Things I lost while you were out
Installation for the Dog Star Orchestra 17, Whitney Canyon, Newhall, California, June 20, 2021.
Eight stations, arranged over a secondary hiking trail under high-tension power lines through and above Whitney Canyon, spaced far enough apart so that a listener at one can barely hear a neighbor, to either side, above, or below.
Eight wooden boxes, prepared with transducers and filled with junk materials: pieces of smashed flowerpots, bottlecaps, old keys, sleigh bells, gravel, old nails, and dust. Each station cycles through 40- and 50-Hz pitches and sound from field recordings taken at this location in July 2020, which rattle the contents of each box at unpredictable times and intervals.
In the year between recording and hearing these sounds, Whitney Canyon has desiccated during the beginning of a historic drought, choked on smoke from fire in nearby Elsmere Canyon that approached the north side of the site, choked again on smoke from massive fires far to the south, and borne silent witness to the height of two human pandemics, one viral and one societal. Bird and insect life and sound is barely what it was in early summer 2020, and the energy of our present and recent past finds match in the buzzing and crackling of the wires overhead.
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