Like all good things, our time in Latvia comes close to an end. We left Karosta on January 9, and three hours of bad bus music and a half pint of brandy later, arrived in Riga. No trip to Latvia is complete without hours of scheming and planning for the next one, so meetings took place in the RIXC to set up a workshop on geophysical infospace, satellite communications and acoustic-cartographic strategies for next spring in Karosta and Riga.

My final trip to ""The Zone" [the old Soviet military base in Karosta], during which acoustic research into the old submarine tubes would have taken place, was intercepted immediately by camo-clad security guards. They informed us that we were in a "border zone", and that we had to leave immediately. My local companion Max Borisov explained our project to them in Latvian, and we tried to ask permission from their superior. Unfortunately, the only thing that got accross was that we were there to "record sounds from the nature." Their superior informed them via radio that "there is no nature in Karosta"", and they showed us the exit. Perhaps in the spring we could make a whole project of going up their chain of command to recieve some sort of official permission, but for now the case is closed.

This is the final batch, for now, of field recordings collected over the months of December 2002 and January 2003 in the former Soviet military zone of Karosta, Latvia. Because this is still a work in progress, reinterpretations from myself are forthcoming, and reinterpretations and feedback from others are welcome. Thanks for dropping by...

--derek

The recordings:
---------------

ice.sheet.1.edit, ice.sheet.2.edit

Each day by the Baltic Sea presented such a different environment, with changes even from minute to minute. The harbor of Karosta is surrounded by piers, and completely froze into jagged, vertical shards of ice during the -25*C weather. These two improvisations, for binaural contact mikes and these ice sheets, were made on different days, using only materials on hand to create cold and clicking textures...

baltic.ice.flow.edit.1, baltic.ice.flow.edit.2

Tide, wind and temperature in a certain balance, creating small and complex interactions of air, ice and water...some strange creature sleeping just below the surface, bubbling lava fields, mineral waters flowing deep inside the earth... This rare event proved to be the single most frustrating recording experience of my stay in Karosta, as it exposed all the limitations of my consumer-grade minidisc/microphone combo.

windy.metal.roof.edit.1

One of the buildings still standing in what we called "The Zone" was once a Soviet army cultural center. The rooms inside held many acoustic treasures: loose piles of unravelled reel-to-reel tape, old military songbooks and records, kilometers of 16 and 35mm film, manuals for old microphones and mixers, broken glass lamps, small medicine bottles...the list goes on... In the attic, I spotted a dangling metal panel where the roof had burned out. My companion Max proved braver than I and climbed the charred beams with the contact mikes to obtain this sample, a beautiful and microscopic journey through the structure of the steel.

binaural.tunnel.study.1

An excerpted acoustic study of an abandoned Soviet aircraft bunker. Max Borisov wears ear-mount binaural microphones, and I test the space with bricks and stones. Max and I found this technique very interesting, as it allows one person to literally "become" a human microphone, and the other to perform for that audience/recorder [many thanks to Aaron Ximm for inspiration in this and other matters]. A clever soul might use these acoustic signatures to place other sounds in the same space virtually...

karosta.bridge.edit

Max suggested a contact mike recording of the Karosta Channel Bridge because of its symbolic nature. During Soviet times, this bridge provided the only access to the military restricted area of Karosta. When the bridge is open for ships entering or leaving the harbour, the entire community still remains isolated from the outside world for up to an hour. A good set of geophones or seismic sensors might have done the job better, but the resonances of wood and metal are still quite clear as cars and people pass overhead.

orthodox.mass.edit

According to the Russian Orthodox calender, January 7 is Christmas. We were lucky enough to have one of the largest Orthodox cathedrals in Latvia, dating back to the turn of the century, standing 100 meters from our door, so we braved the cold for a midnight mass. This ear-mount binaural recording captures three conceptual spaces within this church: the performance space, where priest and choir carry out their mysterious rituals; the social space, where common people come together to whisper, shuffle their feet, sniffle from the cold and even forget to turn off their mobile phones; and finally the acoustic space, where the architectural reverberations create characters of their own.

boiler.room.mix

When I discovered that a crew of three, working 24 hours a day to chop wood, were required to heat the house we stayed in, I felt more than a little bit aristocratic. In Latvia, however, it is often that the shortage is not of work, but of desire to work. If woodcutting is the thing that seperates these three people from the lazy vodka-drunks who visit the soup kitchen in the same wing of the house, then all the better. This piece is a stereo mix-down of a 6-channel recording using contact and stereo condensor mikes to capture the various ambient and concrete sounds of the boiler room, and is dedicated to Astra, Gints and Viktors--for keeping us warm.

[NOTE: because of the binaural techniques used in making these recordings, stereo headphones with proper right/left placement are highly recommended--and essential in some cases--to fully appreciate their nature during playback.]

Thanks go to: K@2, Maxim Borisov, Handjah, Emsis, Calle and Kristine for their support and assistance during this project.