Peter Cusack & Miloš Vojtěchovský: Favourite Sounds Of Prague
Produced by SWR Baden-Baden, producer: Frank Halbig Coproduced by Deutschlandradio Kultur Berlin (producer Markus Gammel) and Czech Radio 3 - Vltava (producer Michal Rataj) "Favorite Sounds" is an artistic survey focused on the city of Prague - seen (or rather, heard) by people who spent some time here. It doesn't matter whether they have spent their entire lives in Prague, whether they have lived here many years, or whether they were just visiting for a few days. Over the past few years, the project has thus given rise to several hours of audio recordings, as well as a website where visitors can listen (ideally with headphones) to new and old recordings from various locations in the city.
Some of the recordings include commentary, accompanied by text and photographs. The website allows visitors to search by contributor or subject, and to hear what people think about their audio environment. Thanks to help from the Berlin-Cologne project aporee.org, the menu also lets you find the locations of some recordings on a map, thus creating a constantly growing picture and civic reflection of the sounds of the city as well as a group self-portrait of the people and communities that live here.
The idea for "Favorite Sounds" was born several years ago in London, where it was initiated by musician and audio artist Peter Cusack. Today, many different variations on this project can be found throughout the world. Together with Miloš Vojtěchovský, Cusack is also the author of a radio composition created in collaboration with Südwest Rundunk, Deutschlandradio Kultur and Czech Radio for which the authors made use of the audio archive of several hundred audio miniportraits of Prague recorded in 2008 and 2009. The composition thus offers an audio veduta divided into several thematic movements and consisting of recordings by several sound collectors and travelers of the audio landscape.
Several motifs kept coming up during work on the recorded material and play important esthetic, semiotic, and narrative roles: streets, water, trains, games, sirens. Using these five diverse compositional elements, which we felt to be specific to Prague, the authors have attempted to construct a subjective portrait of the city - a city which, like any other metropolis, has its protean face. The recordings in the online audio archive could be combined to create thousands of different and possibly even contradictory images of Prague. The composition which we will listen to today captures just one audio facet which the authors felt worthy of recording and listening to.
With recordings by: Peter Cusack, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Lenka Dolanová, Stanislav Abrahám, Michal Kindernay, Tomáš Procházka, Aleš Zemene.
Favorite Sounds of Prague is part of the rádio d-cz project, an initiative of the Zipp - Czech-German cultural projects organized by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. As part of creating five new works for radio, rádio d-cz brings together many different artists, authors, and radio stations from both countries.
International coproduction: SWR Baden-Baden, Deutschlandradio Kultur Berlin, Czech Radio.