EH OUT LOUD

Season 2, Episode 5: Landscapes

5.26.2020

[music]

Voice: Experimental Humanities

Andrew Lee: My name is Andrew Lee, and I am a teaching fellow at Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts. Here in New York, we are in the throes of a global pandemic and at the epicenter of the outbreak. As we quarantine and isolate ourselves from our loved ones, our friends, and our communities, the ability to be outside has become rarified, and has also taken on new political dimensions. New York is a completely different city from the one I moved to two years ago. Being immersed in my art practice, teaching, and working random jobs, I often forgot that I lived in one of the largest cities in the world. Now with all of the time spent indoors, I yearn for the freedom of being out in the city amongst its people, the sights and the sounds that make it what it is. These next two projects intimate that type of curiosity with the outside world. The landscape has always been there, but has now been given a moment of pause, a hush, and a space to speak to us again. What are these landscapes? Are there songs addressed to us? And how and when do we become reacquainted?

Will Santora: Hello, my name is Will Santora, and I study studio arts and environmental and urban studies at Bard. This piece is called Walking the Rectangle, which mostly samples field recordings of the start of spring in the Tivoli Bay Park, which is a rectangle of acreage that I’ve been roaming and exploring during the time of Corona.

[Will Santora’s piece, Walking the Rectangle, plays; Will’s piece includes rhythmic electronic elements of various pitches, long synth tones, grass rustling, rainfall, water splashing, and birds chirping]

Clay Hillenburg: Hello, my name is Clay Hillenburg. I study music at Bard. My piece compiles field recordings of bodies of water within and around the historic Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, New York.

[Clay Hillenburg’s piece, Rosenscape, plays; Clay’s piece includes sounds of ambient noise at various volumes, water dripping and running, and birds chirping]