Cathleen
Grado

The Fells
field recordings/self-made instruments
2007-15, Brooklyn and Brazil
 
Recordings of water from a flood in the woods which occured after construction and clearing of trees…among other things. Mixed for headphones / adjust to med. to high volume. 

The Fells is a multimedia piece created with video, field recordings and self-made instruments. Recordings were gathered from contrasting urban and rural environments. The urban sounds include recordings of freight trains on a former commuter railway line, traveling in the early morning and late at night, as well as recordings of water in decaying concrete and piping within the railway overpass structures after excessive rainfall. The rural recordings include sounds of water traveling through the Fells forest outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Recent flooding and construction around the natural landscape created many new bodies of still and running water.

Additionally, crystal glasses, singing bowls, contact microphones, and bowed instruments were used for compositions in the studio. A video was made featuring locations of the field recordings mixed into video collage.

For the Bike Box performance, site specific audio was transmitted by an iPhone application developed by David Gagnon. While biking through central Brooklyn, participants were able to listen to pieces geographically tagged to their location, and in turn, transmit the recordings back to the gallery for live remixing. The Bike Box project was developed by Sabine Gruffant and Bill Brown.

For the Dragonfly Festival, the composition was installed in a wooded area used as a temporary Soundfjord gallery space outside the main festival stage.