honestly don't know (soundscape)

honestly don't know from Bonnie Veblen on Vimeo.

what did I do? what was I trying to do?

I listened to sounds. I noticed how I listen to sound, what I choose to listen to, when I want music, when I don't. I listened to songs on once repeat, which is normal. I listened to my breath, which is normal. I listened to cars from my studio, and cringed as they passed, which is normal.

I looked up roots of words, thought about The Spell of the Sensuous, thought about Leap, translated between french and english, found roots in both. I breathed, I listened. I took pictures of my lung x-ray. I looked at the sumac outside my window.

I cut up the words of Terry Tempest Williams, Nervous but Excited, T.S. Eliot, Patty Larkin, Allen Ginsberg and Mary Oliver into perhaps a thousand pieces, and pulled them one at a time out of a pile, stringing them back together. I saw what was there, and started to play with it. I moved things, cut it down, recorded myself speaking it.

I played on a guitar. I experienced making harmonics with strings for the first time. I listened to right after, my song I play on clarinet, on once repeat. I recorded some basic guitar.

I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded Latin, French, English. I recorded my voice, my breath. I recorded my voice my breath. Irecordedmyvoicemybreath. I honestly don't know.

I came back to the cut up. I chose. I recorded my voice, my breath.

I put together a video of photographs of a sumac tree and an x-ray of my lungs, my window at home.

What did I want to do? I’m honestly not really sure. I suppose this is a meditation on death and life, and the ambiguity between those. Can we experience death in life? Can we experience life in death? Do we ever really know where we are? Do we ever really know whether we’re alive or dead?

I had to find the sound that was right for the video, to set the tone, guide the viewer's thoughts towards our bodies, impermanence, quietness, death//life, fractures, joy, shyness, hesitancy, being on a border, being the same as another and different from another, being in multiple places at once, and I'm not really sure what else. A huge long cut up was too much, instrumental music was too abstract, and going between breath to Latin to English to Latin to breath was too literal a progression and too abstract//conceptual. I wanted to push the viewer in some kind of direction with the words and my breath, and the quietness, but also leave room for openness.

Perhaps I’m not all that interested in making a piece about sound, but using it in tandem with my images. It's not about one or the other, both support each other. And now I just want to make more.