Nowhere in the Desert

I created this 10-minute composition using 70 audio files that had been uploaded by contributors to the Freesound.org online sound-sharing platform. The original files ranged from seaside field-recordings, to voice recordings, to drum samples, to snippets of music, and much more. What they had in common was the fact that they had all been accidentally geotagged to a remote location in the Libyan Desert.

For Nowhere in the Desert I began developing software instruments that would fracture and reconfigure the original audio files to create a new sound world. This new sound world is the soundscape of the desert as heard from afar, through layers of mediation and fallible geo-location practices.

My project Sounding Desert Utopias (2020) builds extensively on the ideas and processes behind Nowhere in the Desert.

This project has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts.