The sun comes up after 9, and goes down by 4, so we are really having to compress our outdoor explorations into a very small amount of time here. Daylight seems to be about walking around in the ice and the slush, trying out our fledgling Latvian vocabulary to the amusement of the grocery-store ladies and eating panekukas... Night-time is for computers, sounds, ideas, beers, brandijs and balzams. The first audio and video workshop is next Sunday, and Sara and I are both generating a lot of ideas about how to handle it.

My own ideas about sound that I have brought with me to Karosta are taking a particular shape. Talking with Carl and Kristine, the founders of this arts center, I see that other artists come here and are facinated with the ruination. They make films and paintings of this "beautiful desolation" and "picturesque decay" and then wonder why the locals find little value in yet another representation of the decrepit housing blocks and disused factories.

I hope that my approach will be different. I have been thinking a lot about how you can find new value in everyday objects. Of course, I travel quite a bit, and am constantly amazed by the smallest of details in the new places I go... the traffic signs, the color of the bricks, the sound of the wires when the trams ride by... but how can you pass on this absolute excitement to people who have become over-accustomed to these details? Is it enough simply to point them out? Or do I need to do something more, some kind of "DSP magic", to bring life back to something that has slipped below most people's consciousness?

In the area of sound, I have been finding so much inspiration in the field recordings of Toshio Tsunoda, Jeph Jerman's devotion to sound apart from technology, the object studies of Steve Roden's "in between noise", the World Soundscape Project's "Vancouver Soundscapes", Francisco Lopez's "Buildings (New York)", Cornucopia's politically-charged recordings of Cuban wildlife, Chris Watson (before and after the remixes on "Star Switch On"), Fallt's incredible "Invisible Cities" project, Aaron Ximm (the "Quiet American"), Murmer's magnified details, the liberated frequencies of Stephan Mathieu, and so many others... Out of all these influences, I will try to synthesize an approach which can capture the feeling of this place without becoming completely banal, nor becoming completely sensationalistic [like making drum + bass tracks out of it!]

The sonic offering for today comes in two parts. The first is an excerpt of a live improvisation made on Maxim Borisov's Formanta EMS-01 synthesizer. This is a big, nasty Russian synth that is almost totally useless for melody, but has this amazing noise-driven Low Frequency Oscillator with an array of filters behind it. All sounds on the first track came only from this random sequencer, without laying a finger on the keys. The second track resulted from a digital cross-breeding with surface noise from an old Soviet marching record--instant texture and depth! Listen for yourself...

---derek