(Still from Only God Sees Me)

Before the start of 2013, I spent a while thinking through a couple of things about 12 Gates to the City that I’ve been finding problematic. Firstly, I’d come to realize that I was only spending sporadic periods of time both listening and recording, invariably clustered around specific projects. I wanted to find a way to not only make myself pick up my recording gear more often, but also to do so on a more consistent basis than the present small bursts of activity.
Secondly, the acoustic map, which has been laying dormant for some time, seemed to me to not really be functioning in the way that I wanted. The original idea was to create an ever-increasing collection of geolocated field recordings, but instead I ended up with a decontextualized mess; important or at least interesting information was lost through presenting the field recordings in this way. Sound maps are great for many reasons, and I’ll continue to produce them for other things, but I decided it would be best to archive this one.
In its place, and as a way to hopefully meet my first problem, I have started what I have entitled the hebdomadal sound project. Taking inspiration from my photography project that has been running for over four years, the plan is to produce one field recording a week and upload it to the project page, complete with some context (maybe a photograph, certainly a bit of text).
Apart from a minimum of at least one recording made and uploaded each week (it may transpire that on occasion more than one a week is uploaded), I’m not going to impose any further rules or restrictions, such as subject matter, length, or style of recording. I’m going to see whether I can do this for the duration of 2013; beyond this, we shall see…
You can find the hebdomadal sound project page here, and all of the original recordings can be freely accessed and downloaded (in higher quality than presented on the project page) from The Internet Archive here.