Updates to the site become a bit less frequent, but our explorations increase. Latvian winters can be archetypal in their elemental power, and in the past several days we have been exposed to wind, snow, rain and ice. All of these elements carry their own distinctive acoustic signatures, and I have been struggling to keep up with the amazing array of sounds each new day presents.

Equally amazing are the buildings and structures which surround us. Today's explorations took us to the heart of the "Kara Osta", or "War Harbor"--a place more tangible than "The Zone" of Tarkovski's "Stalker", but just as surreal. Liepaja was a major naval installation for the Soviet military, and its western-most European port. Now, all stands in ruins: barracks, offices, workrooms, libraries, docks, training grounds, swimming pools...all stand empty, strewn with debris, ankle-deep with melting snow-water, sabotaged by departing militaries or half-demolished by Latvian workmen. Walking through this place which was the end-point of the Soviet war-machine [an industry which ran that country's economy into the ground], I am reminded of the war fever of my own former home country, the US. On the verge of economic disaster at home, on the verge of military atrocity abroad, I wonder if anyone there would find a lesson in this place or not. What if, instead of finding old Soviet army songbooks, painted slogans from Lenin, USSR rubles and scraps of 8mm propaganda films, we found Big Mac wrappers, Pepsi cans, Magnavox televisions and People magazines? Would the resonance of such a place--after the USA has gone the way of the USSR and dissolved into a collage of economically unstable territories--still be the same? I think so...

The single most astonishing structure left standing is the submarine tank. Twenty meters or so wide, and easily over a hundred meters long, this concrete tube was used to repair the Soviet submersible fleet, and to protect it from aerial surveillance at the same time. Today it was windy, covered in snow, filled with greenish ice and quite dangerous due to large holes in the slippery walkway. In the summer, local children play there when not chased off by drunken security guards. The acoustics inside are sublime. Spacious but resonant, unlike any other building I have been in. Tomorrow I hope to capture some of this atmosphere by introducing new sounds into it.

The field recordings I present today are some of my attempts to document the Latvian winter, as well as to acoustically map the area. I am tagging all of my recordings with GPS coordinates in the hopes that we can design an interface of some kind that offers a new representation of the city. In the meantime, they will live here, in this webjournal. The recordings of trees, bushes and grass are all made with binaural contact microphones. The water sounds were recorded with a stereo condensor mike. Reinterpretations from myself are forthcoming, and reinterpretations from you are welcome.

---derek