This performance explores field recordings of electrical generation and transmission.
Source 1: Navajo Generation Station, Page Arizona. At 2.25 gigawatts, the largest coal-fired generating plant west of the Mississippi. It delivered power to Arizona, Nevada and California. It closed in November 2019.
Source 2: Potrero Point, San Francisco. AKA Warm Water Cove, Toxic Beach. Electricity generated in Antioch enters the city here via an underwater cable.
Infrastructure Soundworks examine the hidden works and underpinnings of the Industrial Antrhropocene era, primarily through the physicality of sound.
As of 2018/2019, preliminary material and exploration is being made for a piece about the end of coal.
“Oil and Gas” is one such sonic journey through desert landscapes of fossil fuel production, composed of field recordings made in the shale gas fields of the San Juan and Green River Basins of Colorado and New Mexico. These lands are an epicenter of fossil-fuel extraction for the present and the near future, and are positioned as strategic energy resource for energy security for the United States.
A wilderness filed with machines, vast areas of remote high desert territory are spiderwebbed with access roads, pipelines and wellheads. All this industrial infrastructure is what makes possible an energy-use profile unprecedented in the history of life on earth. We turn our ears toward this infrastructure, to better understand ourselves within the world.
This is a subset of, an extension of, and an alternate direction for the material from Listen Toward the Ground, an audio tour formatted piece which was shown at ISEA2012.
Listen Toward the Ground is a site-specific composed soundscape work, intended for listening to while walking a defined route. Using headphones and a voice-guided tour format, it superimposes a recorded and composed soundscape of oil- and gas-field infrastructure onto the soundscape of downtown Albuquerque New Mexico. Drifting fragments of voices knit the personal side of oilfield life into the industrial.
The usually unseen and unheard landscape of energy extraction is brought into parallel with the daily world in which we live our lives.
At ISEA2012, visitors could check out a sound player and headphones and take the self-guided walk.
The sound in this video consists of the program audio, overlaid with audio recorded during the video shoot of the walk.
Headphones or quality speakers recommended.
Listen Toward the Ground (Albuquerque) for ISEA2012 – Video Walk Through
The concept was originated for as-yet undeveloped GPS-driven show-control format, allowing the walk to be guided without the vocal signposting.
The walk begins at the Northeast corner of Sixth and Central. Go there and press play.
The route:
Sound:
[ or download mp3 file ]
Concept, sound design and composition, recording and mix by Jeremiah Moore. The recording contains musical improvisation by Friends of the Tank: Max Bernstein, Mark McCoin, Jeremiah Moore, Bruce Odland. The Tank is a developing sonic arts space in western Colorado, learn more at tanksounds.org.
Created for ISEA2012 Machine Wilderness, the convention of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts. Thanks to 516Arts and Bay Area Sound Ecology.
Thanks to Jordan Sawyer and Jessie Hudson, Andrew Roth, Jim McKee and Moment Soundscape Group, Jorge Bachmann, Aaron Ximm, Andrea Williams, Daniel Sawyer, Jerry Sawyer, Abigail Sawyer, Andrea Polli.
Headphones courtesy ME-DI-ATE.NET and Project Soundwave.
Affiliated with Bay Area Sound Ecology, a chapter of American Society for Acoustic Ecology and WFAE, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.
A sound poem about the Federal Food Safety Enhancement Act
Food Safety Enhancement is sound piece, a soundpoem of sorts, commissioned by dancer/choreographer Rowena Richie. It was created as a kind of personalized response to a piece of legislation which was being discussed a lot in the spring of 2009 – the Federal Food Safety Enhancement Act – and in particular a part of it which some were calling “Scorched Earth” – which promoted the idea of creating “Sterile Buffer Zones” around farmer’s fields. But really the piece is about disconnects: About technocracy trying to regulate the interstice where commerce and industry meet growing things. It ended up taking this fragmentary, internal narrative sort of form, hinting at internal imagery and confusion at the information in the news.
Also published on The Unobserved:
http://theunobserved.com/culture/food_safety_enhancement/
A sonic exploration of the overtone series of San Francisco’s mechanical street sweepers, this piece was performed live on Simon Lee’s Bus Obscura as it drove through the suburban town of Dublin, California.
It is part of a thread of work uncovering beauty in the everyday.
Our first child was born april 20, 2003. I set out to imagine ways in which the baby hears inside the womb, and make a tapestry out of those imaginings using everyday living sounds as material… Dreaming an image of these familiar sounds as lullaby. His heartbeat is a keynote, recorded by patching into an ultrasonic fetal heart monitor, threaded into driving over expansion joints on the 101 freeway.
Headphones or high quality speakers recommended.
