being there by grisha shakhnes

This album is a field recording. It’s a field recording of me recording music. It’s a recording of my room and the street outside. One track was recorded in the morning during a holiday, the other on a weekday afternoon. In a way, all of my albums since “Ghosts” are field recordings. Most of them weren’t planned to be, but I don’t really have a choice. I’ve been recording onto a Zoom digital recorder since I moved here. Sometimes I try to eliminate the outside noise, but my apartment has no double-paned windows and I can’t be completely silent either. So is this album really any different?

Well, for one, the set up here is different. I have altered my set up several times over the course of the 10 or so years I’ve been playing music. The last change was one of the most significant. I disconnected my mixer’s aux outputs from the reel to reel. Instead, the tape’s input is now two microphones – a contact mic and a Shure SM57.

When I record, I can only think of the intended result in terms of things like structure, volume or duration. I don’t approach recording with a preconceived concept, and I try to keep my mind clear. But connections to the real world become evident when the music is played. I try to approach listening in the same way as any listener, but the difference is that I know the process, the environment and the source of the sounds on the recording. On some recordings, although you can hear the surroundings sometimes, they safely can be ignored. On others, the surroundings are equally as important as the music I made. And in some cases the surroundings can be ignored, but my presence is a part of the work. Adding the microphones to the set up allows for an exploration of the room’s surface and space, making the music tightly connected to the room it has been made in.

I could go on and make this text a bit longer and fill some gaps, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. As much as the subject may seem mundane, I’ll just say that what has been increasingly important in my work, starting with “Something to Ponder Upon”, is this gap between what you know and what I know, between what I choose to tell you and what I choose not to, between the sounds you think you hear and you actually hear. The most significant difference between this release and the previous ones is probably my choice to eliminate some of this gap. My choice to let you know all these things; that this is a record about an artist, a musician, and his living room. It’s about his presence in this room. It’s about his environment, and his relationship with his environment. It’s about listener’s relationship to the artist’s environment and also his own environment. And it’s about listening and the choices we make – as artists and as listeners.

(grisha shakhnes, December 2018)

a thematic ltd series focusing primarily on phonographies reflecting the spirit of a specific place crowded with memories, its aura & resonances and our intimate interaction with it…

unfathomless.net
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