Functional Obsolescence

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2014-11-01

Label: Absence Of Wax

The heavily manipulated source material for this piece consists of field recordings collected on three separate occasions spent underneath the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Oregon, capturing the peculiar, resonant tones produced by vehicular traffic passing over the steel grated deck of the bridge, which then underwent spectral analysis and processing before being sent through multiple chains of effects to create a densely layered soundscape. Built in 1910, the Hawthorne Bridge is the oldest operational vertical lift bridge in the United States; despite multiple renovations, it has been appraised as ‘functionally obsolete,’ a curious concept which was part of the motivation behind this work.