I need 4 more people for a compilation - field recordings

["matt davignon" <mattdavignon@hotmail.com>]

(First of all, yes, this is a huge email. Sorry to the folks who are not 
interested, but it is on topic and it is all relevant text that I had to 
get 
in there.)

Hey everyone,

I have another CT-Collective compilation in the signup stage right now. 
The 
aim is to record field recordings of the city (or town, or rural area) you 
live in, or a similar location that you're visiting, then to create music 
from those field recordings.

I announced this project to the CT group on Wednesday. I was expecting to 
struggle to get 10 people from different geographic areas, and I very 
quickly got 16. So this project is going to be in 2 volumes, and I'm now 
looking for 4 more people to round out Volume 2.

Very Important: Since I'm specifically aiming to get a wide variety of 
cities in this project, I can't let two people represent the same area. 
People who do not live in North America or Europe are especially 
encouraged! 
Here are the areas I already have represented:

San Francisco, California
Los Angeles, California
New York City
Atlanta, Georgia
Austin, Texas
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Bloomington, Minnesota (Minneapolis/St. Paul area)
Lafayette, Indiana

Mexico City
Garda Lake, Italy
Pretty much all of the United Kingdom (we already have 3 participants)
Kuerten, Germany
Eskilstuna, Sweden

If you can represent an area other than the ones listed, and you'd like to 
take part in this (for more details, see the rules posted below), please 
email me directly. I imagine there could be a lot of demand for this, so 
it's best to email me soon, and I apologize in advance for the people I 
won't be able to fit, but I can only take 4.

These next two paragraphs are general facts about most CT Projects. 
Participants will join a seperate email discussion list, hosted by 
Egroups.com. (I'm the moderator of this group, and I'm here, so the 4 
people 
I take should have no trouble getting in.) Finished tracks can be sent to 
me 
by mail in the form of music on a CD-R or tape, or a .wav file on CD-R. I 
can also take .wav files over the internet, but they have to be posted 
somewhere. Sorry, I can't take MiniDisc, DAT, or ZIP/Jazz discs.

We all chip in for the costs of the discs and artwork that we'll all 
recieve. That will most likely be around $8-$10 per participant, and 
you'll 
recieve both volumes. Why is it so cheap? Well, first they'll be on CD-R, 
probably with very nice black and white artwork. Secondly,  you don't have 
to chip in for extra copies unless you want some. When we're done, I will 
be 
offering these for sale online for $5 per disc. That's pretty much what 
they'll cost me to make and mail. Since they're CD-R's I can make them as 
I 
sell them. I've historically been the distributor of the CT-Projects, but 
I'm not greedy. If another participant wants to make and sell them the 
same 
way I do, we'll figure out a way to make that work. In short, these 
compilations are not for profit. They're a chance to collaborate with new 
people, and to try something most of us probably haven't done before. (I 
certainly haven't done music from field recordings before, anyway.)

Okay, here are the rules for this project in particular:

CT-Location project rules.

Ok. Here's the idea: I want to get (a total of) 20 musicians from around 
the 
world to represent their various cities or geographic locations where they 
live. These people will go out and record sounds from the areas they 
encounter in their day-to-day life. Then they'll construct "music" from 
these sounds they recorded. The result will be to get a survey of 1) the 
day 
to day life of different areas around the world, and 2) the intuitions, 
interests, and techniques of the musicians recording and "remixing" the 
sounds.

Here are the project rules:

1) 10 musicians with a time limit of 7 minutes each for each disc. 
Musicians 
are allowed to divide their time into 2 or more pieces of music to 
represent 
different aspects of their "cities".
2) By "Cities", I'm not limiting this project to urban areas. If you live 
out in the countryside or in a suburb, that's perfectly fine. "City" is 
about the amount of land area I'm looking for.
3) Since I'm trying to get a nice variety of geographical locations 
represented, I'm not going to allow 2 people to represent the same city.
4) However, if two people who live in the same city want to join, they can 
both contribute if one of them is traveling to a different location, and 
wants to represent that other location. For example, if two New Yorkers 
want 
to join, but one was going to base his music on sounds from his vacation 
spot in Wyoming instead of New York City, that would be perfectly fine.
5) You must be able to send at least one photograph of the area you're 
representing, and it has to be a photograph taken by you or a friend of 
yours (not taken from a National Geographic, for example). I'd like to use 
these photos somehow in the artwork or the front cover. How photos can be 
submitted will be up to whoever's doing the artwork. Hopefully, these 
photographs will represent the day to day life in these areas (not 
pictures 
of the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower), but I'm not going to set a 
rule about that last part.
6) You can't play your instruments on this one. You can't re-record any of 
your old songs from a stereo, or instruct other people to perform on 
command 
either. You can record street musicians, music playing from passing cars 
or 
stores, people humming and singing amongst themselves, yourself 
interacting 
with your environment (walking, using ATM machines, etc.), animals, all 
sorts of stuff! Most of the performance aspects of this are going to be 
when 
you re-organize your source recordings to make your final pieces of music.
7) Of course, your final submissions must be made entirely of your field 
recordings. You can process, loop and rearrange them however you want. If 
the track you send me has nothing to do with, or clearly breaks these 
rules, 
it's simply not going to be on the compilation. (For example, if the track 
you submit is of you playing guitar, or is your latest synth-techno hit.)
8) Final submission date: Postmarked by June 1st for Volume 2. (I might 
back 
this up within the next week.)

Here are some examples of this kind of music that I know about:

Alejandra and Underwood: "Notebook on Cities and Clothes"  - These guys 
did 
a tour last year where each performance is created entirely from 
laptop-manipulated sounds of another city. This is a disc of these live 
shows. Most of the music is created by making simple loops or playing 
passages in stereo slightly out of phase with each other.

Christophe Charles: "Undirected 1986-1996" and Oval: "Dok" -  Christophe 
Charles made several recordings of different city sounds - bells, crowds, 
machinery, traffic, and altered, layered, and rearranged some of it to 
create kind of spooky minimal 'soundscapes'. Oval then borrowed a lot of 
Mr. 
Charles' source recordings and ran them through his trademark digital 
music-making process to create the CD 'Dok', which sounds quite different.

Tetsu Inoue, Charles Uzzell-Edwards, and Daimon Beail: "Audio" - Actually, 
I 
just bought this CD, so I'm not sure exactly how they did it, but the 
music 
is created entirely from source recordings made at different street 
corners 
in San Francisco.

Michael Peters: My2k webpage : 
http://www.mpeters.de/mpeweb/music/my2k/index.htm
A lot of Michael Peters' 10 second songs for this project involve source 
recordings.

The Quiet American <http://www.quietamerican.org>. This guy provides his 
excellent music in streaming mp3 and real audio! He travels to different 
areas of the world, and makes looped music from his source recordings 
there.



Thanks for your patience! Even though this mail seems strict, I'm sure 
we're 
going to have a lot of fun doing this, and I'm confident that it's going 
to 
be a nice comp when we're done!

Best,

Matt Davignon
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