set 1: NY Phonographers Meeting II, 2007
with Scott Smallwood, Sawako, Seth Cluett, Civyiu Kkliu, and Ben Owen
The NY Phonographers Meeting's are a series of annual concert's presenting un-processed or raw location and field recordings in a collaborative immersive listening environment.

set 2: Gilles Aubry
Gilles Aubry is a Swiss sound artist & musician based in Berlin since 2002.
His work at the crossroad of improvisation, installation and performance privileges the use of field recordings, surround sound and random processes.
Gilles will present a solo set of his ongoing work Berlin Backyards

Berlin Backyards – 2007
Berlin Backyards is a sound piece based on field recordings of several backyards made in Berlin during the winter 2006. The live version of the piece uses improvisation and random processes to create a dreamy soundscape at the border of space representation and musical abstraction.

In the urban context, backyards are interesting in that they are transitory spaces between private and public territories, home without a roof and enclosed streets at the same time. They are the place of various types of neighbouring interactions - from friendly greetings to perverse voyeurism – where a mutual process of visual and aural control is at work on the pretext of the community's security, a phenomenon illustrated in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Rear Window.

In many cases, backyards reveal spatial surprises in contrast to what one could expect from the street point of view: a peaceful garden, a school playground, rich ornaments on the walls, big ventilation systems, piles of anonymous garbage or, typically in the case of Berlin, a huge empty no man’s land.

On the acoustic level, the backyard works as a resonance body for all present sounds especially the ones coming from the street. Loud traffic noises are being heard through indirect reflections, filtered and attenuated by the high walls surrounding the empty yard like in a reverberation chamber, while quieter sounds from activities within the yard or from the houses around are being amplified. Because of this balancing and smoothing effect, backyards soundscapes have a particularly high acoustic resolution and constitute interesting sound sources for recording.

Far from being spectacular, Berlin Backyards aims at attracting the attention of the listener on the sonic qualities of the space itself and on micro-variations in the peripheral sound environment.

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