studies and sound ecology and an integral member of the World Soundscape Project. She presents soundscape workshops, performs, writes and lectures internationally. For comprehensive information please visit http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/index.html
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ER. Can you talk about the origins of the Vancouver Soundscape Project – how it came about, and your own involvement.

HW. The World Soundcape Project (WSP) was a research project, initiated by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University in the late 60s and remained under his direction until the late seventies. When I joined the project in 1973, the group (then consisting of R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, Peter Huse, Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davies and myself) were working on the document entitled The Vancouver Soundscape, published shortly after as 2 LPs and a book. It was…

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…