Deviating for a minute from my focus on Europe, I’ve turned my sites to San Francisco for this edition of Echolocation. I was approached recently by visual artist / tech wizard Juan Miguel de Joya to collaborate with him on an interactive music piece for Codame’s 3D Webfest, an art + tech event at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The project was to write a piece of music that would interact with my performance through web-based projections, visualizing the sound and actions I made while playing. The theme of the fest was “connections” so Echolocation seemed the perfect choice. After all, what is Echolocation if not an attempt to bring people together across the globe through sound and music? I’ve learned so much about people, places and cultures just by listening to them carefully, and I want to bring that experience to my listeners.

Given that I was soon headed to Chicago for almost 2 months to help my Dad after his heart surgery (he’s all better now), I needed to collect all the SF sounds, post haste. I ran around SF like a li’l mad man trying to record every iconic sound that I could think of before I left. What if I got to Chicago and realized I needed a sound but didn’t have it? Unacceptable! Fast forward one week and I’m calling my wife Anna from Chicago asking her to record some sounds for me that I’d forgotten, namely the sound of BART, and the massive gears that pull the famed SF cable cars around the city. The ENTIRE web of cables that run under the streets here are powered by these massive gears, zig-zagging beneath the city pulling dozens of cars along four different lines. The powerhouse that contains these gears is under the Cable Car Museum, and proved an amazing place for her to record their deafening roar. Huge thanks to Anna for saving the day.

Watch or listen to the piece below and you’ll hear the field recordings I used: numerous foghorns, the BART train, the F Line bells, the cable car powerhouse, the seals at Pier 39, Chinatown street noise, the Wave Organ, the sounds of the harbor at Marina Green, MUNI bus sounds, waves in the Bay, and soooooo much wind. Some are more obvious than others (foghorns, the bells on the cable cars and F Line, the clinking of sailboats at the Marina Green Harbor), and others are blended more (the roar of BART trains melded with female choir, the plunking and plopping of the Wave Organ within the drums of the end section) – I’ll be posting audio and video showcasing the sounds and how they were used, so stay tuned!

GALLERY