An airline ticket, a backpack and a recorder – this is what is needed to get soundtrip.org website up and running.
Let me remind you that July 18 is World Listening Day celebrated by field recordists worldwide and it seems like there is no better occasion to have a look at this website.
Soundtrip.org is a cross between the two hobbies – the love of traveling is getting backed by the curiosity of someone with a recorder in his hand. Pressing play button brings us on the author’s trail – from Sumatra to Kishinev. Anyone can make and upload his own soundtrip, a nice feature for making a community project.
Technically the website is pretty interesting too. It is made with Cotonti CMS – not the most likely choice when it comes to creating a web project. One can’t miss a random soundtrip player and some notes on field-recording based on author’s experience further below. Forum page, polls, registration form among the other things often neglected by a blogger.
Another nice feature provides filtering according to the time of year – winter brings sounds of Saint Petersburg, Belarus and Moldova, spring and summer takes us to Crimea or South East Asia.
One last thing to add – Nikita Istomin, the man behind the website shows no admiration towards preserving the recording “as is” – as if fading and cutting make it less real or less authentic. And he is doing it quite well.
Not many recordings are uploaded yet, but if you drop a line to Nikita this will definitely make him more enthusiastic about buying an airline ticket, packing a backpack and grabbing a recorder over and over again.
There is a Vmeste-Radio festival that draws radio journalists from all over Russia together that were joined by yours truly that presented this blog as well as the Sound Map that won the 1st prize for Best Multimedia project.
Published June 11th, 2011.
Know what all those little knobs of the washing machine are really for? Great! Record a full colour wash at 40° and Ward Weis, a sound recordist from Belgium would be delighted. More info at his website (press WASH when there).
A bird came and pecked 140 characters up – oontz.ru is on Twitter now.
And this is a chaffinch bird recorded beside the Oktyabr cultural centre, Skobyanka, Sergiyev Posad.
Recorded April 21st, 2011 (CA-14 omni)
Published May 9th, 2011.
The sound of an old squeaky tree in Sergiyev Posad is now a part of the new short film by Alastair Cook, an Edinburg-based artist. The Forty Elephants premiered on 8th of April at the opening of Alastair’s fine art photography show at The Howden Park Centre, Livingston in Scotland.
In Alastair’s words, “The Forty Elephants is a psycho-geography, a filmpoem, developed around No Rest Tonight, a piece commissioned by Alastair, written and read by Gerard Rudolf. The project takes its lead from the Victorian street gang, of women and their children, who plagued the Elephant and Castle; it draws in the current landscape and it’s deteriorating edge, a farewell to the Heygate and Aylesbury estates; this is a dark trawl through threat and desire, driven by Gerard’s incredible words”.
The original recording appeared online in March, 2011. This is the first time that oontz.ru recording is getting featured in a film.
Published April 16th, 2011
It is one of the greatest mysteries to me, why do people in Russia have so dramatically lost their interest in recording audio, or probably never had any particular affection towards the genre.
Despite having a flourishing tradition of DIY electronics in the Soviet past, formed not only as a fancy or hobby but as a bare necessity thing, not many consider taking a portable recording set outside a good way of spending one’s free time.
Things have changed. 8 mm footage swept away by the video, photography getting that big with the cats as the only creatures on Earth not to have a personal DSLR handy. But capturing sound isn’t a habit still.
Some sort of renaissance is desperately needed. It had to happen one day, and in the meantime 2010 and 2011 already saw more and more Russian field recordists emerging and even publishing their material online. Two such projects came into sight lately, one of them is a sound map from the South and the other one is a sound blog form the North with nearly 1500 kilometers in between.
Zheleznogorsk sound map is created by the local newspaper and is currently on hiatus – but I hope it’s won’t take long for The Zhelezhogorsk Echo staff to get back to work on it soon.
There are four sounds spots available on the map at the moment, some may say the effort is too humble but let’s see. This southern industrial city is famous for the amounts of micaceous iron ore hidden deep below, and the chances are high that the sounds of the world above would become equally famous soon.
From the city of seafarers, fishermen and polar explorers comes the dooom_trooper blog. He records the sounds of his native Arkhangelsk. Not much could be gathered about the blog owner from his Livejournal profile, so let the sounds speak for themselves. One of my favourites is the ambiance of the Chainaya Lozhka tea-house, a lovely shelter for the frostbitten Nordic recordist.
Published April 10th, 2011.
Lena Uporova of podst.ru asked me a few questions about oontz.ru and sound recording in general, which became a part of their live online broadcast last Friday.
Getting over the other side of the recorder was so good! The interview isn’t available online, but the sounds used were Grigoriy Yavlinsky loudhailer canvassers, the conscripts and their friends’ early morning yellings, and the DBK jazz trio recorded at the Dubrava cultural centre last summer.
Published February 1st, 2011.
