“An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human.” - Man Ray
I contributed a piece to the Cities and Memory Dada Sounds project.
February 5, 2016 marks 100 years since the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, and thus the beginning of Dada.
To mark the occasion, Cities and Memory: Dada Sounds marks a century of Dadaism by applying the techniques and practices of Dada to field recordings from around the world, bringing a Dadaist approach to the concepts of sound, place and memory and creating a new, Dada-inspired sound world.
The whole amazing collection is here.
My contribution: Swiss MLK
My process as thus: I chose a recording from the Cities and Memory sounds that was made inSwitzerland because Dada. As I was working on it over the Martin Luther King holiday I worked in units of 1.18. I laid a grid over the source recording breaking it up in 1.18 second segments. I used a random number generator to rearrange the clips until I had a length of 1min, 18 seconds. I decided I wanted to collage in sound that related to the moment in time that I was working on this so I randomly recorded a German language news radio station coming out of Switzerland at the same time I was editing the first piece. I took that recording and applied the same method to chop it up. On both recordings I used a second set of randomly generated numbers to apply a small set of effects (backwards, reverb) to a few clips. As an homage to Man Ray I wanted to suggest an aural layer of dust, so I stretched out the edited version of the first track and then I mixed all three together in a very un-Dada deliberate way.
Viva la chance.