Crystal Records Releases Listen: Taiwan Speaks — The Waves Are Coming

Taiwan’s first entirely natural-sound field recording CD — The Waves Are Coming — was recorded on Taiwan’s east coast, almost entirely free of human-made sound: only the rise and fall of ocean surf, wave after wave, for a full 47 minutes. This sound was captured one summer morning in 1994 by recording engineer Fu K’un-ming — who was participating in an indigenous music collection project — when, after recording the Harvest Festival of an Amis village in Hualien, he went to the coast alone and, moved by a moment of inspiration, recorded this natural soundscape. The Waves Are Coming both inherits Taiwan’s 1960s–70s “Folk Song Collection Movement” — the collecting consciousness of using recordings to seek “our own sounds” — and also signals two transformations in the consciousness of field recording collection: first, the shift in recording targets from musical sounds to non-musical sounds; and second, a disclosure of the recordist’s subjective position within the documentary record.

Tags

External Links