It started in the fall of 2019 in the Marin Headlands, a hilly peninsula located just north of San Francisco, when the two of us were fortunate to be Artists in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. For 42 days, we would wake up to the distinct rustling sound and cold scent of the eucalyptus forest gently softening the mornings of this former military base. We were ambitious, suddenly free from the distractions of wifi, cell reception and daily obligations, and setting out to create a single piece of music every day. But as with the nature of the creative journey itself, some days were less inspired than others, so we have named each composition after the day on which its idea arose.
Continuing our sound making practice in the Headlands, we recorded our daily soundwalks, encountering unexpected sounds everywhere: resonant ring handles on rusted iron gates at the abandoned military barracks, whispering water radiators in our bedrooms, choirs of insects near Rodeo Beach at nightfall, and the “musical” pipes outside the Writer’s House after a full night of rain. We combined these field recordings with our primary instruments - voice and pipa (a Chinese string instrument), and recorded our improvisations and compositions in our temporary studio, a 2000 square-foot gymnasium once the site of service members’ basketball games and bowling matches, now a hollow, dusty space with ghostly resonance.
Something particular emerged in that space. Internal landscape and rugged terrains, the routes to which were normally ambiguous, suddenly opened, and slowly came unraveled into something at once intimate and expansive, under the warm embrace of the 4-second-long reverb of the gym. Sometimes, layers of imagined sonic spaces appeared through subtle digital processing juxtaposed with organic field recordings and the acoustics of the space.
Listening back, it feels as if we were transported from the mundane into an otherworldly place: a magical realist world, perhaps, where the boundary between humans, animals, nature, and mystic beings are porous, transforming freely into one another.
So here it is, our first album, 42 Days, finally coming together in the bizarre winter of 2020, with each of us now isolated in our apartments in New York and California. Creating and producing this album has sheltered us from this long, cold and chaotic pandemic winter. We hope your listening journey will be as surreal, comforting, and empowering as it was for us.
1. Day 4 Constellations 繁星 03:53
2. Day 8 Between Fleeting Somethings 须臾之间 05:40
3. Day 11 Three Pipe Percussionists 水管乐 03:15
4. Day 18 To Frank the Owl 致猫头鹰弗朗克 03:07
5. Day 22 Luminescence 萤光 04:57
6. Day 25 Traveler 他看到时间的桥 03:24
7. Day 33 Improvising at the Gym (Live) 在篮球馆即兴 05:00
8. Day 42 Unwanted Bits I 边角料（壹） 03:41
All music composed, performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Sophia Shen and Lemon Guo
