In photographing a landscape, the eye is the dominant sense. Like a camera records the image, a mike can record sound. Sound has a great associative power because it is concrete (a robin is singing) as well as abstract: many sounds are not easy to pin point (is it a creaking glacier, a creaking door?) In linear sound collages as well as in interactive sound installations this associative power is used to construct new landscapes: soundscapes.
The soundscapes on the website are necessarily restricted to the linear format.
Michael Pestel / Jeroen van Westen
The Bunker is a man-made cave, cold and dark, hostile. This bunker built on Sylt dates back to the 1930s. Sylt is a beautiful island at the German coast.
It was a bright summer day, ... outside. Larks sang, a light breeze cooled our skin when we climbed the high dune. The bunker atop was cold upon entering. Michaels flute tried hard to call up the spirits of the larks outside.
Jeroen van Westen / Vincent Huijpen
A collection of sounds organized by association of the sounds to the elements Ether, Air, Water, Earth, Fire. First each element is introduced briefly, then layered into (im)possible landscapes consisting of sounds only.
Michael Pestel / Jasper Goedman / Jeroen van Westen
Sound: Vincent Huijpen
The Runde was a tiny watercourse running through a peat marsh. The marsh is gone, the peat is gone, water still wells up, at the location of a disappeared fort a new fort is built. The Fort is not surrounded by water as a defense but celebrating a new alliance between man and water. The Fort can be used as an open air theatre, the opening performance is recorded and mixed by Vincent Huijpen.
Jeroen van Westen
Water lapping against the coast of an island. Land and water meet endlessly all around. On an island, silence is audible.
Between arrrival and departure, isolation is relative: the ‘World’ is at bay: the HORIZON. Fragments of sounds blowing, floating, barely ‘intelligible’ or just not recognizable.
Jeroen van Westen / Vincent Huijpen
The Runde was a tiny watercourse running through a peat marsh. The marsh is gone, the peat is gone, water still wells up, a new stream finds its way between old stories, old sounds: landscape is a composition, a work of art.
Jeroen van Westen
Sounds of culture are as natural as sounds of nature, but nature is often hard to hear when in a cultural environment. Silence and sound, nature and culture, day and night, many dichotomies are often understood as oppositions. The exchange of life bringing salt through the membrane of a cell, thus connecting inside with the outside through an airtight separation shows there is a different way of looking at these sets of concepts. Osmose is a composition of sounds from cities, churches and nature.
Jeroen van Westen / Vincent Huijpen
Framing water is not easy, the Dutch have a fascinating history of living with water. We live on land that grew out of water, but today we fight drowning for two thirds of the country is below sea-level! How come? .... We are guilty. The digging of canals and building dikes to make land more solid, and especially the hundreds of years of pumping have squeezed the sponge we were living on: our land shrunk below sealevel. On this soundscape the sounds of a representational collection of pumping stations are used to illustrate our mechanical relationship to the landscape we are surviving in.
