Following their four-channel concert on World Listening Day last July in the Reception Hall and historic former Pump Station at the Deer Island Sewage Treatment Plant, Boston Harbor, the New England Phonographers Union bring their recordings to the mainland to present to a Boston audience for an immersive concert in a large former industrial space in Fort Point currently being used by Studio Soto.

Their recordings were made on multiple days in, on, under, and around the Sewage Treatment Plant itself (on which see this entry in CLUI’s Land Use Database and the MWRA’s information page) by the Phonographers Union: for this project Rick Breault, Mike Bullock, Ernst Karel, Kara Oehler, and Jed Speare. In live performance, the sounds are re-presented, completely unprocessed but recombined improvisationally, through a four-channel array where each side of the square is a stereo field, resulting in a peculiar kind of quadruple-stereo spatialization for the audience (and performers) sited within that array.

For the original event, Scott LaPierre did a full video story for the Boston Globe, including sounds and images from the Sewage Treatment Plant, interviews with the phonographers and with Massachusetts Water and Resources Authority officials on-site, and footage from the concert:

A video by Scott LaPierre, and published in the Boston Globe, about the New England Phonographers Union’s Deer Island project.

(Watch in full-screen mode so that the edge isn’t cut off, or see a higher-resolution version here.)

The facility is listed in the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Land Use Database, with the following description: “The Deer Island waste treatment plant processes Boston’s sewage and is the second largest sewage treatment plant in the country (Milwaukee’s is larger). The plant is capable of handling more than a billion gallons of wastewater per day, ejecting treated effluent out giant submerged sprinkler heads at the end of a 9.5 mile long tunnel that leads out to sea. A dozen ‘egg-shaped’ digesters, 110 feet tall, loom over the island, and break down solids in the waste. The city’s sewage, treated and untreated, has been pumped out to sea from here since 1899.” For more detailed information about the processes which the Phonographers Union have recorded for this project, please see http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/03sewer/html/sewditp.htm .

The occasion for the concert is the second annual World Listening Day, a new tradition started by the World Listening Project in honor of Canadian composer, soundscape philosopher and activist R. Murray Schafer, and held on the date of his birthday. For this project, the New England Phonographers Union is represented by Rick Breault, Michael Bullock, Ernst Karel, Kara Oehler, and Jed Speare.

Attending the concert and directions: carpooling to Deer Island through Winthrop is the suggested means of access (directions below). Public transportation is also available by taking the Blue Line to Orient Heights and then catching the Point Shirley bus to the last stop; walk up the road to the plant gate from there.

NOTE: All attendees to the concert must R.S.V.P. in advance, by 8:00 p.m. on Sunday July 17th, to Barbara Allen of the MWRA at Barbara.allen@mwra.state.ma.us with: name(s) and means of transportation, i.e. by vehicle (with number of occupants) or by bus. All attendees must also bring a valid I.D.

Both NEPU and the MWRA are aware that this protocol for attending the concert is unusual; it’s due to the unusual nature and location of the event. We encourage people to come and share the adventure. There is also a National Park Recreation Area and 2 1/2 mile Harbor Walk on the island to discover as well.

Automobile directions to Deer Island from Boston via Boston Harbor Tunnels:

1. From Boston, the Callahan or the Ted Williams Tunnel, follow Route 1A North, McClellan Highway, until first traffic light.
2. Take right on Boardman St. to rotary, go half way around and continue on Saratoga St.
3. After passing “Entering Winthrop” sign take first right onto Pleasant St. (Route 145)
Discontinue following Route 145.
4. At “Stop” sign take a right on Shirley St.
5. Follow Shirley St. to Elliot St. take a left and follow Elliot St. around to the left.
6. Take a right on to Tafts Ave. and follow to the end. (GPS: 190 Tafts Ave, Winthrop, MA)
7. Visitors to the Deer Island Public Access Area can use the visitor parking lot and walk around the island.
7a. Visitors and Employees of the treatment plant can continue to the Guard house/check point.
7b.Visitors for functions at the Historic Pump Station (Reception/Training Center) should inform Security Staff and follow their direction.

Saturday, 23 April 2011
Event begins at 8:00; the New England Phonographers Union performs two sets, at 9:00 and 10:00.
Massasoit Elks Lodge
55 Bishop Richard Allen Dr.
Cambridge, Mass./Central Square

Sensate is an online journal for innovative projects that engage new modes of media-based scholarship and critical practice. Using groundbreaking new open-source multimedia publishing software, Sensate aims to become a significant venue for the production, circulation and discussion of audio, video, interactive and other media produced by artists and researchers working at the intersections of the humanities, arts, design and sciences. We are driven by the conviction that the making of creative projects is an inherent part of academic or scholarly work.

Sensate grows out of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, where graduate-student efforts to push the boundaries of anthropological and audiovisual representation have coalesced in a collaborative project to draw attention to and examine the limits of cross-breeding art, culture, the senses, and technology. We take from visual anthropology a focus on production and from anthropology of the senses a commitment to embodied aspects of our work.

UnionDocs
322 Union Ave
Brooklyn NY 11211 

New England Phonographers Union member Ernst Karel will present recent and in-progress work made from location recordings, in stereo, quadraphonic, and 5-channel configurations.  Work will include: a five-channel extension of  Heard Laboratories (and/OAR 2010)  incorporating an electroacoustic interpretation recorded live by the Chicago Sound Map ensemble; a version of  Swiss mountain transport systems, eight-channel version with percussion (a collaboration with Helen Mirra currently on exhibition at Diapason Gallery) composed for German radio; current quadraphonic work in progress, recorded in quad at a recyclables-sorting facility in Charlestown, Mass.; and experimental ethnographic audio work coming out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

Discussion might take up the documentary use of nonlinguistic sound to produce ‘doubtful knowing’, in connection with ideas such as anthropologist of sound Steven Feld’s notion of ‘acoustemologies’, or sonic ways of knowing and being in the world, and the recognition (found, for example, in new books by sound theorists Salomé Voegelin and David Toop) that listening is an experience of a continuously fleeting, ungraspable present moment, and as such is “full of phemonemological doubt,” as Voegelin puts it (Listening to Noise and Silence, 2010:4): “The understanding gained is a knowing of the moment as a sensory event that involves the listener and the sound in a reciprocal inventive production.”

cf:

Canadian Association for Sound Ecology

Bay Area Sound Ecology

Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology

Southwest Society for Acoustic Ecology

New York Society for Acoustic Ecology

New England . . .

7:00 p.m., Sunday 18 July 2010
12 Farnsworth St
Boston MA

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12 Farnsworth is known as Art@12, a venue of Fort Point Arts Community that includes a store and about 5,000 sq. ft of raw gallery space. It is located nest to Flour Café on Farnsworth St., off of Congress St., one block down from the Children’s Museum. This concert will be produced by Studio Soto in collaboration with Fort Point Arts Community (FPAC).