I was sad yesterday and I didn't think I was gonna be... But i started looking through sounds I recorded on my voice memos app over tha past few years and it made it a lot worse. I made a short peice out of these sounds .. I found the process very therapeutic but I feel a deep sadness when I listen to this piece. Much of that is due to my connection to the individual sounds. When I listen to it I feel I have died. I hope some of this feeling can be picked up on by the audience.
"The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation." - John Cage
I cant think this way.. I feel so idle .. I love to do nothing and observe but it also makes me feel purposeless, useless... bad. Here in many of these recordings I am idle, observing.. and still compulsively recording. appropriating. *Insert Sontag quote here*
I like the sounds of me holding the phone while recording too. the clicks and scratches and static. It creates a strange feeling of point of view and a feeling that reminds me of listening to an old tape recorder. It's amature nature. It makes it feel more autobiographical. I thought it was an interesting interplay of forms where I record a tape recorder playing old tapes of my grandpa taking voice memos, on my digital voice memo app.
i really enjoy this piece and can also imagine youve died when i hear it. i think surges of nostalgia are inevitable when looking back on collected memories in any medium, and there are nuances of nostalgia. sometimes it's not so much about the relationship you have with the specific memory but the big empty sad feeling you get just observing that expanse of time that's passed, where you are now compared to then, et cetera. i think this piece really communicates that feeling. even though they aren't my memories, i still get this feeling from it. i absolutely love the range of familiarity in the voice samples, there's a spectrum--friends and family, you can hear it in their voices, or doctors, or people calling you for a purpose, and my favorites are the happy birthday song and the church hymns. im thinking about in class when we were discussing what could accompany this sound piece; the collage of footage from your phone thing lilly mentioned would be cool, and i also liked the idea you had about shaving your head while it plays TBH. it'd be a cool tribute to time passing, or metamorphosis, or change, or what have you. maybe even shaving your head while the footage is projected over you. idk. cool fun possibilities.
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