Michelle Macklem

sound designer & mixer

Podcasts & radio

Film

Sound Art

Producer work

There is Space for You Here (Remember)

Crafted entirely from fragments of discarded words, mouth sounds and breaths, my latest, There Is Space For You Here (Remember) explores the spaces we dispose of in the editing process. All sounds are rooted in land, even when we try and remove that context through studios and closets and doonas (duvets), our soundscapes and field recordings and voiceovers are complicit in the act of colonisation, in the process of capturing and taking. I’m interested in ways we can recognize this and have more conversations about audio recording and the politics of land and voice. In making this piece, I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land. I recorded this audio on the lands of the Bunurong Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation. I pay respect to their Elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that Aboriginal Australians have one of the oldest storytelling cultures and ties to land in the world. It was stolen by white settlers and the struggles for decolonization of this land continue. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

For a while I’ve been interested in working with the sounds we edit out in the process of making podcasts , the clicks and pops. Deleted words. Erased breaths. So I made a piece, a bit of a song if you will, all from bits of space that had been thrown away during a particular recording session. I’ve been questioning what makes a voice ‘listenable’ and how to subvert the process of ‘cleaning and polishing’, using those extraneous bits to make something completely new, sparkly and fun.

Credits:

-featuring the voice of Lia Stark (@curlsofthefuture)
-mixing help from Atticus Bastow (@custron)

Commissioned for The Wheeler Centre’s Signal Boost 2021 programme