(We are trying to take) Soundings of Social Reality.



For more than 7 years we have been recording sound. We were running through the city seeking 
samples for Boris Karloff, we tripped out in the Wienerwald, falling in love with the wind; we 
plugged into a 100 lectures and we tried to get hold of a strange November night in the Hotel 
Bellevue on the Rijeka Shores. We were enjoying bob sledging in cold winter nights and we spent 
hours examining the snow underneath our shoes. We used the sounds to meet and hang out, and 
we were happy to annoy the civil cops. We mapped 3000 km of the Schengen border on MDs but 
still we haven't found out what our desires are... we are trapped in the belly of that horrible 
machine. Maybe we feel that we can preserve some moments of LIFE when we push REC, maybe 
we try to escape through the headphones. Things can unexpectedly clear up for certain reasons 
while we get lost listening to a recording. Anyway, we still are more ambitious with collecting than 
with analysis.

This publication by the Manoa Free University is a sketch for an interim report, insufficient by 
definition. It brings forward a few aspects of sound and politics, focussing on using a microphone 
to explore the maps of social lifes. We neglect large areas of political sound - most of them surely 
more powerful as an emancipative tool to overcome oppression - Bei Tanzmusik kommts einer in 
die Beine. It's not our revolution either if we can't dance to it... Still we think some field recording 
might be of some help.

Soundings of Social Reality  is a subjective collection: Both the sound examples and the texts are 
chosen out of a belle confusion of historical cornerstones, personal favourites and random 
discoveries. Many of the sounds and texts have been sneaking around us for many years, but most 
of the actual material has been gathered throughout the research for the Copenhagen Soundscape 
project. 

We are aware of the fact that many lines and spaces are hard to be read, most often because they 
are rooted in a local and personal context. Go Google. This is an appetizer.


Transgressing the frontiers of the circle of fire!

the Mason & Dixon Fellowship,
Manoa Free University / Xerox Academy, February/June 2003