the stranger that is next to me
the stranger that is over there;
the stranger that is right in front;
the stranger that is moving away;
the stranger that is fast approaching;
the stranger at the next table;
the stranger sitting across;
the stranger staring into space;
the stranger with nothing to do;
the stranger that brushes past;
the stranger that bumps into me;
the stranger outside;
the stranger on the bench;
the stranger that interrupts;
the stranger that suddenly lends a hand;
the stranger as the embodiment of city life;
the stranger I cannot overlook;
the stranger whose fortune is to remain on the periphery;
the stranger who dislikes being a stranger;
the stranger riding his bike;
the stranger that stops to look into the window;
the stranger on her phone;
the stranger that is no one;
the stranger that is everywhere;
the stranger I do not know nor ever will;
the stranger whose eyes never stop moving;
the stranger that smiles at us;
the stranger that seems threatening;
the stranger that loves to sing in public;
the stranger without a home;
the stranger I wish to meet;
the stranger I overhear;
the stranger as a question of community.

WORKS

:: Lost Touch With Oneself . 10:05 .
Ashley Fu-Tsun Wang // Urbana, USA
I had a conversation with my friend about one of American painter Jackson Pollock’s famous quotes: “It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” My friend disagreed with it, because he thought in music it is different. In music, one can always go back and retrace oneself, but in painting you can’t. What interested me was “what if the work itself is just about getting lost?”
In this piece, new sounds/materials/ideas keep penetrating the already established sound world and eventually taking over of it. This process happens over and over again; instead of following directions on the map, it is more like one is really ‘lost’ and being taken by what comes next.

:: Marcha en contra de la Reforma Energética, Querétaro, México . 05:39 .
Balam Ronan // Querétaro, México
Is a recording made in Querétaro, México, in a march against the Energy Reform, promoted by the “president” of México, Enrique Peña Nieto and the right-wings parties PRI and PAN, where they intend to privatize the country’s energy resources.

:: the stranger that is over there . 02:57 .
Bandum // Aldeia do Mato, Portugal
… a radio … a stranger that is over there … radio sounds & noises.

:: Hidden Materia . 09:59 .
Brane Zorman // Ljbljana, Slovenia
This sound composition is symbolically conceived as a formation and travelling of elementary, live, raw energy of the earth’s magma through numerous transformations and syntheses toward liberation and release, and consequently stabilisation in the solid matter in the earth, as an explosion of gas dispersion in water and air.

:: Noise Action for Radio . 10:00 .
David Schafer // LA, CA, USA
Noise is a form of activism about listening, forcing the receiver to make distinctions between types of sounds, and challenging the prescribed filters regarding listening and physical boundaries.

:: La loko ki vie rigardas (The place from where i look) . 10:00 .
Diana Combo // Portugal
This piece combines recordings made outside and inside the building where i used to live in Barcelona, in the Raval neighborhood.
The main purpose was to use the shout of the man who distribute the gas cylinders in that street, carrer Sant Martí. His shout his different from the others, his presence too and so his absence became different, once i started to record everyday from my balcony and from the streets around mine.
When i finally had an empty cylinder and was ready to record the whole process of calling him after hearing his shout, waiting for him to come around and then upstairs and down again and away, he didn’t come. I decided to take it downstairs and wait for him there, but i couldn’t see nor hear him.
I edited the samples in a way that mixes the chronology of the recordings. Inside and outside, up and down, me, him and the others are elements that are always present but become more evident that others at some point.

:: Samy . 05:03 .
Elisabetta Senesi // Florence, Italy
The recording is a first conversation I had in the middle of the night with a new neighbour from Sri Lanka upon a hill next to Florence. The piece deals with relational dynamics between perfect strangers in intimate contexts.

:: I Dream of Music . 10:22 .
GJ1214b // London, UK
What makes a stranger a stranger. The word implies an association of fear of the other. What motivates us to approach someone new. What are the invisible barriers and what role do visual cues play in forming our judgement of others. How important is our perceived value system when we set out to make contact.
In every exchange we evaluate what we are getting out of it. It could simply be a sense of wanting to feel the connection with another human animal. Each time you meet someone new, another world opens up, information is exchanged and something is learned.
Most of the time, we gravitate towards encounters where we might expect to have something in common, often based on preconceptions. What about unlikely meetings which challenge those preconceptions. What if we reach out to encounter a stranger with no other intention than to listen to their story.
For this piece, I approached strangers in public spaces and spoke with those willing to exchange with me. I asked them about their memories, their dreams and the music that was meaningful to them. I came out of each exchange with a real buzz and sense of joy. I felt that they also seemed to really appreciate the experience.

:: The Stranger. 08:40 .
Jan Van Den Dobbelsteen // Eindhoven The Netherlands
The stranger that was in my studio at PS1 Queens New York
on may 19th 1984.
Excerpt of a microcassettetape of 40 minutes.
He was an intruder and used my small Sony voice operating recorder M-529V microcassette-corder.
At this night of 19-20 may ’84.
I kept this recording because of the nice intriguing sounds this person recorded probably without any specific reason,just passing time.
He pushed the recording button and walked around in my studio.
Played some instruments and recorded materials I used in my studio.
For me this stranger is not a stranger anymore.
Jan Van Den Dobbelsteen
Eindhoven The Nethelands
February 2014

:: The Stranger . 10:00 .
John F. Barber // Vancouver, Washington, USA
Nearby strangers are rich in their own worlds of experiences and thoughts, all unknown unless I listen to them speaking. This work begins with the opening musical score to the 1946 film noir The Stranger starring and directed by Orson Welles. Samples of contemporary BBC interviews with actors, artists, musicians, and writers follows. Counterpoint to these conversations are samples of Albert Camus reading from his novel L’etranger (The Stranger) for French radio in 1954, just three years before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Camus published his novel in 1946, when he was twenty-two years old. Also sampled is Jonathan Davis reading from an English translation audiobook of Camus’ novel. The result is an overlay of multiple voices in overheard conversations. The combination would seem absurd, but makes narrative sense if only you listen to the stranger that is next to me. This work was abridged from the original 20-minute narrative.

:: Strangers On A (Subway) Train . 02:36 .
John Tenney // Lafayette, CA, USA
A man rides the subway, rejecting contact with the strangers seated around him, in favor of his inner life, which descends into bizarre hallucinations. The moral: stay involved and don’t wall yourself off!

:: Medicinal Drinking . 03:42.
Kasper Vang & Jan Høgh Stricker // Copenhagen, Denmark
A recording made on a rainy evening in London. The authors meet an observant stranger, who lectures them on the concept of medicinal drinking.

:: A transgressive click . 04:50 .
Kevin Logan // UK
In the British Library reading rooms only pencils are allowed, amongst the sound of laptop typing the click of a retractable pen is a sonic violation, a transgressive click-tap-cough-shuffle-click-tap

:: Grand Central Stranger Song . 03:06 .
Lin Culbertson // New York, USA
I recorded myself walking through a sea of strangers in the main concourse of Grand Central Terminal during rush hour. I was quietly singing Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song”. I was surrounded by people, but enveloped in my own world.

:: impressioni sonore su un campione di piatto trattato con equalizzatore e modulazione ad anello . 10:00 .
Marco Tentori // Italy
“impressioni sonore su un campione di piatto trattato con equalizzatore e modulazione ad anello”used as a sample , the sound of a cymbal , taken from the library of Kontakt, in all its envelope ( attack transient , transient extinction ) .
It was treated with :
1 ) ring modulation through the program MAX/ MSP , obtaining :
-pulse with beats slow and fast ( example with carrier to 0.1 HZ or 10HZ )
-glissandi to zig-zag with beats in acceleration-deceleration (example with carrier to zig-zag between 0HZ and 20HZ, or even with carrier to zigzag tra100HZ and 200HZ)
-transformations of timbre (example.with carrier 10000Hz)
2) equalization of the result of 1), with the EQ3 7-Band equalizer (plug-in for Pro Tools), added on different sequencer tracks, varying the automation corresponding to the center frequency,the fattore Q (which adjusts the width of band), and the gain of the individual filters
The construction of the piece was made on the various tracks in Pro Tools , by stacking , cutting, moving the sample plate treated with Max/MSP and EQ3 7-Band equalizer, trying to create zones with different density horizontal – vertical , in acceleration-deceleration or flash , varying rhythm, dynamics, space for
various sounds of plate obtained by the different treatments, which have undergone themselves, a variation of pitch and timbre

:: floating sound . 09:05 .
Mari Ohno // Tokyo, Japan
We release extremely subtle sounds from inside our bodies which are hard to perceive. Although the sound is made by the body, it cannot be heard because of the limited audible range that a human being can hear.
This work is a composition using the sound of the composer’s bloodstream as a sound source. All the sounds were created from the sounds of the bloodstream recorded mainly in an anechoic chamber.
The purpose of this work is to deconstruct and reconstruct the components of personal biological information via computing. These sounds were composed to express another reality beyond the boundary of the animate / inanimate.

:: Paired . 08:39 .
MUfi.re // Guimarães, Portugal
Improvised with two radios and two old walkie talkies (that haven’t been used since my childhood). The objects responded to the presence and closeness, as they were displaced, with a surprising range of sound manifestations.

:: Barcelona Frottage: Carrito. . 02:58 .
Osvaldo Cibils // Trento, Italia
Barcelona Frottage: Carrito.
Soundart, grabación de campo, de la serie: Barcelona Frottage.
Lugar: Barrio Gótico de Barcelona, España.
Fecha:18 diciembre 2013.
En el Barrio Gótico de Barcelona, España, un artista de origen uruguayo que vive en Italia persigue con la fotocámara durante 3 minutos a una persona que lleva un carrito.

:: Faubourg Prayer, Faubourg Poem . 03:21 .
Paul Collins // Paris, France / Toronto, Canada
A small window, a little too high to peer into, gives out onto our enclosed courtyard off the Faubourg St.Antoine in Paris. A mysterious man who no one has ever seen, lives behind this window. Everyday, the window open even in winter, he emits the strangest of sounds; a babbling “blub blub blub,” as he performs unceasing ablutions. Varying theories abound amongst the neighbors as to the meaning of his rantings. Some think he’s praying; some think him merely mad. Most find it all very spooky and are generally bothered by the quality and meaninglessness of the sounds he makes.
I have spent many hours enjoying and recording his vocalizations.

:: Before/After Images . 02:34 .
Peter Barnard // London. United Kingdom
Recording made within a busy gallery space, capturing voices talking about the images they see in front of them – creating a level of ambiguity within listening.

:: Social Immune System . 09:58 .
Philip Mantione // Los Angeles, CA
Social Immune System was created using field recordings made at an Occupy LA protest. Included are the voices of John Densmore, Peter Joseph, and text by Etheridge Knight and John McMurtry.

:: The Stanger . 08:14 .
Radio Approxim // Nederland
The guitarist that is next to me, that is over there, that is right in front, that is moving away, that is fast approaching, at the next table, sitting across, staring into space, with nothing to do, that brushes past, that bumps into me, outside, on the bench, that interrupts, that suddenly lends a hand, as the embodiment of city life. I cannot overlook, whose fortune is to remain on the periphery, who dislikes being a guitarist, riding his bike, that stops to look into the window, on her phone, that is no one, that is everywhere, I do not know nor ever will, whose eyes never stop moving, that smiles at us, that seems threatening, that loves to sing in public, without a home, I wish to meet, I overhear, as a question of community.

:: Collection of shivers . 07:09 .
Raquel Stolf // Florianópolis, Brasil
The creaking of an old iron gate. Cutlery on the dish. A strange insect. Submerged time/noise. Closed window. Open door. What is not there when one thinks it is. Something wavers in a blink. Trying to get out of oneself.

:: LGate_RLamppost . 01:50 .
Raviv Ganchrow // Amsterdam, NL
Two channel contact transducer recording, Wychbold, UK, December 02, 2011.
Left Channel Gate Vibration:
Scrape / Long-Wave Residue / Preamplifier Circuit Noise / Mechanical Handling / Rectangular Profile Resonance / Interior / Gate Overtone Structure / ‘Drain-Pipe’ Capacitance / Transduced Male Voice / Verbal Commentary / Electrical Discharge
Right Channel Lamppost Vibration:
Circular Profile Resonance / Transduced Horn & Drum Signal / Car Horn / Mobile Phone Transmission / Rain Impact / Wind Contact / Sway Branch / Cloud Movement / 49.53 Hz Square Wave / Wave-shape Harmonics / Wheel-Water-Tarmac Friction / Gaussian Pressure Variance / Rhythmic Branch

:: Untitled . 07:22 .
Renata Roman // São Paulo, Brazil
The piece Untitled is a strangeness and subversion of speech. A non-idiomatic language, proposes a listening that resembles that of encountering an entirely unknown language. A estranger is an unreached language.

:: “singing harbour” . 04:26 .
Ricardo Huisman // Amsterdam, Netherlands
“I’m a stranger wanting to leave the island; still waiting for the next ferry to come the harbour slowly starts to sing and becomes a stranger place to be”
I’m eager to widen my sonic perspective by listening to the harbour at twilight. Waiting for the ferry, the openness in between and the unexpected to come naturally. The harbour provokes a new hearing perspective by its re-turning metal tuned sounding objects and slowly starts to sing its windy scape of sounds; becoming a radio play with birds in the air. I have to move on listening like a hearing stranger.

:: Martim Moniz . 04:33 .
Ricardo Paraíso Silvestre // Oeiras, Portugal
Martim Moniz square in downtown Lisbon is part of Mouraria neighborhood and is Lisbon’s multicultural center. Its soundscape includes sounds and noises typical of small towns. Here you can find sounds from all corners of the planet.

:: In the footsteps of a stranger’s nostalghia (Overture) . 09:58 .
Richard Crow & Lucia Farinati // London, UK
In the footsteps of a stranger’s nostalghia (Overture) combines field recordings from inside the catherdral of San Galgano, Bagno Vignoni and other Tuscan locations and incorporates sound fragments both real and phantasmic.

:: Interrupter . 03:54 .
Simon Serc / Pharmafabrik // Slovenia
Interrupter // The stranger that interrupts.
Recorded on the streets of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Additional processing in Pharmafabrik studio, February 2014.

:: Alone . 07:15 .
Toni Dimitrov // Skopje, Macedonia
I’m alone in the mountains. In the untouched nature. Sitting next by the fire. Its raining. No strangers here. Strangers are where the people are. In the big cities. Where people are concentrated, isolated one from another. The bigger the city is, the greater strangers are. Maybe I’m a stranger too.
The dog came and sat next to me. Spent the night with me. I share the food and the fire to dry his fur during the night. The next day he continued his path. I also thought that should continue with my path through the woods.
I am alone again. Alone, but not lonely.

:: Home . 08:12 .
Una Lee // Belfast, UK
A Sunday stroll in the city, asking myself what ‘community’ means to me, right there and right then.

:: the strangers on my screen . 03:24 .
Yuri Sousa Lopes Pereira // Lisboa, Portugal
Multitude is a term for a group of people who cannot be classed under any other distinct category, except for their shared fact of existence.