TOM COMPAGNONI - 9 COUNTRIES (2010)

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"This project began in late 2005 when my wife Ishbel and I quit our jobs, packed up our flat, put all of our belongings into storage and took off for a two year journey between our two homelands of Australia and Scotland. Initially the plan was to travel overland as much of the way as possible but politics and practicality intervened, making it impossible to achieve this goal the way we intended. The Chinese forced us to fly into Lhasa, the Burmese forced us to fly into Yangon and the Iranians outright refused us a visa. Nevertheless, we managed to travel by bus, train, boat, rickshaw, car, truck, motor scooter, bicycle, horse drawn cart and on foot across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, China, Tibet, Nepal and India over the course of an incredible 15 months. After repeated failed attempts to gain Iranian visas, we flew to Greece, my motherland (quite literally, the land where my mother was born and still lives), and put our feet up for three months before flying again to Scotland where we spent the rest of our time on the windswept bonny Isle of Iona.
Along the way I made audio recordings of anything we came across that sounded interesting. Temple bells, chanting monks, the beating drums of festival processions, insect, bird and animal noises, random conversations with people on the streets, traffic sounds, protest rallies and everyday people singing their hearts out as they love to do across the Asian continent. I made my recordings on a Minidisc recorder with a small Sony condenser microphone. With this portable setup I was able to record anywhere and anytime, whenever we stumbled across anything of interest.
People are used to seeing foreign travellers with cameras, but microphones are a more unusual sight. The curiosity of some of the people I bumped into on the road, microphone in hand, is well documented in 9 Countries. On occasion I would place the microphone at the entrance to a temple to capture the sounds resonating within, only to have it kicked out of the way by unimpressed devotees. Outside Tibet's Jokhang temple a prostrating pilgrim picked up my microphone and threw it aside. On as many occasions I was welcomed into places of worship for the purposes of recording and evidence of the joy of performing for the microphone is evident thorough the album. Discovering the acceptable and unacceptable boundaries for intruding into peoples lives for the sake of making documentary art was a big part of my learning experience in making 9 Countries.
Wear and tear on my microphone caused it to eventually stop working in the desert fortress town of Jodhpur in Rajasthan, India. But India being India, I didn't have to walk very far from my guesthouse to find a man willing to solder it back into working order - free of charge. The only other technical problem I faced was when I ran out of minidiscs. I had planned to re-stock in Bangalore, India's technology and IT capital. I must have visited every hi-fi retailer or Sony dealer in town but minidiscs were nowhere to be found there. Amazingly, after weeks of searching, I found a pile being sold in a hole-in-the-wall street stall in a Mumbai backstreet.
On our return home, I transferred every bit of sound I had recorded onto my Mac laptop, created an archive of usable audio files and began the task of piecing together the sonic sculpture that would eventually become 9 Countries. My mission was to create an album using nothing but the archive of sounds I had recorded on our journey. What I did with the those sounds once imported into the digital domain was not bound by any self-imposed rules. I mixed, re-mixed, sliced, diced and mashed the same as I have done on all of my previous productions. But the source material, every single sound, is an authentic field recording. The nine countries which made the final cut are Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Tibet, India, Egypt and Greece.
The Egypt recordings were made on an earlier trip. In 2001, iSh and I travelled from Egypt to Greece via Jordan, Jerusalem, Syria and Turkey. Back then I only had a small micro-cassette dictaphone. The Egypt sounds on 9 Countries come from those early recordings.
I have spent half of the last decade travelling. During these years I found freedom like I'd never before experienced and I feel such a deep sense of fulfillment that I have now seen so many of the places I always dreamed of one day seeing. My photographs on the images page cover some of them. Since returning home it's been back to supposed "reality", where none of this life experience means a thing in the day to day grind of office life. I continually go back in my mind to the countless places we've been and people we've crossed paths with. The best thing is that iSh and I have been through this together, there is no inequality in our experience. This has made us invincible as a partnership. That's the greatest success of my life and is why I'm now so happy to be bringing a child into the world. You can hear her little heartbeat at the very end of 9 Countries after the enveloping swirl of the Ganges River. The new adventure begins and the cycle continues..." (Tom Compagnoni - December 18th 2009)

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