02009-04-17 | Music
You CAN travel without moving!
Download the 111MB .aif file Travel Sound Collage here.
In this piece you will hear the following locations: der Kölner Dom/the Cologne cathedral – listen for the large space and a coin dropping in a donation box, the main railway station in Cologne – listen for announcements and the ICE (beautiful German highspeed train) opening its doors, a farm in Austria – listen for the pitch fork delivering hay to the cows, birds in Cologne…. and much more. I mixed the sounds, all recorded with a SoundDevices 722 digital recorder in April of 2007, in form of a collage. Found Sound. For some of the recordings I wore my OKM microphones (((check out their recording samples here))). I mentioned the OKMs in my Diary before. They look like little earphones and are worn like those. Wearing them, my ears shape the incoming sound – a process similar to the Neumann K100 binaural head we used to record Up Close (((that album was recorded at 24/96 and if there is interest I could make one song available in the form of a 24bit AIFF or FLAC file))).
Enjoy!
Found on Matt’s Flickr
02009-04-16 | Uncategorized
I listened to a sound collage I made a couple of years ago, from sounds I recorded in April of 2007 in Germany and Austria. It sounds amazing and I thought about making it available in the form of a .aif file (CD quality: 16/44.1). You can travel without moving!
It was only 28ºF this morning and I discussed transportation with myself. Arguments for and against using my bicycle were exchanged, but in the end I bundled up and took off on the Mariachi Bullitt to meet Jon for breakfast. We discussed that there seems to be more interest in audiophile sound these days. Good!
Gizmodo had these two items this week:
Vietnamese Audiophile Turns a Room Into One Giant Speaker
Why We Need Audiophiles
The second one is particularly interesting as it compares SACD to great vinyl. Then I found this piece, which compares SACS and DVD-Audio and prefers DVD-A. I also noticed that Logic 8 allows the burning of DVD-A. DVD-A does sound very promising. When I was still with Epic Records I spoke to an executive there, it must have been around 1999, who had one of only seven DVD-A players in the country, and he raved about the sound quality! I myself have never heard it. (((however I have heard 24/96 in my studio, because One Guitar and Up Close were recorded like that…)))
While we are staying in Manhattan in May (((five nights at the Blue Note))) Jon and I will try to locate an audiophile dealer there. We want to listen to DVD-A players and see what the fuss is about. I don’t think DVD-A will be a commercial option and we’ll have to wait until high quality 24/96 or 24/192 files can be losslessly compressed and downloaded.
I was glad I decided to ride my bike and ended up riding for about an hour today. I enjoy the easy communication with pedestrians. How can a pedestrian communicate with a car or SUV, especially when the windows are tinted and inpenetrable!! Like talking to a tank.
02009-02-14 | Uncategorized
Scent of tragedy lingers in a 650-year-old perfume bottle buried by pogrom victim
When the tiny stopper is delicately eased free, a mere wisp of scent imprisoned for over 650 years is released.
In a unique experiment, scientists at the L’Oreal perfume institute in Paris tried to analyse the ingredients of a perfume whose precious container survived the Black Death, which annihilated a third of the population of Europe.
(Via Guardian Unlimited Science)
Y wrote:
I started thinking how rare scented oils were, compared to now. To carry a scent in a piece of cotton, place it in a bottle in order to carry it around your waist. How beautiful the thought of that.
Scent is such an industry and no longer special. The elite aspect is not welcomed, either. But, the beauty of it…trying to capture the scent of grass or damp wood after a rainfall…flowers, the sheerness of air.
Scent parallels music.
Music used to be special. Performed only by musicians (whether amateurs or professionals) in real time. There were no recordings until 100 years ago. Now you can hear music at every gas station, fast-food chain etc.
We gained something, but we also lost something. That surprise, even shock of smelling something new, or hearing a different music. Only a person traveling would smell and hear these scents and sounds…
02008-11-23 | Travel
Long journey. Bumpy ride over the Atlantic. Read this marvel of an insightful poem by Gary Snyder:
As the crickets’ soft Autumn hum
is to us,
So are we to the trees
As are they
To the rocks and hills.
Arrived in Barcelona, where my friends picked me up at the airport and drove 1 1/2 hours in a South-Western direction. The Priorat is contained in a large bowl of granite, a handful of small towns – some with less than a hundred residents – that produce grapes, almonds and hazelnuts. Because there is only dry-farming, meaning that there is no irrigation, and the ground is not rich dirt, not even dirt really, just rock into which the vines drop roots up to 30 feet down to obtain water, the fruit is very concentrated and intense. Similarly the nut-trees are small, but with very flavorful almonds and hazelnuts.
On my last day in the area we drove to Corbera D’Ebre, a town which was the location of the last and deciding battle of the civil war. We took the long route and briefly visited a cave that served as a makeshift hospital. Coming to Corbera we crossed a river in which many of the retreating forces drowned because they could not swim. The town abandoned the buildings bombed during the civil war, which recently have become an art project, the alphabet of liberty.
Route to Peace – LIME
Like most medieval towns, Pinyeres is situated on the highest point of land in its valley, the better to see danger approaching. Throughout the centuries, the more modern town of Batea grew up around it. When destruction came in the 20th century, it came not by land but from the air, delivered not by invading foreigners but by Spanish countrymen.
02008-09-06 | Ottmar, Travel
File under “Wanderjahre”:
Thirty years ago I was on Phuket island in Thailand. On the Trans-Siberian train in April of 1978 I had met a few young fellow travelers, an Englishman on the way to India, a Swede on his way to Thailand. We called ourselves the Semolina Club, because for vegetarians the only food options on the train were semolina gruel, peas and the occassional potatoe, baked, wrapped in newspaper and offered for sale in buckets in railway stations by old ladies. The train would stop for a few minutes and we would jump out and buy potatoes. Yes, I did sell a pair of jeans to a waiter in the train’s restaurant car. And we drank vodka with soldiers on the train.
I arrived in Japan at end of cherry blossom season. In Japan I got around by hitch-hiking, and while hitch-hiking is something the Japanese did not do themselves, they tolerated foreigners doing it and in fact it was very easy to get rides as people wanted to practice their English. Three weeks later I flew to Taipei, where I stayed for a month studying Tai-Chi. In July I traveled to Hongkong, which I loved, and in August to Bangkok, where I ran into the Swede from the Trans-Siberian train, heard about the beautiful Phuket island, and took a bus South. At the time Phuket had one resort hotel (((must be hundreds now!))), but I rented a hut about 100 feet from the beach, for $1.50 per night. I stayed for a month.
Related entries: Rockgarden in Japan, Papaya in India, Traveling in Thailand, Bombay and Goa, Eating on the Train
