Losslessness

As someone that works with recordings, I feel that my proper place is neither here nor there. I am drawn toward working with recordings in part because I tend to feel that they provide at least something like a stable, if ridiculously limited, reference from which I may consider an event. By stable, I mean that the experience of viewing and / or listening to a recording more than once gives me the feeling that the patterns that comprise the recording have remained the same while I get to be the one that cannot help but change. I often give up a bit of my ability to perceive an event I am directly involved in so that I may consider the frame of a recording device. I am then thinking of what the event will seem like while observing from a possible future. I don't feel that I did this very well during the parasite performance. I think I trusted that whatever happened would be alright, and was then disappointed at how little the recordings held of what I remembered. I wish I had filtered my memories through the recording machine.

The source recordings for these sketches are in the mp3 format and were gathered using a hand-held recorder. They don't sound very good. There is a lot of information missing that I can still remember. Some of the sounds were re-recorded by myself a few hours after the original performance. I re-enacted things that I had observed other performers doing, and tried to follow Chris's text score for as long as I could. The sketches are a mixture of documentation of the actual performance and re-enacted sounds. Nothing is quite as it was, just so you know. The sketches themselves are 16-bit stereo AIFF files; they have also been saved as an audio CDR. I have recompressed the sketches for distribution as mp3 files, but as this has meant a further loss of information, I wouldn't recommend they be preserved in this way.

The sketches aren't meant to exist in a particular space. I also often listen to audio recordings using headphones. In this way I get to ignore a world of relevant variables. They may be transmitted over radio, Internet (here, the mp3 files are probably most suitable) or lent in the CDR format. If the AIFF or audio CD files need to be re-encoded in the future to be heard, please try to do this in a lossless format, and keep in mind that I'm probably laughing a bit at the idea.