catalogue is a 20 minute audio piece for radio, small speakers, or headphones completed in February, 2009. The collection of ten successive “snapshots” is arranged to call attention to contrasts in colour, duration, and stability. There are two sections which are repeated but otherwise there’s no looking back, just more or less pure progression. This stands in contrast to the way the sections function internally since all of them are based on closed loops.
The short fragments come from recordings made with different portable devices in different places, usually while moving or doing something other than “recording”. All of the locations are cities. You can sometimes tell what’s happening but usually not. Looping is a way of drawing awareness to the “musical” aspects more than the realism, or at least to the contrast between the two. In any case, when we say we use a microphone to capture the sounds of things we miss the “source” of the sound entirely. What gets recorded is always our approach to things. In this case the approach is defined by the editing.
catalogue [20m02s]
