Medea

SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE

MEDEA

sound work: Stephan Crasneanscki – Dug Winningham – Simone Merli – Kamran Sadeghi – Jake Harper
texts: Arthur Larrue
photos: Stephan Crasneanscki

sound excerpt from Medea
http://soundcloud.com/soundwalk-collective/05-balaklava-medea

On the occasion of the release of this book/CD, the Soundwalk  present Medea in a performance on 4 May 2012 at the centre Georges Pompidou:www.centrepompidou.fr

Medea is a sound journey around the Black Sea. A previously unreleased composition developed from recordings of radio waves as well as fragments of voices and sounds gleaned by the Soundwalk collective, during a two-month crossing on a sailing boat specially equipped for the occasion with scanners, microphones and long-range antennas. Medea touches on Turkey, Georgia, Russia, Crimea, Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, and proceeds as a sonic reading of this region of the world where beauty vibrates, bloody and dark — like the ancient Medea.
The book unfolds the sound composition of the CD included in this volume and brings together photographs by Stephan Crasneanscki and texts by Arthur Larrue.
Taken at nightfall, the photographs convey, in a particularly icy chiaroscuro, the fatal character of the regions explored.
The texts, for their part, recount the stages of the sound creation in the form of a Journal de la Mer Noire, kept during the expedition.
Together they invite immersion in a strange and disquieting universe.

Soundwalk is an international artistic collective based in New York.
Since 2000, Soundwalk, as a nomad of sound, ceaselessly undertaking improbable journeys, from the desolate land of Bessarabia as far as the Rub al Khali desert. By exploring and taking the sounds of the world around us, Soundwalk captures the fragments of a shifting reality to form singular sound compositions. Created by Stephan Crasneanscki, who lives and works in New York, Soundwalk received the “Audie Award” for its collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa in the Bronx as well as the “Dalton Pen Award” for the Sonic Memorial Soundwalk made with Paul Auster, at Ground Zero, New York.

Soundwalk has taken part in group exhibitions and given performances including: “Paris-Delhi-Bombay”, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2011; “Le Son du Nous”, with Philippe Starck, Festival International Exit, Maison des Arts de Créteil, 2010; Museum of Contemporary Art, Naples; Villa Noailles, Hyères, 2010; Singapour Art Museum, 2010; World Expo 2010, Shanghai; “Art, Talks & Sensations”, Abu Dhabi Art Fair, 2010. performance as part of the “Spectacles vivants” at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 4 May 2012.

The ZagZig collection (edited by Frank Smith & Philippe Langlois) published by Dis Voir is an editorial space for artists’ books, which consists in making sound works exist in the form of books/CDs in order to create genuine innovative art objects.