Welcome to the first installment of Echolocation. At its core, this project is about music and raw sound. But it’s also about a lot more than that. It’s about life, experience, travel – it’s about opening yourself up to everything new in life, everything beautiful and different than what you’re used to, something we all need to do more of these days. As our country and politics become more and more about fear, ignorance, and blindness to other cultures, it becomes necessary to try to understand what’s outside our comfort zone and borders. To that end, this project is going to be about listening and understanding – exploring and learning about other places through the sounds they make.
Echolocation is the physical process using of sound waves and echoes to determine where objects are in space. Bats use it, dolphins use it, and now I intend to use it, only with a twist. It comes down to using sound to locate yourself with an environment, to understand your surroundings just by listening. Definitely an under-utilized way of exploring our world.
This began because I spent exactly 90 days living and traveling in Europe (and even a tiny bit of Africa) with Anna, my wife (then girlfriend), and a rotating cast of friends we met on the road. Our plan was to start by spending three weeks in Germany where my wife is from, then a week in Italy, five weeks in Portugal, a week in Belgium, and two weeks in the Netherlands. Not bad at all. We went with the specific idea of
looking for sound that is unique to these locations, but also to learn about the people who live there and what the sound of a place can say about it and them.
I’m an electronic musician and composer, I write music for computers and humans alike, and have spent decades hunting down unique sounds to use as the building blocks for music. Finding strange and beautiful sounds and turning them into something musical is endlessly fascinating to me. Whether by stacking and organizing them against each other or stretching, chopping, and sculpting them into something unrecognizable, there is a bottomless well of possibility to pull from, endless opportunity for discovery and experimentation.
So we hit the road and started searching. Our first stop was in Oslo, Norway. A painfully short trip – less than a day – but thankfully it’s home to one of my oldest friends, Ingrid, a native Norwegian who ended up going to the same high school as me in Chicago. She would take us through her hometown to show use what she loved about it (quite a feat considering our time constraints). Despite having known each other since we were teenagers, I’d never had the chance to visit her even though I was desperate to see what Norway was like. So this was a long time coming.
And rather than wait for our extended stay in Germany to start our project, we took this entry point as an opportunity to begin Echolocation and spend a day trying to absorb and reinterpret the sound of this ancient, beautiful city.
OSLO
As it was such a short stay, we had limited time to get out and gather sound. Luckily one of the first places we came upon proved to be one of the greatest: Nationaltheatret train station. Oh dear God, the acoustics in the entry hall were unlike anything I’d ever heard. Echoey doesn’t do it justice. The echoes were so numerous and multifaceted that they danced and buzzed around us, forcing their way through our heads, leaving us spinning, dizzy, and smiling over what the HELL we just heard. Ingrid, Anna and I danced, clapped, snapped, sang and shouted together for as long as our brains could handle the reverberations, which, it turns out, wasn’t very long. At one point a well-dressed older businessman came in and saw us recording – he immediately let out a high-pitched laugh, raised his umbrella over his smiling head and started jumping up and down with us. This station clearly has a positive effect on everyone.
So the majority – though by no means all – of the the sounds used in this piece were recorded there. In it you’ll hear Anna and I snapping our fingers and stomping our feet, the girls laughing, talking and shouting, and the three of us singing in unison. The sound of that hall was so incredible I was able to get endless amounts of musical material from it. Not a bad way to start the trip.
We spent the next few hours wandering through quaint, quiet streets past shops and cafes, everything clean and inviting. The air was tight with cold for a June day and a drizzle started up shortly after we started walking, but it didn’t bother us at all. The day was still beautiful. More so when we arrived at Vigeland Sculpture Park, an enormous, palatial park dedicated solely to showcasing the work of the famous Norwegian sculptor, Gustav Vigeland. (The largest park dedicated to a single artist in the world). Absolutely stunning beyond words.
From there we headed towards the waterfront to Akershus Fort, a squat stone castle overlooking the fjord. We sat and talked, enjoying the sunshine and wind as we watched good-looking blonde locals stroll and bike around. I used numerous recordings of the wind and our conversations in the piece.
We finished by walking to the mind-blowing Oslo Opera House. I wasn’t really prepared for a building as grand and stunningly modern as this. This structure was unlike anything I’d experienced before. The opera houses I’ve spent time in tend to come in one variety: old. But not only was it incredibly modern and beautiful, seeming to rise silently out of the water, it was designed so that you can walk all over the outside of 
it, top to bottom. We did just that, exploring every inch of its smooth, snow-white surface while looking out over the sunny Oslofjord.
But we didn’t have much time beyond that as our train was approaching. We walked to the nearest train station, said our sad goodbyes, and hopped a train to the airport. Germany awaited.
Subscribe and listen to Oslo below:
Enjoy the infographic from Singer Design about some Norway’s more fascinating aspects.
(Copyright Singer Design, 2016)
GALLERY
