What were your expectations?

- I was very excited to be asked, since I have been wanting to go to Norway for a long time. I develop a relationsip to certain things that is very personal, that comes in through a backdoor. I find my route through a history or a material. My knowlegde of Norway is almost exclusively through Knut Hamsun, especially the way he talks about landscape. He talks very musically about listening to the landscape. So my excpectations were to find out if my experience of the landscape mediated though his writing would happen without him present.

- When I work, I don't approach information or experiences with a specific plan, because then I think I am looking for something. And if I am looking for something, I am excluding the potential of other things that I might find. I like left turns to come up, to take me in another direction or to another place.

 

- I brought a bit of equipment and Hamsun, but I have been inspired as much by listening to people speak in Norwegian as I have by the landscape. I have spent time working with languages I don't understand. I look at a word and try to figure out what it might mean, based on no knowledge of the langauge. What I end up with is rarely a correct translation, but I like what happens when these pathways can be followed, when the work in progress is open enough to allow using things in ways they weren't intended, allowing them to develop their own sense of poetry. 

 

You work with a "double listening", the first being out in nature, without listening to the recording, the second when you are back in the studio?

- I am not interested so much in capturing a specific sound, as I am interested in recording a moment of experience. If I took three seconds of my 5 minute recording in Grieg's cabin, where almost nothing really happens and almost nothing is audible except a little bit of hiss; I would still have the mystical presence of that space. a sound recording can be a tactile artifact of that moment, no matter how much or little of it is used. Of course I am interested in the sounds i hear during a recording experience, but I know for myself that very often the resulting recordings are not that interesting to listen to later. The experience of being in a space is what was moved me, and I want my work to evoke a similar depth of feeling in others.

 

- Sometimes this involves using the initial material in an unrecognizable way.
On the other hand, it is important that there is an integrity to the work, where the ideas and initial moments and places exist as the skeleton of the work, even though they might not seem part of its audible surface.

 

- If I played you the 5 minutes of Grieg's cabin, there's a good chance you would find it uninteresting. In terms of a listening experience, it  doesn't offer much. Because I want the finished work to evoke some of the depth of feeling that i associate with the original experience, I have to be open to working with the material almost like a sculptor.

 

- The idea is to try to pull something out from inside of itself  - to help the recorded moments begin to speak of their recording. It's a challenge, particularly to do this and to keep the integrity of the recording intact; but my interest is in making work that is built from an experience, rather than attempting to replicate an experience photographically with sound.

 

- I want to create a situation where someone can listen to my own work in the way I responded to the original experience, where people can begin to listen to the subtler kinds of audio activity they tend to ignore in their daily lives.