ADDITIONAL SOUND PROJECTS

Somewhere in this realm of spherics you have found yourself. You have been wandering, out with your radio again. Out with the carrier signal as if you are on a date. These actions are inescapable, because at the very core of it, you adore listening. Seasons of hopeful searching for the special moments of static music that grace our hearing. Receiving and transmitting the signals has become an elegant way to move across the land, to make and transport stories, to add a measured teaspoon. These sounds become your second weather and have found ways of making you intensely emotional. This ability to radio forecast frees you and so you have nailed a wire in the ground to make receiving wire, grounded that certain place where waves will fall.

The Distant Exchange - French language version. Written by Jay Needham with a reading by Aurélien Petillot. Created as a micro-radio performance. Thanks to Dick Bingham for letting me record the birds and whitlers in his yard in Stehekin Wa.

“Somewhere in this realm of spherics you have found yourself. You have been wandering, out with your radio again.These actions are inescapable, because at the very core of it, you adore listening. Seasons of hopeful searching for the special moments of static music that grace our hearing. Receiving and transmitting the signals has become an elegant way to move across the land, to make and transport stories, to add a measured teaspoon. These sounds become your second weather and have found ways of making you intensely emotional...”

Spheres - is a work multiple percussion instruments and prepared piano by Ron Coulter. While Ron dips tam tams into a water bath, I spin a scallop shells on the piano strings. Ron Coulter, percussion; Jay Needham, prepared piano and custom electronics.

Sounds for the Lens - I was sleepless at the time, and so this work features some of the sounds from the house as I roamed in the dark. My friend Alberta Skaggs reads an excerpt from her writing near the end that details the lengthening of leg bones. Curated by Harold Schellinx for Tales From the Lighthouse Keepers from Ameland Lighthouse, Netherlands.

In Blacktop - we are out of town, the real outskirts, on a flat county road in America where the streetlights fade to prairie darkness. Night air pools in the darkest shadows. Climb over the rusted fence and we are in. You are in someone else’s yard now, no lights to give you away. That’s one feeling you know, except right now you are in a junkyard. Used soil underfoot. Oil thick ground, rust powdered fine, tight and transformed. Before us stand rows of Detroit's finest. Half crumpled and stacked. Walk among them. Enter the museum of dead transportation.