Songs of the Islands

I started collecting the raw material for Songs of the Islands: Concrete Music from New York in 1996. It was my first year of living there and I spent a lot of time walking around the city. I grew very aware of the quantity of discarded ribbons of loose audio cassette tape tangled in gutters, subway grills and traffic islands, and decided to start collecting it. I collected on and off for about two years and then cleaned up all the fragments, connected them end to end, and spooled them into a cassette tape to make them playable. After transferring the sound from the cassette to digital, I pulled out all the original audio tape from the cassette shell and pressed it between two heavy sheets of acrylic glass, like a botanical sample.

The soundtrack contains all sorts of musical fragments, including rap, Vietnamese pop music, heavy metal, reggae, traditional Indian music and salsa. There were also non-musical discoveries, such as an episode of All in the Family recorded ambiently in a room with a bird chirping, a preacher delivering a sermon in a large church, and outtakes from a radio journalist's interview with a psychic. In their stylistic variety and linguistic diversity, these discarded sounds describe the incredible diversity of the city—a vivid portrait of its inhabitants gleaned from discarded, unwanted detritus. These days, audio tape also recalls the bygone devices used to play it: the car stereo tape deck, the boom box, and the personal cassette tape player with headphones, precursor to the headphones and EarPods that are ubiquitous city accessories now.

When exhibited, viewers can browse the sounds from the tape fragments using a digital media player. Each track number corresponds to a different tangle of found tape, as marked.