I started 2025 far from Berlin. In the first week of January I played at the Wadi Damm Arts Festival in Oman and stayed on for a field recording residency. From there I went to Abu Dhabi for a residency with NYU, working with Michael Ang and Desert Media Art.
A desert is a demanding place to listen. Without the constant noise of a city, the smallest sounds come forward, and so does the self-noise of every microphone you bring. It is exactly the kind of place my instruments are made for. I brought my normal recording setup; my personal set of Cortiça Microphones, TASCAM recorder and some electromagnetic probes and my small Siemens world receiver. I love scanning through the airwaves in a desert, signals are so clear in the absence of big buildings, especially on the FM you generally receive really clean signals on top of the desert dunes.
Together with Michael Ang I built Sonoveyers, a collaborative, site-specific sound installation in the desert outside Abu Dhabi. Two autonomous desert rovers crawled through the barren landscape and with their self chosen path generated musical tones, creating a composition by movement.
The recordings from these weeks will find their way into future work. Some of them may end up on the Listen page. Here is a little video I made in the desert about field recording: