Charlie Cooper

I am a composer and sound artist who examines the ecology of lived and imagined environments through sound. Field recording is central to my practice, particularly in underwater environments. Although I live in Vancouver, I temporarily relocated to Michigan due to the pandemic. During this time, field recording has been critical for me in regaining a solid sense of place.

Without the rhythms and activities of a normal day, the structures that delineate my life - where I live, where and when I work, where and when I spend time with people - have dissolved. Now that these temporal and spatial partitions of my life have disappeared, once discrete parts of my day blend into a single mental space. I am left floating in a sea of distant familiarities. People, memories, places, and tasks can appear - virtually - at any moment, and vanish as quickly as they come. My mind is always drifting. 

As a response, I spend time recording anything and everything - woods, swamps, guitars, the ocean, even air conditioning units. I find myself sorting through the recordings like old photographs, listening to them again and again, looking for a place to anchor. 

The view from nowhere emerged from this process. Consisting primarily my recordings of the past few months, it is an attempt at grounding - working and reworking the same material, finding moments of cohesion then letting them dissolve.