Viv Corringham - Soundwalkscapes

A Closer Listen

What is the value of listening to someone else’s soundwalk? It’s a reasonable question. Hildegard Westerkamp defined soundwalking as a practice of listening to one’s environment. A means of intentionally tuning in to one’s surroundings. But listening to someone else soundwalking once again threatens to take listeners out of their physical environment and place them in the realm of the virtual. Soundwalkscapes, Viv Corringham’s latest album, makes a strong case for what tuning in to another’s practice might offer fellow walkers and listeners.

Corringham has maintained a soundwalking practice for decades, leading group walks and broadcasting her own walks on Resonance FM.  She’s also a vocalist who has practiced and performed a wide range of world music and styles and a seasoned improviser. On her latest release she continues what is now a two-decade plus career of marrying the two practices. Soundwalkscapes is comprised of six walks recorded in various locations in New York and London. The walks captured here are the documentation of a practice begun at the beginning of 2023 in which Corringham recorded a walk and her sung responses to the specific environment on the first Monday of every month. It’s a continuation, of sorts, of her ongoing series of Shadow-walks, which she has created throughout the world. The recordings create layers of time and space, combining recordings from shared and solo walks taken along the same path, and wordless improvisations she makes in response to both the sounds of the landscape and the creatures with which she shares it.

The walks captured on Soundwalkscapes are highly variable listening experiences. These recordings are mastered by Kate Carr, a fellow field recordist, and there is a lot of nuance to take in. We hear Corringham reading signs warning passers-by of “24-hour video surveillance”  and the sound of water lapping a shore in Sag Harbor in January. We hear a coach cheering on his team of enthusiastic young hockey players in New York City in February. We hear her relating aspects of the indigenous history of NYC’s Greenwich Village in March, leading her listeners on a personal tour of the area the lost Minnetta Creek once passed through. The distant sound of traffic and the close sound of a bird in April in London. And always we hear Corringham. Sometimes her breathing, but always her voice; gently humming, wordlessly chanting, and breathlessly counting, responding to the sounds she is hearing and insisting on the creative role the human can play in conversation with both the natural and urban soundscape.

Westerkamp warned against our potential neglect of the more “delicate and quiet sounds” that surround us decades before the ubiquity of personal and portable listening devices. In answer to the question posed at the beginning of this review, why listen to another’s soundwalking, Corringham offers a plethora of answers but one might simply be to grasp how creatively generative the process can be. Through both Corringham’s recording and her voice, listeners have the opportunity to tune in to not just things we might not have heard in the surrounds, but to things we might not have seen. The recordings on Soundwalkscapes also excavate the relationship between history and imagination, fact and fiction, listening and creating. The possibilities of soundwalking, she suggests, are endless. (Jennifer Smart)