odd person – there is no place : a travelogue audio diary
I am a sucker for conceptual audio/visual cohesion with art projects. Often we see an individual component of an art project, and while it may be fantastic on its own, it is when seen as a whole that the bigger picture is illuminated. I hope that is what I achieved through this project.
From April 2023 through June 2024 I was slow traveling through the United States; slowly exploring cities and regions, staying in each area for a month or so. During this time I was creating an audiovisual journal and travelogue. I attempted to create music based on specific thoughts, emotions, and places, and paired that music with accompanying photographs and videos from that same time.
The culmination of all of this was a cassette release on Ingrown Records called ‘there is no place‘ by my music project odd person. All tracks are presented chronologically in the order they were created. And each track contains one or 2 associated images.
This was originally going to be three separate EPs but I smashed them all together for the full length cassette release. The first 2 EPs were released digitally only. They were called ‘my dismal arcadia‘ and ‘all futures fade‘. I never got around to releasing the third independently.
This is the cover art for the first 2 EPs:
I began this project without any preconceived ideas of the music. Just make whatever I make as part of the audio journal experiment. In practice that ended up being a lot of creations on my laptop either via max/msp sequencing or straight composition in my DAW’s piano roll editor. Nothing fancy. Visually I was simply taking photos with my junky phone camera, trying to capture spaces.
Below are the individual track photos for the ‘there is no place’ release:
In addition to the photos, I also created some promotional videos, namely for the first part of this project, my dismal arcadia. These videos followed a similar approach to the photos. I was interested in exploiting the lo-fi properties of my phone’s terrible video compression to create video field recordings.
Below is a youtube playlist of some of these promo videos. They are short, 60-second snippets of moments. I have hours of recordings left that are just sitting on a hard drive, eventually to be lost to time.
When I see all of this on a single post it seems like a significant amount of work. This stuff consumed a large chunk of my thoughts for a year or so. Now it’s like looking back at old diary entries. Alien and forgotten. Written by someone else. But here it all is exposed to the world. Kinda weird. But enjoy! Support Ingrown Records if you can! They have been extremely generous and supportive of all of my work. They are doing the Weird’s work.
