Soundwalk

Marcus Boon

(This article originally appeared in The Wire)

I am standing on a street-corner in New York’s Chinatown, on a winter afternoon.  The voice in my CD Walkman’s headphones tells me that there is a black door on the right, and that I should open it and get inside.  I turn and sure enough, there it is.  I enter a rundown tenement building next to a Chinese beauty parlor.  “Now walk to the third floor”, the voice says.  So I follow the recorded footsteps up the stairs, while the voice explains to me that in apartment number 3, lives a former Chinese triad boss, who likes to play cards in his apartment.  “Be very quiet,” the voice advises, “you are definitely not supposed to be here.”  Yet here I am.  With the headphones on, it’s hard to tell whether I’m being quiet enough.  Nervous tension rises as I slowly mount the stairs.  “Go up to the door,” the voice tells me.  “There’s a crack in it, take a look.”  I edge towards the door, and peep through the crack, heart pounding.  I can’t see anything in the darkness, and I’m relieved when finally the voice tells me to turn around and go downstairs – “I’ll meet you outside”.  As I walk down, a Canto-triphop soundtrack swells in my ‘phones, and William S. Burroughs disembodied voice floats through the mix.  It’s good to reach the street again.

The voice in my ears belongs to Jami Gong, host and guide to Soundwalk’s NYC Chinatown v1.0 audio tour (tours of New York’s Lower East Side and Times Square are currently available, and guides to areas of Paris, Rome and London are in the works).  Produced by New York based photographer Stephan Crasneanscki and film editor Michel Sitruk, each CD comes in an elegant pack that includes a map of the area to be soundwalked, and a number of recommended drop off points for food, fortune-telling and funeral arrangements en route.  The CDs themselves talk you through a particular route around a city neighborhood, beginning, passing through and ending at specific locations – in the case of the Chinatown tour, a coffee shop, a maze like set of tea parlors, Hong Kong style shopping malls, reputed opium dens, barbershops which double as gambling places and a Buddhist temple respectively.  Along with the guide’s verbal instructions, are interviews with local figures, recordings of footsteps that allow you to keep pace with the guide’s words, ambient sound recordings taken in the various locales of the tour, and soundtrack-like recordings composed to enhance the experience.

Listened to at home, the CDs sound like so-so audio documentaries, complete with fairly average electro-lite soundtracks.  When heard while walking on the prescribed route however, they become an intense, exhilarating, embodied experience.  “Use Common Sense.  Be ready for the unexpected.  As you do in real life” advises the warning at the beginning of the CD.  Well, the first thing you have to watch out for is the traffic you’re repeatedly ordered to step into.  Especially when you fall into the rhythm of the disk’s recorded footsteps, you enter the same kind of trance state that early Walkman owners apparently did, setting off a rash of horrible street accidents and lawsuits, as a result of which, to this day Walkmans come with a warning “to use extreme caution … in potentially hazardous situations.”  Soundwalk can offer an extreme example of the kind of tension between sound and image that film-maker Michael Snow discusses elsewhere this issue, only this time you’re trying to match pre-recorded verbal descriptions and the visual imagery they evoke not to video, but to a real life situation in all its complexity.  In fact, the tours cease to be visual in the strict sense of the word, but immersive, electronic environments of the kind Marshall McLuhan spoke in the 1960s – deceptively intimate, rich with sensory data.

Soundwalk straddles a variety of possible and uses: it’s at once a highly local audio version of a Rough Guide, a sound documentary, a soundtrack (DJs and musicians are invited to contribute to updated versions of each tour), and an abstract environmental sound project.  It’s unquestionably a state of the art urban experience: in the 1950s, the French situationists conceived of the dérive as an aimless, open exploration of the psychogeography of the city.  Soundwalk, which presents a packaged version of such wandering that would probably have Guy Debord turning in his grave, nevertheless opens up a whole new field of relationships between sound and environment.

For more information, go to www.soundwalk.com.

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