I fuse raw recordings of political struggle, battlefield audio, and oral testimonies into protest symphonies, which is a form of activist sound.

Activist sound overtly addresses, examines, and attempts to redress social injustice.

The complete first cycle is below; the second cycle, which includes Wallingford Food Bank (2008) and Live at Occupy Wall Street N15 M1 S17, is not yet complete.

Live at Occupy Wall Street N15 M1 S17 (excerpt) (2011) Recorded on 1 May 2012 in New York City, this is a stand-alone stereo section of a longer multichannel version of the work. Live at Occupy deploys unedited, homopolyphonic, and oracular sound to examine social, material, and utopian paths towards a just society.

Live in New York at the Republican National Convention Protest Sept 2 – Aug 28, 2004 (2004-05) welds combative field recordings of the various protests and art actions with police transmissions, NOAA weather alerts, radio broadcast anomalies (splashes and sprays of tape hiss, enigmatic numbers glossolalia, crude phase encoding), and wild card audio snatched from the airwaves into a vivid soundscape of dissent.

Two Secret Wars (2003) is an audio dossier of two secret wars fought today using field recordings made from an anti-war rally in Seattle made on December 8, 2002 and a [long since de-classified] recording of an American air attack on a suspected “enemy” camp in Afghanistan.  But does the time and place matter? These wars (secret government military action, and political activism) have been fought continually for decades now…

N30: Who guards the Guardians? (2000-01) fuses official and unofficial recordings of police transmissions made at the WTO Protest on November 30, 1999 into a simmering polyglot of radio traffic, polyphonic speech, splashes and sprays of tape hiss, enigmatic numbers glossolalia, and other broadcast anomalies. Both activists and law enforcement strategists refer to November 30, 1999, as “N30″ while “Who guards the Guardians?” was inspired by lines from Plato and Juvenal. In that classic of Greek philosophy, The Republic, Plato called for elite guardians to rule his ideal state: “We mean our guardians to be true saviors not the destroyers of the State….” (Book IV, 1896 Jowett translation). Addressing the decadence, erosion of individual rights, and decline of morality in the early Roman Empire, the satirist Juvenal asked pointedly in his Sixth Satire “Who guards the guardians?”

N30: Live at the WTO Protest November 30, 1999  (1999-2000). On the morning of November 30 1999, armed with a portable DAT (digital audio tape) deck and two microphones, I ventured into the streets of Seattle to record the heady and harrowing protest against the World Trade Organization. Spattered by pepper spray, enshrouded in tear gas and pelted with rubber bullets, I was engulfed in maelstrom of drums, slogans, chants, screaming, and police violence. Propelled by the audible drama of the unfolding protest, N30 has no narration, objective reportage or interviews. N30 is the second in my series of aural safaris.