release date: 14 september 2021
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I’ve been collecting more Electromagnetic Frequencies or EMF from the local environment – this time scavenging sounds from various sources in the small apartment I live in.
Every electronic device, source or connection generates EMF, which remains mostly inaudible to the naked ear though sometimes you might hear a hum or a buzzing. There’s a kind of electrosonic diversity to these found sounds – there’s an anima there, a life-likeness; the flutters, whistles, tones and cracklings of EMF are like the cryptic calls and cries of insects, birds and animals in an environment.
This time I’ve used a different EMF detector, one built by Sorte Muld Instruments, a project of Martin Kofoed who is a visual artist and illustrator living in Amsterdam. Sorte Muld, meaning perhaps black soil or black mould, is an important Danish archaeological site of an iron age-early viking settlement that was populated for a millenium into the common era.
Significant finds there include hundreds of tiny stamped gold foil squares of diverse figurative symbolism. No-one really knows what their function or use-value was – much like my podcast…
This composition is another sonic derivé, drifting the listener across and through curious scene-settings for an audio theatre of the mind, built with fragments of recordings made in the past few days at the end of this third month of COVID lockdown here in Sydney Australia.