Berlin Soundmap by Son Clair

Cities can never be silent - indeed, they make their own sounds.

People, animals, machines and nature are making sounds that in turn reflect and refract across their surrounding environment and form the great wash of precise and general sonics that weave together into the picture of a city for each moment of our time there.

The sounds of children at play or birds chirping will always seem familiar, but apparently normal sounds like car traffic and trains and trams are relative newcomers to our ears, and will almost certainly have changed or disappeared come the next century.

It is my role, as the artist, to capture these fleeting moments of history and poetry as they pass, to edit and combine them with as much sensitivity as possible, and to try and make sense of the everyday and extraordinary in a way that lets the subject tell it’s story in sound. This way, the streets can talk, the walls can listen, and the great, unknowing theatre performance that is our time in a place together can be relived again in the concise contact of an artwork.

Son Clair ('Clear Sound') is the ongoing field-recording/environmental sound project of artist and musician Thom Carter.

Inspired by the immediate, everyday and extraordinary noises that are all around us, each album of recordings centers around a particular location or place and presents the audio from it as a site-specific sonic portrait.

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