Here are highlights from September!
Hope you will enjoy and join us for an evening of listening together soon! We meet via Zoom these days. Looking forward to our next gathering.
Highlights:
We got the night started with a sonic prompt and introductions: what is your favorite fall sound or sound that you look forward to hearing falling?
Henry: Leaves underfoot, and also dodging them
Lizzie: Crunching leaves and also getting boots under the leaves and swishing them all around
Sonia: Hooked on leaves too, so many different colors of tree shedding, yellow, red, brown, tan. Enjoys stepping into certain parts where they are burying everything, and enjoying the visual of wet sloppy post-rainfall leaves (though they aren't as sonically satisfying).
Tanya: took the second half of the prompt and said...”the Republican party- unfortunately it doesn't seem to make a sound as it falls” (which is debatable ...though they lost the presidency, it doesn't seem to be falling elsewhere...anyway we aren't about politics at the Lounge). She noted the way that sounds shift as it gets cooler and drier compared to the sounds of humid summers. And commented on how, since moving to a more rural place, the few human sounds around her are more noticeable.
Jocelyn: The sound she thought of was of apples falling from trees and their full thuddy sound on the earth or over cement, which is a little sad and not soo satisfying but sometimes stepping onto really small fallen crab apples over cement can be somewhat satisfying (maybe more texturally than sonically). And that made her wonder if stepping on the pods from gingko trees would be more satisfying if they didn't smell like vomit.
Sound:
Henry: shared audio involving a spoken word and soundscape.
reflections
Sonia: soundtrack was so cool it distracted me (like White Lotus)
Jocelyn: beautiful textures in that refreshing scoring (refreshing break from the overused music from podcast music library scoring). Might enjoy the voicing more as a story than enunciated poetry – though loved the very sparse leaning on the “wee, eees, eees” (which can be tiring if overused but because it was sparse it really worked) and use of silence throughout.
Tanya: Schoenberg's Sprechstimme style, might be interesting to play with to play with the gestural phrasing https://www.britannica.com/art/Sprechstimme
Henry: Lou Reed might be a contemporary version of sprechstimme. Snake eating its tail was symbolic of the rebirth he was conveying. Orouboros https://soundcloud.com/henry-lowman/ableton-orouboros. Shared tracks from King Crimson with added piano and percussion.
Tanya: Being in the music industry as a woman and dealing with unwanted commentary, implied, things said and not said and sometimes outright harassment...sometimes it feels like a constant wash that we (women and female identified folks) learn to ignore but that we shouldn't have to. In a recent exchange with a person in a position of power to promote her work serious professional boundaries were pushed into harassment
from behind a veil of “collaboration.” Among the many inappropriately titled working tracks she took one called Flute Flaunt https://soundcloud.com/tantroniq/flute-flaunt-source/s-6lkuKEWfexn
Tanya created Grow Up
https://soundcloud.com/tantroniq/grow-up-v1/s-3HhcGBHc6ic
use of public domain https://vimeo.com/384796494
Quote of the evening: “It's not hard to not be an ass”
Jocelyn wrapped up the night with audio from a recent Solvable episode about consumerism and faith organizations. She gave a shout out to the old fun moments of public radio production that used to be shared at Listening Lounges in the past: the audio left on the cutting room floor. From time to time that audio can find an easier resting place at the end of a podcast. This little snippet was a joy to publish.
Looking forward to next month!