Sara Zalek and I performed a live set of field recordings, improvised music and dance for Todd Carter's"BelAir Presents" on Lumpen radio. The recordings come from Steel Workers Park on the South Side of Chicago, once called US Stee,l one of several Steel Mills that were located on the South East Side of the city. What found were urban ruins of ore walls and giant boulders of slag, large factory components to giant machines in a public space seeming to be a park and a memorial. In these actions and recordings, we reflect on industry and imagination in the context of a terrain vague and a recovering landscape.
After participating in this year’s World Listening Day programs this weekend I began to reflect on what lead me to my involvement. I rarely talk about what exactly lead to my interests in soundwalks, soundscapes and composition, because I felt they were too personal. Especially when I’m talking about practices in sound art and acoustic ecology many deem as esoteric and inaccessible. But the roots of my practice came from a toxic climate of race, economics, violence, politics and place that we experience today. I moved from Chicago to Oakland, California in 1998 to study art in San Francisco at the height of the first dot-com boom. I was there to have time and space to be a better artist and for self-recovery. Unfortunately, most people I had dealings with there treated me as if I was there to take their spot in the art scene, take jobs, housing and opportunity away from them. All this, while still being treated as a degraded other, in particular being harassed by the Oakland Pol...




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