One Single Sheep Bell by GretchenJude

Created in 2022 for Cities and Memory (Obsolete Sounds project) and utilizing an anonymously donated field recording (Dedinky, Slovakia: Drunk shepherd sings to his sheep), this piece pairs sounds of a specific site with excerpts of an audio interview with my dear friend who was born in Slovakia in 1968. When she was very young, her family had dramatically escaped from the now-defunct nation of Czechoslovakia to the USA. Knowing this, I told her a little about the current project, hoping to hear a bit more of her story. It turned out to be a fortuitous pairing! The eponymous sheep bell comes from her interview, providing formal structure for the composition. The full recording of the shepherd in Dedinky is played through once, EQ’d to sound thin and distant. Played a second time less attenuated, the original recording sounds fuller but is shortened by several cuts. My approach to the placement of the interview vocals differs in the first and second sections as well. To begin with, the voice is interspersed in turn with the shepherd’s song. But as the story becomes lighter and more playful, my friend’s voice overlaps more closely with the shepherd’s. In these ways, I aimed to reflect my friend’s changing relationship with Slovakia, which she reflects upon so eloquently in her storytelling. I am grateful that the process of working with this recording could lead to such personal depths – in terms of both my friendship with the speaker and my understanding of what it means for something to become obsolete. How both objects and sounds can become steeped with memories that shift subtly with our changing perspectives through time.

More information about the project can be found at http://citiesandmemory.com/obsolete-sounds/