it is an island after all

Wow, it snowed!! What a blog-worthy natural phenomenon. No but seriously folks, it was quite comforting to wake up, look out the window, and see 'winter' as I have known it my whole life.

You should have seen the headlines though, you'd have thought it was Katrina all over again. I asked Will early on about snow here, and he said (quite accurately) "it snows for about five minutes, everyone freaks out, and they shut down the underground." Which was exactly how it went down - there were hour-long delays and some lines were out all together. My bus ride was also unusually delayed. Keep in mind that this was a dusting of powder - the photo only looks nice because we can see rooftops and backyards from our 4th floor apartment. On the street, it looked like any other day.


This is a photo of half of my room. Yes, I did pick the purple sheets. Tune in next week to see the other half!

Spent some more time today in the sound editing suite. I loaded the files on that I had recorded on the previously mentioned field recorder. They sound good, but as written in all the reviews I had read about the PMD 660, the preamps are a bit noisy, so you do get a fair amount of hiss on the recording. This depends of course on what you are recording, but I happened to be capturing fairly quiet droning sounds, so it did come through.


While I do enjoy escaping to the sounds of nature, these days I am trying to listen closely to things that are around me all the time. The murmuring dishwasher, Mario's particularly squeeky door, the phone company waking me up at 6:45 this morning on our obnoxiously loud ring with an automated message telling me exactly how to check my voicemail, the wind rattling my room, the way the boiler clicks on whenever you turn the hot water on. Regular stuff.
The field recordings were taken at places which have nice 'naturally occuring' industrial drones, generally caused by some sort of fan or motor, such as this vent nearby one of the CSM buildings, pictured above. I went to these places and recorded myself humming along in close harmony with the naturally occuring drones, moving between unison and slight dissonance, which causes one of my favorite natural sound phonomena of audible beats as the frequencies of myself and the machine come closer together. Other sites included Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, and the the vent fan in my bathroom.
I'm looking into building my own oscillators so that I could 'play along' with various appliances, or write some sort of score, maybe using fans, dishwashers, I'm not sure yet. Or taking said appliances and oscillators (and voice too) out to these places with exisiting drones, and do it site-specific style, with the 'score' crafted to the particular drone of the place.

Brainstorming.

Tommorrow we install the group curatorial project, which actually will be nice to get out of the way. I met the other girls in our group and we talked our way around into a theme and a basic idea of how/where we'll organize the works... but I don't think we've all got our shit together. Anyways tommorrow will tell, I'll take pics 'cause I have to submit documentation. I think the Invasive Species sound piece will go well with what we have in mind.

Rob and I went to see John at his DJ debut at Cafe 1001 the other night, over on Bricklane. Rob was dubious of the venue from the start, describing as a haven for Trustafarians and 'Spainards.' (by which he really meant guys with dreadlocks, frumpy knit clothes and lil' beards) Yeah basically nothing much to note, lots of me and Rob sitting around making fun of people, the guy playing guitar when we got in there was horrible. Like just screaming out of tune over fuzzy guitar, but it wasn't like once you got used to the scream/fuzz that there was anything worthwile or interesting about it. John was basically just playing songs between acts, Pogues, Clash, etc. Easily the best part.
But what really got to me was the next act, specifically their art-jazz-folk female-acoustic-guitar-lead mediocre cover of Outkast's 'NOW! VOL 27'-fodder smash hit 'Hey Ya.' Oooooh god, and to top it off, the drummer just used farrrr too much splash cymbal. It was the only cymbal he had besides the ride but even so, the splash is only good in moderation.

On a related note, there is a player on Arsenal who looks so much like Andre 3000 in the Hey Ya video (mostly the smooth straight black hair) and I kept wanting to tell someone. But I was watching it in a bar of football-entranced Englishmen, so I figured it was best to keep it to myself for the time being.