I Am Standing in a Field is a reworking, a cover, of Alvin Lucier’s iconic 1969 composition, I Am Sitting in a Room. In Lucier’s piece, the composer enunciates the process by which the work will unfold: he will play a recording of his speech back into the room in which it was captured; over the course of each generation the recording is to become affected by the physical characteristics of the room until all that is left is the sonic articulation of space. Lucier’s composition is both a dispassionate investigation into the acoustic properties of built space and an attempt to obscure the artist’s presence in the work.
Lucier’s original transforms space, in this case a simple room, into a laboratory for sonic investigation; I Am Standing in a Field does the same, only adopting the eponymous field as its empirical ground zero. In this version, new sonic events insinuate themselves into each playback, each becoming a part of an aural palimpsest. By the twentieth repetition, a car horn captured in take seven has been transformed into an indistinct resonant pulse. I Am Standing in a Field is a meditation on the one hundred and twenty year history of field recording, a tradition that has placed great epistemological value in the act of capturing sound out of doors, in the places where things happen, without influence, without interference.
Or so the story goes. But in fact, historically, field recordists have been inveterate tinkerers and tamperers, instructing their subjects on how to perform, on where to stand in relation to the phonograph horn or microphone. They have devised implements like parabolic microphones to isolate particular sounds, thereby creating virtual zones of control, temporary laboratories in the distance. In the spirit of Lucier, in the spirit of the anthropologists and biologists that have used sound recording to gain knowledge of the world, I Am Standing in a Field earnestly investigates how sound and space interact. But it is also considers the degree to which sound recording is always caught up in the double mirror of representation.
Multi-level Audio Recording
All rights reserved, Mitchell Akiyama
[Bio c. 2012] Mitchell Akiyama is a Toronto based composer, artist, and scholar. He has released several records on labels such as Raster Noton (Germany), Sub Rosa (Belgium), and Alien8 (Canada), in addition to works on his own imprint, Intr.version Records. He has scored and contributed music to many films and dance performances. Akiyama has received commissions from, among others, the Akousma Festival (in conjunction with the Canada Council for the Arts) and the Nouvel Orchestre D’aujourd’hui. He has performed across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North American in concert halls, clubs, art galleries, fallout bunkers, and festivals including Sonar, Mutek,...
Audible observatories are points of sensory convergence. They are nodes where worlds perceived through the senses intersect and begin the labour of transforming independent events into knowable and meaningful claims. They speak and they are spoken to. Audible Observatories brings together works that draw attention to both the situation and the agency of the observer. The curators for Audible Observatories make a playful connection between research-based art and place-bound exhibition in order to animate a curatorial vision that foregrounds audio-centric art works within a broader rubric of site-specificity. We conceptualize the audible observatory as either a mobile or a stationary...