“Putting a few more pieces back in their rightful place"

“Putting a few more pieces back in their rightful place”

by Paul Vazquez, sound designer/recording engineer at The Crossing

As the sound designer/recording engineer, I get to think about how all the pieces will fit together sonically, especially for a multi piece sound and video installation like How To Survive.  It can be easy to get caught up in various approaches, both technical or logistical, but all of it needs to come together in a way that makes a cohesive piece of art that everyone eventually can listen to from beginning to end.  

How to Survive was in the planning stages for some time with ideas and approaches evolving as expected but they really came into focus this past Summer. Given that the audience would be moving through this installation, I knew I wanted the audio to be immersive in nature and that helped shape the audio design for the film shoot and multi-speaker installation at Fabric Workshop Museum.

Having sorted out how I was going to approach the project from a technical perspective, it was then on to thinking about the overall impact, or intent of How to Survive.  The Crossing repertoire covers a lot of culturally relevant topics, but what would this project really look and sound like? Sure, natural disasters are not the most uplifting thing to think about yet we are all faced with the changing world around us and I was reminded of some natural disasters that occurred over the course of my life; one being hurricane Gloria in September of 1985 while growing up in Long Island, the other being Hurricane Maria, where most of my family is from and relatives were at their home in San Sebastian, in September of 2017.  Gloria left our neighborhood without power for a week but Maria was on another scale, rendering utter devastation across Puerto Rico from Category 5 winds and rain. 

I experienced Gloria first hand, recalling that I went outside as the eye passed over.  For Maria, I was not in Puerto Rico but home in New Jersey, working on the upcoming CD release of If There Were Water which featured Greg Brown’s un/bodying/s, a piece which addressed the displacement and flooding that led to the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir. It was surreal to be working on that /material while at the same time taking in news updates of the progression of deviation from Hurricane Maria.  It would be a few days after the storm that we heard back from our relatives in San Sebastian as well as friends living in the town of Rincón, grateful that they made it through the storm without physical harm.  Following the storm was the largest blackout in U.S. history, some parts of the island went without power for eleven months.

As with all disasters, the survivors try to make sense of the devastation, put their lives back together one piece at a time and get back to a sense of normalcy and peace.  Singing about disasters surely won’t make them stop happening, but hopefully the work we have created will help others reflect on the challenging times in their lives, and put a few more pieces back in their rightful place.