✷ Michael Trommer: Spectral Sound System
Ambient, experimental, field recording
Total Length: 36m14s
Release Date: 11/28/2023
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Michael Trommer is a sound and video artist based in Toronto. Initially, he gained international attention as a producer of house and techno records released under the moniker Sans Soleil on such legendary labels as Detroit’s Transmat and New York’s Wave Music. Around the early 2000s his practice took an experimental turn, being primarily focused on psychogeographical and acoustemological explorations of anthropocentric space via the use of field recordings, spatial and tactile sound, VR, immersive installation, and expanded cinema. Over the subsequent decades he has since released, exhibited, and performed his work all over the world. In addition to teaching a graduate sound design and sound art course at George Brown College, Michael also teaches Sound Film at Toronto Metropolitan University, Think Tank at OCAD University, as well as Media Practice and Sonic Cinema at York University, where he is currently a PhD candidate and SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral scholar in Cinema and Media Art.
ABOUT THE RELEASE
Spectral Sound System is a field recording-based project that approaches urban spaces as commercialized topographies of deliberately deployed sonic mnemonics – an earworm-generating acoustic architecture that, in the words of musicologist Peter Szendy, ‘us[es] the words of hits as subliminal advertisements’. Fragments of pop songs audited within shopping malls, chain stores and other retail spaces have been sourced online then digitally enmeshed with field recordings obtained within these same spaces via a process known as spectral convolution; the resulting file presents a drifting, textured and organically shifting document of enfolded substantive and imagined sonic milieus.
