Themes: Language, Shared identities. Symbols, Cultural Media.

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Begin listening with Made Up Western Memories Part Two, please start at 20:00

 

Media plays an influence on narratives that we construct, and also ideas of communities and places. I am interested in making a soundtrack about the imagined idea of a place that I have from the influence of media, and about the space that exists between the viewer and the subject. 

 

In this piece, I chose to take the individual tracks and collage them into a mix, as opposed to presenting them as separate pieces for an album. I use collage because assemblage, cut-up, and dispersal are engrained in my ideas of memory and perception related to sound, and the recovery of the subconscious through collage that I aim to convey.

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I want to make a soundtrack of what I imagine iconic Americana western culture to be like in the United States from places around Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. Iconic in this case, means the image that I get from these places comes from mass-culture media that
has placed an imprint of these places in my perception. I use the influence of printed word, music, and film to create a landscape of what these places sound and look like. The sounds I use, draw from ideas of heat, beating sun, dirt, masculinity, hunger, durational journeys, and vast, open red and brown canyons.

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An initial inspiration for Made Up Memories of a Western is from an interview with Eliane Radigue from the series of interviews with Julia Eckhart Intermediary Spaces. There is a story from the composer, Eliane Radigue, where someone asks her to make a track that sounds like the stars at night (Radigue and Eckhardt 34). This made me consider music about landscapes and the perceptual space that exists between human and nature. The word “inter” means between. I was inspired from this description to make compositions about intermediary music between myself and media, and what that space could sound like. The media creates an imagined idea of a place. Radigue also states, “Sound always reflects something from the mind.”

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