Boron “Vicinity” (2013)

The word “vicinity” is not used by itself in English, it’s normal instead to say “in the vicinity of,” and usually it’s the police who say that in the context of “the suspect was last seen in the vicinity of…” What it means for this recording is a feeling of being in a place, near people and animals and experiences that are location-specific.

The simplest way to describe it is like a movie with all but the visual part: dialogue, sound effects, field recordings, soundtrack music, etc. What I tried to do is make audio that makes the listener feel very close to different places and situations, to create an intimacy that also stimulates imagining what each scene looks and feels like (because the visual part is absent).

There is intermittent dialogue through the piece in Finnish, Dutch, Spanish, etc., because language is beautiful and mysterious when you don’t understand it, and because I don’t want there to be an obvious narrative. Listeners ideally hear the inflections and textures of the voices as a kind of music. The piece attempts to put Cage’s idea that all sound is music to the test.

Listen here: http://boron.bandcamp.com/album/vicinity

like a movie with all but the visual part: dialogue, sound effects, field recordings, soundtrack music, etc. What I tried to do is make audio that makes the listener feel very close to different places and situations, to create an intimacy that also stimulates imagining what each scene looks and feels like (because the visual part is absent).