Five Sound Questions to Sam Hamilton

What if you have heard all the sounds of your own country and you are longing for something new? You could take a trip to the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, Colombia and Peru to discover a completely new sonic environment.

 

That is what Sam Hamilton, sound artist, field recordist and musician from Auckland, New Zealand, did. Sam is currently working on the release of a new solo vinyl LP called “PALA”, which will be released in June.

 

For a complete list of tour dates and more information on his work, visit:

Sam Hamilton on Myspace.

 

 

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

Listening to the radio with my dad. Every Sunday morning he’d tune into BFM radio while we potter round the house, listening to the kids show, then the BFM comedy show (having Stephen Wrights mono tonal one-liners and Bill Hicks whiny scathing sarcasm deeply ingrained into my psyche from a young age), and then into the BFM jazz show.

I fondly remember driving around with my dad from the city into the country at nights falling asleep to the purring of the engine, listening to him cast sleepy spells on me with stories of dinosaurs and magic vegetables. Then there was the ecstatic joy obtained from running up and down screaming my lungs out in the high ceiling, wooden floored hallway of echoes.

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

I used to never leave the house without headphones. Loving the enhanced cinematic engagement of senses between discovering and indulging in new music and flowing through the physical landscape. Now days I actually can’t stand the dissociative aspect of headphones, vastly preferring the rich sensations of being more fully and spectrally engaged with the world. 

On a deeply subjective level as a living creature I found the enhanced focused engagement with the world through listening to be deeply grounding. Of course I still, ever increasingly love the potent hypnotic other-worldly habitation of ‘music’, but for me now days there is less separation between environmental ambient sound and human made music, in fact I love to perceive their mutual positions within the world of sound as deeply communicative components of a great, dynamic, flowing, hybridized, biological framework or network of reality. 

These connections are certainly fundamental concerns for my practice. Concerns that are so ingrained that for the example I consider the work I did recording bio-acoustic sound environments in the Amazon rain forests of Brazil, Colombia and Peru to be key influences on where my practice as a solo musician has gone, which is what might be more readily described as spectral electronic party music. 

Last night I played a show in a club in Auckland with a score of other producers and DJ’s, but funnily enough even this I view from a distinctly biological or ecological platform. I mean, what’s the difference between a bunch of humans dancing in a sweaty club with flashing lights to a hundred frogs chirping in a bog with the lights of fire flies? Sound in both situations is at the centre of a fundamentally social activity.

3. Which place in the world do you favor for its sound?

I spent four months in South America, mostly in the Amazon jungle and Andean cloud forest, dedicated to field recording. Coming from an ocean-locked country well clad in dense and lush green forests, but comparatively silent forests, I have fond memories of the intoxicating excessive sonic exuberance of the Amazon, I just cant help it, it’s fucking incredible ;) Saying that, there are still a great many place’s I haven’t visiting that I would love to visit for aural reasons.

4. How could we make sound improve our lives?

I don’t think it’s a matter of making sound do anything, more a question of enhancing how we experience sound. Sound is always at 0 present where as it seems, generally speaking, our understanding and utilization of it as a platform of engaging with the present, with the environment and with our own subjective psychological states functions at about a bare minimum.

5. What sound would you like to wake up to?

Oh you know, I just simply love waking up, lying in bed half asleep listening to sweet music ;) haha… It’s just totally pleasurable. But if you wanna limit the question to non “music” based sound then I’d have to say sounds of the elements. I love big storms and rain, the ocean etc. 

Animals also, but that’s a little bit more tricky, I mean I’d hate to wake up to the sounds of distressed animals etc. Oh, I’ve never spent time in a Muslim country and I’d love to experience waking up the the distant scattered broadcasts of morning call to prayers. I remember dictaphone recordings my grandmother made of 4am morning call to prayers when she was living in the Gaza Strip in the 80’s. 

I also like waking up to the sounds of a busy city. I don’t know, I think I’m a bit of an adrenalin junky cause I love waking up and feeling excited about getting up and engaging with a bustling vibrant city day. Oh, … how bout this, I’d like to wake up to the sound of someone cooking me breakfast ;) hahaha.

Also read the answers of other artists in the Five Sound Questions section.

Comments

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The sound I remember most is from the travels with my grandparents and the old style country music that they listened to.