credit: Foundsoundscape

Foundsoundscape

Installation

Foundsoundscape website. 8 March 2015.

Description

Foundsoundscape was an online “radio” project curated by Janek Schaefer. Over a twenty-four hour period, he continuously mixed 1000 locations as captured by 100 different recordists, including Chris Watson, Brian Eno, Charlemagne Palestine, Phil Niblock, Richard Chartier, Stephen Vitiello, William Basinski, Scanner, Taylor Dupree, Simon Fisher Turner, and Philip Jeck.

I contributed three field recordings made in these locations:

• Garrykennedy woods, Co. Tipperary, Ireland
• Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, Ireland
• Casa da Musica, Porto, Portugal

These will be released in due course.

Press

This project was described by Disquiet.

(Janek) Schaefer collated and layered the source audio, so at any point the service is playing three different feeds. Make that four feeds: in addition, there is a live mic in Schaefer’s own studio, and that gets added to the audio. The resulting stream is intended to complement your own place and time. It is less a listening experience than something to be filtered into daily life. The Foundsoundscape site bears the description “live collage of foundsound places to underscore your personal spaces” and the instruction “adjust your volume to background sound.” I ran it for half a day today, and wandered by my desk to occasionally hear chanting, water flowing, and mysterious rhythmic pulses. More often than not the audio was more texture than recognizable content, like a hint of fragrance coming through an open window. In this case, the “window” is an imaginary one, a fiction constructed painstakingly by Schaefer, a window of windows.