R E W I N D

Commissioned by SOUNDWALK.COM, New York City, January 2010 © Kirkegaard

Some years ago I started to collect the tape that I pick up in the streets and sidewalks around the world. I walk a lot wherever I visit, and every now and then I come across one of these crumbled old pieces of brown tape that somehow managed to escape its music cassette and is about to end its days as an abandoned and long-forgotten little piece of sound. I regard each string of tape as a secret witness that might tell a story, sing a song, provide a random and unexpected information about its habitat. So I pick it up, put it in a little plastic bag and note down the date, hour and location. If I happen to have brought a camera, I will also take a picture of the place. At home, I wrap up my find into a cassette, play it back and make a recording of the sound, or the fragments of sound, that are left on the tape.

This work consists of two pieces of tape that I collected on two different trips to Havana, Cuba. The first 4 minutes of the track are the A and B sides of a string of tape that I found last month. The tape was stretched out in the middle of a street in the center of the city. It was moving slowly down the hill towards the famous Malecón promenade as the cars drove by. The second part of the work, 4.5 minutes long, consists of the A and B sides of another piece of tape that I picked up from the gutter in Habana Vieja, near the Malecón as well, in December 2007. It was curled up in a messy lump next to a garbage can.

In order to listen to the piece please visit SOUNDWALK.COM