THE SOUND OF ONE FOOT WALKING

I was digging through the bargain bin at Café Oto, the ‘home for creative new music that is outside the mainstream’ and came across an album which seemed to be just for me.  It was titled Walk…Stay…by Yan Jun.  I hadn’t heard of either the album or the artist but that title meant I had to buy it, so I did.  A fiver well spent.

 

Yan Jun, I now know, is a Chinese musician, poet and occasional ‘dancer’ who uses noise and field records, and has been known to say, ‘I wish I was a piece of field recording.’ Well, don’t we all?

 

Walk…Stay…has 8 untitled tracks, and I’m quoting from the album notes here, ‘Tracks 1, 3, 5, and 7 were Recorded by Yan Jun in Liulichang and Dongsi Beidajie, Beijing; Zhujiajiao, Shanghai; and Lashihai, Yunnan, walking with an Edirol R09 digital recorder in hand. Yan Jun suggests you listen to them while taking a walk.’The other tracks are ‘sound fragments ... Most of them are residue from editing. Some are recording disorders. Yan Jun suggests you listen to them while taking a break, sitting, lying down, or daydreaming.’

Well, the CD soundsmuch as you might expect: voices, street noise, distant unidentifiable drone and whines – but you know it’s really quite listenable. I can't find any pictures of Yan Jun walking, but here he is sitting at a desk making noise.

Sound walks now seem to be everywhere, they may even be a ‘thing.’  I understand the term was first used by members of the World Soundscape Project led by R. Murray Schafer  in Vancouver in the 70s.  The first one I went to was in Long Beach in 2007.  I still have the CD and even the map:

My memories of the event are understandably patchy, though I know I walked the whole area.  I don’t play the CD very often and I don’t recognize the names of most of the performers – though one I do recognize is Steve Roden, a visual and sound artist who lives, or at least used to live, in a dome in South Pasadena, actually a ‘bubble house’ designed by Wallace Neff.  

 

Roden, I understand, is a proponent of ‘lowercase music,’ a name that speaks eloquently for itself. I can’t say how much of a walker Roden is, though his blog, not updated recently, makes various references to walking and he quotes John Cage on elevator music ‘perhaps you did walk around inside of it (the music in the elevator): the architecturality of music is now a technical possibility and a poetic fact.’

 

Steve Roden

In more recent times I remember, during lockdown, an online performance by Carl Stone and a couple of other performers that involved ambient sounds recorded in Tokyo.  Of course, I can’t find it now.  But I do know that when Stone was first in Japan in 1988/9 he collected many hours of city sounds, that became the basis for his piece Kamiya Bar.  

 

I can't find it online but here's a piece of Stone's that I like very much - you could definitely listen to it while walking.

And do I know from Stone’s Instagram feed, that he does a lot of walking around Tokyo at night, and I understand he still takes his mobile recorder with him. And here is walking, though not in Tokyo and not at night.

STONE WALKING

 In the current issue of The Wire magazine the very wonderful Carl Stone is interviewed by 

the very wonderful Emily Bick.  This is one of the pictures accompanying the article.

 

Carl Stone

I can’t describe Carl Stone’s work any better than Emily Bick does: ‘snatches of sound sampled and looped, layered and time-shifted, decontextualized and transformed … The results are as mind-melting as you’d expect if you fed tape loops through a psychedelic Cuisinart, followed by a hacker-modified replicator from Star Trek.’

 

I also happen to know, because I follow him on Instagram that Stone something of walker and he takes photographs as he goes, and since he divides his time between Tokyo and Los Angeles this produces some very interesting results.

 

In Tokyo this kind of thing:

In Los Angeles this kind of thing:

 

Since both these places are his home I don’t suppose this counts as ‘traveling’ but I found this interesting remark of his from a 2016 interview with the magazine LA Record from 2016

‘When I travel, unlike tourists who might have a camera strapped on, I walk around with a portable recorder looking for interesting sounds. I don’t necessarily have a goal in mind. Sometimes there are certain places that I know should have interesting sounds. I’m very attracted to marketplaces and things like that. And I especially like urban soundscapes, so when I go to a city, I will always have my recorder handy. I think I mentioned earlier that I lived in Tokyo for six months back in the late 80s, and at that time, I had a portable digital recorder. It’s what’s called a DAT recorder and a stereo microphone and a pair of headphones, just walking around soaking up the sounds.’

 

There are two photographs accompanying The Wire article, the one at the top of this post and also this one:

 

It does not strike me as the most flattering picture of Mr. Stone, and then I saw that the photographer was Michael Schmelling who is a top photographer, but I too have been photographed by him, and flattery is really not what he does.  We can live with that.  We have to.

 

 

MARKS OF WEAKNESS, MARKS OF WOE

There’s something about walking in London. Wherever you go in London you see strange, interesting and sometimes incomprehensible things. And some of us take photographs.

Of course, to be walking down a London street taking photographs may suggest that you’re a rube, or possibly a mark, but I like to think of myself as a photoflaneur, a term that I just made up, but I’m sure others have used it already.

Now, I know there are strange, interesting and incomprehensible things everywhere, but it seems to me that in London you see more oddities per mile, per street, per minute, than in any other place in England. And I’ve been wondering why this should be. Obviously it has something to do with population density. Pack people in tightly, and the weirdness will start to show. When a city acquires a certain size and mass, the population feels freer to be more eccentric, to express their peculiarities, and I’m not saying that’s always a good thing. I wouldn’t for example be thrilled to be living next to this house:

But in London my feelings would be of no consequence. The bigger the city, the less likely you are to know your neighbours, and for many of us that’s an attraction. You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and even if you did know them, you wouldn’t care what they thought about you. There’s a lot to be said for that. Or maybe it’s not so much about the city as about the walker’s perception, by which I mean that a big bad city sensitizes you. You need to keep your eyes peeled, your wits sharp, in case of real or imagined dangers, and that makes you aware of all kinds of things that are going on around you.

Ultimately I think this is only a partial explanation. Among the Instagammers I follow are Dinah Lenny, and Lynell George who wander around LA taking pictures like this in Dinah’s case:

And this in Lynell’s case:

In LA, I suppose, the real or imagined dangers would be drive-by. I also follow Carl Stone who wanders around Tokyo, which we’re regularly told is the safest big city in the world, taking pictures like this:

Incidentally, I did an online search for the world’s most dangerous cities. There seems to be some difference of opinion. Mexico seems over-represented, and Port Moresby and Caracas always very high on the list, though I’d have thought Kabul or Baghdad would be higher. I don’t doubt that these places quicken the senses, and I don’t doubt there are some walkers, observers and on the streets there, though I don’t suppose they think of themselves as flaneurs, photo or otherwise.