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Cathy Lane’s ‘Am I Here? ’ is a playful exploration of how the concept of ‘Be Here Now’ translates to recorded sound. The work takes the listener on a journey through time and space – from sounds of the stone carvers of Mamallapuram, the Bangalore laundry ghats and the temple of Madurai in South India through the glacial lagoons of Iceland to birdsong in a domestic garden in inner London stopping off in Chile, Italy, Norway and Scotland along the way. These field recordings have been made at different times over the last decade and often feature the composer’s voice commentating on what she can see or hear.
In performance we are immersed by these recordings as they are manipulated live within ‘Am I Here? gently questions the nature of a recording and the various degrees of embodied or disembodied presence in a recorded artefact. It challenges the commonly held belief that field recordings are an ‘objective document’ and reasserts the inability of the recordist to escape their own physical and subjective presence.
Listen to excerpts of Am I here?