FIELD RECORDINGS: Farewell to Chicago, Part Three
Mixing board on the Bluhm Family Terrace, Modern Wing, Art Institute of Chicago, during grand opening festivities on May 16, 2009. (More photos here.)
In the previous installment of this field recording series, I included some recordings of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing while it was still under construction. Here’s the payoff, when Alex and I visited the Modern Wing on the day of its grand opening. Also, the next day I visited the MCA and made some recordings at Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your TIme” solo show.
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Renzo Piano Speech at SAIC Commencement, Millennium Park (9:04, 19MB mp3)
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On our way to the Modern Wing, we stumbled upon the commencement ceremony for the School of the Art Institute which was going on in Millennium Park. A friend of ours, Alicia Chester, was graduating so we hoped we’d bump into her, but the crowd was too big. Instead, we managed to stick around for a speech by Renzo Piano, architect of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. We also got to hear a redwing blackbird, a young boy fascinated by the sound of stepping on a drainage grating, and a Japanese family sitting down in front of us with several bouquets of flowers wrapped in crinkly paper.
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Photography Gallery, Griffin Court and Pritzker Garden, AIC Modern Wing (6:16, 12.5MB mp3)
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Interior and exterior sounds of the new Modern Wing, starting inside the ground floor photography gallery, then out into the Griffin Court entrance hall, and finally out a side door and into the Pritzker Garden, a gorgeous space which envelops you in the building’s architecture while still affording you a wonderful acoustic vantage point of downtown Chicago. Lots of traffic sounds echo around the space in a way that feels tranquil rather than bustling.
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AIC Modern Wing Galleries 182-184, Cy Twombly, “The Natural World” (4:02, 8.1MB mp3)
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Recorded during my second walkthrough of the Twombly show, when I went back in to take pictures on the (bad) advice of the security guard in the photography gallery. I got busted immediately (but not until I was able to take this picture), so I immediately switched my camera with my Zoom H2.
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Olafur Eliasson, “Ventilator”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (3:07, 5.9MB mp3)
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On to the MCA’s installation of Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your Time” retrospective…one of my favorite pieces was “Ventilator”, a room containing an electric fan hanging from the ceiling which whips around the room at a height of about six inches above the top of my head. Fun, scary, and sonically blissful. I thought I was being pretty slick by holding the exhibition program in front of my Zoom to hide it from the gallery guard (and help cut down on the wind noise); she probably just shook her head and kept walking.
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Olafur Eliasson, “Beauty”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1:39, 3.2MB mp3)
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Another Eliasson installation, “Beauty” is a dark room containing a dim spotlight and a hose on the ceiling which spouts a wall of fine mist that you can walk around. A gorgeous bit of white noise in a black space.
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FIELD RECORDINGS: Farewell to Chicago, Part Two
Recording traffic passing over metal construction plates, 111 West Jackson St, Chicago, April 29, 2009 (photo by Alessandra Gillen)
Picking up where I left off, here’s my second batch of recent Chicago field recordings, my sonic farewell before Alex and I move to Ann Arbor…
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Rain outside apartment sunporch (9:35, 20.7MB mp3)
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Almost ten minutes of a lovely evening rain from the acoustically rich interior of our apartment’s sunporch, facing north.
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Purple Line CTA train arriving at Howard (4:47, 10.5MB mp3)
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A healthy portion of the second half of my morning commute (Brown line to Belmont Purple line, then Purple line to Davis). This is actually a Purple line only to Howard, so occasionally my commute has had three parts instead of two. I was lucky to get a recording of the train interior without anyone speaking.
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Traffic over metal construction plates, 111 West Jackson St. (5:56, 12.3MB mp3)
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Recorded at the same time the picture above was taken. A block-long stretch of Jackson Street down in the Loop has had a series of large, square metal plates on it for some time, and when the traffic runs over them they make a great booming sound which echoes amazingly off all the skyscrapers nearby.
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Fountain, Art Institute of Chicago garden (4:00, 8.2MB mp3)
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Public fountain season’s upon us, so this is a recording of this fountain now that it actually has water in it again.
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Modern Wing of Art Insitute of Chicago under construction (3:20, 6.9MB mp3)
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A compact little field recording symphony. I love the way the drone of the equipment and the traffic interplay at first, followed by the construction worker’s whistling and the woman’s footsteps in the gravel. A great beginning, middle and end. Can’t wait to finally see the inside of the new Modern Wing in person this coming weekend!
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Walking to Sox-35th CTA station after White Sox victory (1:37, 3.3MB mp3)
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A nice moment of public euphoria, saxophone and changing acoustic spaces as we walk across a bridge over the freeway and into the Sox-35th CTA Red Line station.
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Birds, cars and El trains, 5:15am (8:47, 17.3MB mp3)
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Since I have the sleeping habits of a 70 year old man, I usually wake up around 4:30am. When spring starts, the morning birds go crazy. This was the first really riotous bird morning of the season, and i recorded this out the windows of our living room.
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Chicago River bridge raising alarm bells from Merchandise Mart CTA train platform (1:32, 3.1MB mp3)
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I’ve rarely seen the bridges over the Chicago River down in the Loop raise up to let boats pass underneath. I’d never seen the bridge raise up in front of the Merchandise Mart CTA train platform while I was actually on the train until this past weekend. With the bridge up, the train couldn’t pass, so we disembarked and stood on the platform so I could get a recording of the bridge’s warning bells as it lowered back down into place, mixing nicely with the walkie talkie communications of a CTA employee standing next to me.
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Hissing air vent above Chicago Union Station Amtrak track, National Train Day (2:25, 4.6MB mp3)
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After touring an Amtrak Superliner train during the free National Train Day event at Union Station last weekend, we stepped back onto the track and walked right under an air vent with an amazing hiss. That wall of white noise has a few cracks in it which expose some of the other sounds in the station at the time.
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