Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles)

Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles) is a technical cover-song to artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s City Links series, adapted for a high-speed interconnected world of streaming, liveness, and hybridity. This project, inspired by early iterations of City Links, brings together live hi-fidelity audio from multiple sites into a new situation. Here, the sites happen to be multiple water channels amidst constructed industrial infrastructure—the Los Angeles, Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers.

The sounds from remote spots along these bodies of water coalesce at the separate, third site of Human Resources in Chinatown, Los Angeles. Using two portable A/V stations consisting of high-speed mobile wifi hotspots, solar paneled power–banks, condenser mics linked to mobile camera phones, and audio software, the resonant concrete architecture at HR becomes a hub and amplifier for ongoing signal receipt—a live mix for place, perception, and waters to recombine in presence and present-time. The audio mix from the third site, in turn, is relayed back out to broadcast via internet radio for global listening.

This project was made possible in part by support from the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiriy Grant #2023-003.