Join me for the Gerrard Street Indian Festival. It was a hot time! Especially the Indian Salsa at the beginning ..

The second clip is Kathakali dancers putting on their bells in an Indian dress shop just before the performance of The Toronto Tabla Ensemble

Listening means a lot of different things. To me, it’s a time to really focus in on what I’m hearing. To try to hear things in unusual ways. As my colleague and mentor Hildegard Westerkamp says “to get inside the sound”

I celebrated the day by listening to some of the sounds I gathered last week when I was in Toronto .. sounds that we take for granted all the time — streetcar sounds, street festivals, people talking to each other on the street, that one bird whose chirps and tweets rise above the sounds of the cars, other birds, dogs barking, sirens screaming.

Come to think of it, a poem I wrote a few years ago describes it perfectly:

Be here …
Amidst the soughing of the trees
The clicks and whirls of summer cicadas
gentle swish of the waves
On the distant shore Be here
Not there
In the centre of metal upon metal
Low grumble of machine
Hysterical wail of sirens
responding back to the wails of the world

Be here now
With closed eyes
With ears opened
To the possibilities of a world which hears its own heart.

- Victoria Fenner 2003

The sounds that go along with that picture .. sizzling of grills, people buying food (in Spanish), sounds of rattles and noisemakers …

This picture was taken outside Iglesia La Mercedi (Mercy Church) in Antigua, Guatemala. Every Sunday during Lent, a different village up in the surrounding mountains make a long procession carrying this huge, heavy platform with Christ on the Cross mounted on it. It involves hundreds of people all dressed in purple robes, drummers and men wearing sousaphones (they are dressed in tuxes). After they get to town, they process throughout town ALL DAY.

And yes, I got the sounds. I will be doing a podcast today (promise!) with this sound sequence and a whole bunch of other sounds I gathered while in both Honduras and Guatemala.

The documentaries I am doing can also be heard at The Green Planet Monitor

More reflections over the next few days. I love being here and listening to my sounds of there

Join me on Saturday morning, November 7, 11 am at the gate of the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto for a morning of listening.

Just for fun, no charge. Bring your recorder or just bring your ears. You can even bring a camera if you turn off the Click sound.

The Leslie Street Spit is a piece of land in Toronto which juts out into Lake Ontario. I have not soundwalked the spit before but figure it will be a great place to listen to nature meeting the cityscape.

I figure we will walk for about an hour, then go to a coffee shop or someplace for lunch and talk about sound, media, film making, photography and all these things us media artists do. No cost .. just a chance to get together.

Best to RSVP in case it rains and I have to send an update.

Just to let you know I am just about done the new one. Just have to package it (which means do the intro, the extro and mix it in with the theme). The content is done.

And I’m really happy with it. I’ve done a new piece called You Can’t Miss It … a composed piece about getting lost in the mountains of Appalachia, and the surprises I found. Music, praying, bug sounds, coal sounds. And a collection of directions from people I met about how to get from here to there. You’ll hear why I got lost so much.

And wrapping up with a wonderful interview with the amazing Katie Dollarhide, a mountain woman who is able to combine the best of tradition with the forward thinking of a contemporary thought. Katie is an inspiration and speaks of her mountains with love, tempered by a sense of realism.

This weekend. For sure!

First of all, I am delighted to be a contributor to a couple of web magazines. I just wrote an article on recording in conflict zones without being arrested or having your gear confiscated. This was for the Indie Travel Podcast blog, an adventurous and fun site by intrepid Kiwis Linda and Craig Martin (that’s somebody from New Zealand, for those of you not yet in the know.

Here’s the article
http://indietravelpodcast.com/article/record-travels-secure-regions/

And, a slightly different twist — I was asked by Cyndi Ingle, one of the chief philosophers of Soul’s Code — to write an article about how I use Soundwalking as Meditation.

Much as I love recording, there’s something really gratifying about seeing my words too, not just hearing them.

About the workshop, heck, this is getting too long, so I’ll do another post about that. Can’t let these blog posts ramble on too long, y’know.