I just completed a piece on Sound Art and specifically Field Recording for Art World in China (I’m thinking piece this will eventually find its way to these pages). It was an epic feat of editing to say the very least. One of the cut snippets is below. A metaphoric mediation on sound art.
“It can be argued Sound Art, as an art form, suffers a blurry perhaps even indescribable boundary. It’s this ill-defined, edgelessness that has contributed to a vagary around the art form and which practises fall into its canon.
In many respects Sound Art could be thought of as a delta; a floodplain of practise, fed by many tributaries of sound and musical activity. Cagian philosophies, European 19th and 20th music traditions, installation practice, musique concréte, radiophonics, cinema, kinetic sculpture, popular electronics, generative computer technologies and other creative occupations flow freely into the floodplain, creating a fertile, yet unsettled landscape over which navigation can be difficult, even for the most experienced of travellers.
The terrain is constantly shifting, sand bars of activity appear and are overlaid in a matter of years and the convolutions of connectivity between the singular elements creating this Sound Art delta appear treacherous and often frustratingly temporal. Understanding this though opens a wonderful sense of possibility about these disparate sonorous pursuits.”
