Aaron Ximm | USA

Aaron Ximm, a.k.a. Quiet American (USA). Sound artist, phonographer. He made his first work composed from field recordings in the fall of 1998 while travelling in Vietnam. Quiet American has been played on numerous radio programs and streaming internet stations. He has been interviewed by numerous public radio stations and reviewed in print by the major experimental music magazines. His perpetually-popular one-minute vacations project was featured on WNYC's The Next Big Thing and is regularly cited on blogs and portals.

Aaron’s collaboration with his wife “Annapurna: Memories in Sound”, was awarded the Director's Choice Honorable Mention at the 2002 Third Coast International Audio Festival. The concert series he curated and hosted from 2001-2005, Field Effects, was awarded a Best of San Francisco award from the SF Weekly and a Best of the Bay award from the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His recordings have been used in a variety of other projects, including albums by Shuttle358 and Noe Venable.

http://www.quietamerican.org

Project: As Paredes Têm Ouvidos (The Walls Have Ears)
Category: Sound Art, Phonograhy
Period: April 2007
Event: Arts Residency

As a sound artist, I work almost exclusively with field recordings. By recording I seek understanding of the place that I am in. I am most present to the world when I am listening to it with the intent to document it. I prefer dialog to develop on its own terms between the sound of place and my experience of it.

I can offer some reasons. I am interested in one however:

Most of my recording to date has been in places with which I have only a passing or transient relationship. When travelling I move quickly; I rarely have more than a week to come to know a place. As a result I have been limited to documenting and working with moments that I know are unlikely to be representative of the soundscape of particular places; instead, they capture interesting but arbitrary ‘high-frequency transients.’

I’m interested in working in a place for a longer period of time. Ideally I would like to spend a year or more in a single place coming to terms with its transitions over the seasons, of course. I don’t know what would come of greater intimacy - I hope greater honesty.

Photos by Aaron Ximm (except first)