Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Commissioned Experimental Sound Piece for the Music Unlimited 21 Festival.  Collaboration with renowned musician Carla Khilstedt. Below are the liner notes for the piece. The art above was created by Oakland based artist Lisa Carroll.

-A note about CONCURRENCE:

Carla Kihlstedt and I travel quite a bit. Carla is a musician who needs little introduction and I am a filmmaker. Often, I am the location sound mixer for documentaries; I am a technician charged with capturing the live sounds of a film as they are taking place using an array of microphones, recording devices, speed, wit, and guile.  Carla invited me to submit a soundpiece for the festival based on field recordings I have been making for my family as a substitute for photographs. I immediately begged for her time and expertise as a collaborator. We bought Edirol R-09 recorders and captured sounds and events separately in 16 countries over eight months from January through August of this year.  Carla was traveling in Europe and the U.S. with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and various other musical endeavors; I was working East and West Africa primarily on projects chronicling the ongoing crisis in the Darfur region and the tenuous peace in Liberia.  We distilled over 10 hours of recorded material into a 36 minute piece with Dan Rathbun of SGM in Oakland over two days.

Our initial intentions were formal—to simply posit one sound against another in a musical conversation.  The resulting aural juxtapositions hopefully would bring into sharp focus for the listener the idea that sound/music is a constant in all parts of the world including the sounds we unconsciously filter. We believed we had succeeded on this level, but in multiple auditions we discovered that a conceptual foundation lay beneath, like archeologists who find a different city beneath the city in which they are working.  Just as in cinema, where there exist points of view (authorship) as evidenced by lens choices, montage theory and sound, in field recording there is a wide variety of meaning revealed through choices in subject matter and microphone proximity.

These selections bring to the forefront the relationship between the recordist and the subject. Taken separately and pulled apart, there is a difference in the intimacy found between the sound of Carla’s recording of footsteps in gravel and her recording of the American gospel choir. There is a difference in the intimacy between my recording of an English class taking place within the Sudanese Rebel camp, and the kids singing the song one can hear in the middle of the Liberian thunderstorm. Taken together, our choice of layering and truncating captured sounds distances us from an anthropological viewpoint. We are not cataloguing cultures for others to dissect and study in the future. Rather than displaying trophies taken from foreign countries we have attempted to surround the listener with the sounds and feeling of someone’s home environment, indeed, each one of these sounds is occurring today, some even as you read these words.

The song at the end of Concurrence is sung by a young Sudanese boy who I found sitting, chanting his prayer board with many other men and boys at sunset on the edge of a refugee camp. Beyond them was an area not safe for them to travel for fear of Janjaweed attacks. I closed my eyes and used my microphone as a diviner’s rod to find the owner of the voice in the midst of the crowd. He is singing a belief of the Koran that those who commit bad deeds in this life will have to answer to God when they die—their deed will not go unpunished.  I was moved to tears standing there before I even heard the translation. Carla was moved without any information.  His voice stands in stark contrast to the opening minutes and we hope this leads the listener to ask interesting questions of the piece and of themselves.

—Wellington Bowler

CONCURRENCE

Field Recordings by Wellington Bowler and Carla Kihlstedt

recorded between January and August 2007.

36:34 min. (WAV 24-bit/48.0 kHz)

Chopped up, pushed around and manipulated by Dan

Rathbun at Polymorph Recording, Oakland, CA, U.S.A

with backseat driving by WB and CK.

Produced by WB and CK.

CK field recordings from:

AUSTRIA (Dornbirn), CANADA (Denman Island), CZECH REPUBLIC (Prague, Dudingen), ITALY (Lodi, Milan), LATVIA (Riga), SLOVENIA (Ljubljana), USA (New York City, Newark, Boston, Dennis, Mobile, Austin, Chicago, Toledo, Moab), and various trains traveling acrossEurope.

WB field recordings from:

BELGIUM(Brussels), CHINA (Hong Kong), ENGLAND (London), GERMANY (Frankfurt), GHANA (Accra), HOLLAND (Amsterdam, Den Haag), LIBERIA (Monrovia), SENEGAL (Dakar), SUDAN (Khartoum, Al Geniena, IDP camps in Darfur, Jebel Marra), USA (Denver, San Francisco, New York City, Milwaukee),

Thank you: Dan Rathbun, Phil Perkins C.A.S., Lisa Carroll and Akira Bowler, Matthias Bossi, Petr Vrba and Katerina Ratajova, Kirsten Johnson, Gerilyn Pez, Ted Braun, Wolfgang and Janis Wasserbauer, and all of the crew at Music Unlimited, in Wels, Austria.

Published by Broca’s Fold, ASCAP.