42 Days 四十二天 by Southeast of Rain 东南有雨

It started in the fall of 2019 in the Marin Headlands, a hilly peninsula located just north of San Francisco, when the two of us were fortunate to be Artists in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. For 42 days, we would wake up to the distinct rustling sound and cold scent of the eucalyptus forest gently softening the mornings of this former military base. We were ambitious, suddenly free from the distractions of wifi, cell reception and daily obligations, and setting out to create a single piece of music every day. But as with the nature of the creative journey itself, some days were less inspired than others, so we have named each composition after the day on which its idea arose.

Continuing our sound making practice in the Headlands, we recorded our daily soundwalks, encountering unexpected sounds everywhere: resonant ring handles on rusted iron gates at the abandoned military barracks, whispering water radiators in our bedrooms, choirs of insects near Rodeo Beach at nightfall, and the “musical” pipes outside the Writer’s House after a full night of rain. We combined these field recordings with our primary instruments - voice and pipa (a Chinese string instrument), and recorded our improvisations and compositions in our temporary studio, a 2000 square-foot gymnasium once the site of service members’ basketball games and bowling matches, now a hollow, dusty space with ghostly resonance. Something particular emerged in that space. Internal landscape and rugged terrains, the routes to which were normally ambiguous, suddenly opened, and slowly came unraveled into something at once intimate and expansive, under the warm embrace of the 4-second-long reverb of the gym. Sometimes, layers of imagined sonic spaces appeared through subtle digital processing juxtaposed with organic field recordings and the acoustics of the space.

Listening back, it feels as if we were transported from the mundane into an otherworldly place: a magical realist world, perhaps, where the boundary between humans, animals, nature, and mystic beings are porous, transforming freely into one another.

So here it is, our first album, 42 Days, finally coming together in the bizarre winter of 2020, with each of us now isolated in our apartments in New York and California. Creating and producing this album has sheltered us from this long, cold and chaotic pandemic winter. We hope your listening journey will be as surreal, comforting, and empowering as it was for us.

Thank you for listening.

19年秋天，我们两个福建人在旧金山北边的马林岬角（Marin Headlands）做艺术家驻地，头尾42天。被山崖海岸和桉树林围绕着，我们开始了这张专辑的创作。没有网络，没有信号，没有了生活琐碎、柴米油盐的烦扰，本意气风发，想每天都能留下一首作品，然而创作之神降临得总是出其不意。于是我们为了感谢她，决定把她来临的那几天当做曲名。

延续了多年的习惯，我们每天扛着录音机，走走听听，采集了大量在地的声音，包括徒步时偶遇的动物们，还有雨后小木屋门前拼命跳舞的水管，然后回到工作室，录制琵琶和人声的即兴与素材。当时的“工作室”实际上是一个混响长达4.2秒的废弃篮球馆，原先是军事基地的娱乐场所，如今除了给漂泊的灰尘们提供一个家，也慷慨地接纳了我们这些奇奇怪怪的驻留人士。这些录音记录下了我们与那个奇特声场的对话。历史、自然、空间、电子、民乐、实验，掺杂着离家万里与漂泊无期的情绪，吞噬在旧金山湾区的大雾和篮球馆悠长的混响中，边界逐渐模糊。

20年冬天，各自隔离在纽约和加州的我们，重拾这些录音，在卧室里远程完成了这张专辑的制作与后期。于是，伴随着这个诡谲年份的结束，我们的第一张专辑出世了。如果有可能的话，希望你可以戴上耳机静静地与这些声音独处，给一刻不停的生活按个暂停，一起去一趟随想的远方。

谢谢你的聆听。

Southeast of Rain 东南有雨 is an experimental duo of two young female composers/ sound artists based in California and New York. With the shimmering textures of Sophia Shen’s pipa, evocative cores of Lemon Guo’s vocals, and whimsically processed field recordings, their genre-bending works travel freely yet subtly between worlds, while paying homage to traditional Chinese music’s affinity with nature.

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