In the rain in Vancouver after a summer that stretched long into October it is easy to be charmed by what it must be like to be somewhere else. Barcelona maybe. Or Yangon. Tripoli must smell nice in the morning. All that fresh baked bread and tea.
It’s not just the exotic charms that get me, though. Also the mundane, interstitial urban normness of places very much like Vancouver. A narrow focused sameness elsewhere in the world.
The language they speak there may be different and the fashion cut at odd angles and maybe the architecture when seen right up close is more brutalist or has softer curves and alien aspirations or maybe it’s embedded with swivelling technologies that we haven’t dreamed of yet over here on the coast. Or maybe it’s too impractical for our modest needs, too new, too expensive to import. Too strange. Maybe somebody wants it all to themselves.
Regardless, those cities stretch to the horizon when seen from the middle floors of tall buildings the way Vancouver can if you can find the right window at the right time of day.
Looking east, I mean. Looking west is an invitation to a whole other world of despair.
Those other cities. What’s it like to wait there. To kill time. To linger at the window overlooking a street from a purposeless room. Or a room whose purpose can be anything, could be anywhere.
What does it sound like?
Not the human sounds like a muffled cough or the scuff of a patent leather shoe on the polished concrete floor. But the human-made non-algorithmic sounds. What is the sound of another person’s intention as you wait around in the non-descript rooms of foreign cities?
Looking out from a window at the buildings slick with rain. The umbrellas jostling at the intersections are lit up by the headlamps of idling automobiles as they wait to carry their passengers away. Last one outs turn off the office lights in neighbouring buildings and darken entire floors like a layer in a cake that has gone from lemon custard to chocolate ganache in the blink of an eye.
Downtime Salon is a 55 minute trip to that room in Nurnberg and going back in time, if we need to be that specific, to the past summer. Not long ago. A time still stuck to the substance of the pandemic. Slick with that goo.
The piece was created as the audio accompaniment to an installation by artist Nile Koetting for Musik Installationen Nürnberg, in July 2022 and it takes me there.
Or anywhere, really. Any concrete room with windows for walls or concrete for walls overlooking a city whether we’re there or not.
It’s aural transportation without the airfare or the dank echo of a bus station after dark.
There’s a section of Dania’s piece that begins at an ambient transition just before the 37 minute mark that is so sublime, such an interesting change in tempo and mood, and such an inspired composition of sampled sounds that I have been going back to it for most of the week.
This beautiful, buoyant digital ditty that riffles through my brain and transports me to a nightclub in Damascus, a vegetable stall in Mumbai, Spadina, a Chilean mountainside winery, an alley behind a building built by Gaudi at dusk in Barcelona, to Vancouver in November in the thick fog with the morning traffic hustling away outside my window.
You can find out more about Dania and their Paralaxe Editions label and publishing house - here - and you can check out Nile Koetting’s incredible work here.
Support art that takes you places.