One cold night with the homeless in Ikebukuro

The Swedish Dånk! collective has been invited by Stadmuseum (the city museum in Göteborg) to do an audio-installation about homeless people in Gothenburg and in other cities around the globe. They've asked me to contribute some field recordings from where homeless people can be found in Tokyo for the project. Here a link to some of the photos I snapped during the night I recorded. Some of them are crap (shooting at night without a flash is always a challenge), but I like enough of them to share:

Link to photo gallery

The makeshift shelter in the photo above is on a median between several lanes of high-speed traffic and below a pedestrian bridge, elevated freeway and train overpass making it very noisy and polluted with carbon monoxide. The man who sleeps here has to cross the road and climb the fence to enter and exit.

To let you know how cold it was that night, by the time I got back home at 6 AM it was snowing.

The audio file below was recorded from the same pedestrian brige where I took the photo above. It's unedited except for having added a one second fade in/out on the ends and coverting from the 96Khz/24-bit recorded file down to this 3.7 MB mp3 file (the original three minute recording is a whopping 106 MB).

I think the Gothenburg designers are going to do some kind of remixing with them. If there is a website component to the project I'll supply that link at a later date.

It's always interesting to do these kinds of field recordings, because during the process you really become aware of the various rhythms and textures which we normally just seem to filter out. I guess it's kind of like fishing--often it's just an excuse to spend some time in nature. Some of my nighttime exposures can take several minutes, which gives me some time to let the surroundings really sink in.

It was pretty loud on location, so turn up the volume for the full effect. See if you can identify the low rumble of the train passing, the creaking and groaning of the overpass and pedestrian bridge which was bouncing from the traffic load above. The car traffic comes in waves--modulated by the traffic signals further up the street. I like the sound of the motorcycle which passes a little before the 3 minute mark.

audio/08012301.mp3

Pictures shot with a Canon EOS 5D with help from a Canon TC-80N3 timer remote controller. Lens is a Canon 28mm/1.8 prime.

Audio recorded with a Sony PCM-D1.