Bourdon du Kinzie (N° 3 from N° 1), 48°08’33” N 122°45’39” W is a recording of an acoustic space, recorded on a January afternoon within adjoined bunkers, inside of a defunct munitions battery near Port Townsend, WA.
The acoustics within the site are very active, with long reverb decay times, so any sound that takes place within or outside of the space gets temporarily trapped inside, such that numerous sources interact with, dominate, and submit to one another. There were a few strangers that entered and left during the recording period, reflections of their voices unintelligible from multiple, scattered arrival paths.
As I’ve occasionally explored with such recordings — as in Four Dot Three To One (Kendra Steiner Editions, 2017) — the other aspect of this piece involves the use of analysis equipment in post-production to find dominant room tones that are natural to the acoustic space: for instance, here, 90 Hz and 315 Hz, and several much higher frequencies. Using a signal generator, the partials of these tones were emulated in post, married to the natural sound of the room. Such sequences that come and go throughout the recording, blending the synthetic with actual acoustic artifacts of the space; the human presenting the piece sympathetically improvises with the space, with the space always the foremost voice.
The bunkers are full of surprises, often resulting from the weather, visitors, and the changes in biologic sound sources relative to the times of day. To my ears, the most enriching surprises are related to the structure itself: within the architectural decisions of its builders, its angles, dimensions, and the materials from which it is made. Many of these aspects captured in the same day — one might hear throughout the recording brief sequences of airwave transmissions, close-mic’d steel and iron, and stethoscope recordings of concrete and other raw materials.
released December 27, 2018
Recorded at Battery Kinzie, Port Townsend, WA, January 08, 2018.
Purchase HERE
