CD – Verlag Kunsthalle Göppingen

Can we define the soundwalks as a further subgenre of the incredibly huge range of styles known as field recordings? Maybe this question is not so important, because what really matters is not the manner, the “style” of recording, or the choice of the locations and the “stuff” of the sounds. What makes the difference is the artist, his deep motivation, and the way they connect and narrate all the elements which establish the “value” of a peculiar audio experience. In this project Astrid & Ephraim Wegner chose three different ways in Göppingen, in the region of Baden-Württemberg, recording different sounds during the day. The preparation was meticulous: the artists were looking for the right step to regulate and for a temporal structure to provide the composition some analytic attention. The attempt is shown in the refined CD artwork, where each track is accompanied by a small booklet including the photos of the capture locations, some moments of the recording and the sound waves. After some time, it’s clear the result is a musical reinterpretation which allows the listener to virtually be in different times and places, but this is the beauty of such sound approach. The concept realization results in a virtual urban net digitally manipulated, a set made by the traffic noises, natural elements such as twitters and voices, machinery elements, or also by unexpected things, for example some exotic tunes coming from the street. “Feldstudie Göppingen” is a project originating from the main event of Netzwerk für Neue Musik Baden- Württemberg, a festival that took place in October 2016, between 3rd and 30th. During the making, the festival included three soundwalks over the 57 stations in the city center. The visitors could listen again to the audio episodes in the original places, find the walks and re-experience them, making a self-poetic remix of the tracks and following their intimate wandering and the desire to get lost in these special sounds.