After a week of work the result is a dismantled flat. The piano will be the last. I still want to make some more noise.
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It was incredibly quiet today, and very hot, about 26ºC. I saw a hundred people at the beach. Probably the rest were in their mökki (weekend house, usually next to a lake). There are 187,888 lakes in Finland. That means one lake for every 28 Finns :) I have set up my Linux laptop with the 3G Internet for my grandma, and I will leave it here, so I can see her on Skype when I'm away. The attached images and audio were editing using Free Software only. Unfortunately the laptop's display is not very good, so the images may look worse than other times. Sorry about that :) Today I saw a very interesting and well produced one hour long interview on TV. There was a psychologist that takes care of sexual abusers and pedophiles in prison, and the interviewer. She made very good questions and he gave great answers. Both were very intelligent and calm. It was not an attempt to rise the audience by upsetting people, but a deep thought about the issue. Not black nor white, but shades of gray. I wish there were more such thought provoking shows. Then I saw a great French documentary about Congo. Reminded me of Uganda. It was created by Diego Buñuel, grandson of the famous director, and titled "Don't tell my mother". In this series he visits rarely traveled areas affected by conflicts and wars such as Afghanistan, Colombia, North Korea, Congo, Venezuela, Israel, Iran, Iraq, The Balkans (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo) and Pakistan. I hope I find his other documentaries.
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There are many things I like about visiting Finland. One of them is to find everything unchanged. The beautiful lights and shadows texture created by the sun and the trees, the smell of flowers, the nature full of plants and trees, the squirrels running up and down the trees... Those things are still there. The super strawberry cake and all the other great food my grandma does is also there. But this time there is a difference. You can hear it here:
My life here is healthy. I eat tasty food, run in the forest, swim, breathe clean air, I give water to the plants in the garden. But there is something strange. It reminds me of the books from Isaac Asimov, where he described a society where humans did hardly ever see each other except teleconferencing. Each human had 10.000 robots doing all the necessary tasks. Few people lived in that planet, and they were distant from each other. When those people met, the shaked their hands wearing invisible gloves. Very clean and efficient. At the moment I can not tell you about new exciting birds like one week ago. I can talk about money and objects instead. Today I got a EDGE / HSDPA USB stick that connects me to the Internet for 10 Euro / month. No download limit, and VOIP is allowed, unlike in Germany. I also experienced the extreme discounts you find in this country during summer. I bought new summer shoes for 12 Euro, and warm winter shoes for 8 Euro. And Finland is a expensive country. Have you seen "The Story of stuff"? How is it possible to produce all the raw materials needed for the shoes, transport them to one place, pay someone to put a shoe together, send it to Finland, and then sell it to me for 8 Eur? I mean, it's a serious winter shoe, not a drawing of a shoe...
http://soundcloud.com/hamoid/slee-pypiano-and-the-hammer-trio
There is a renovation going on in the building. That's one of the reasons I came here, to help my grandma moving some furniture around and make things ready for next week. So this morning a bit after 7 this extremely loud noises began, that made the floor shake. This happens for a few hours every day until they have drilled all the floors in the building to replace all water pipes. It surprises me that they decided to replace them all, and how they do it. It reminds me of the old movie E.T. They have covered all floors with protective material. All walls. Windows. All walls in the elevator. Each step in the stairs. All doors are covered with plastic. A turbine blows the dust out of the building through plastic tubes. Then they seal half of each apartment (all except kitchen and toilet). All this to avoid damaging anything, and to avoid dust getting around. Most neighbors are temporarily living somewhere else, we will do the same in a few days.
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The morning I took this photo I had not slept much. But as I heard the music I jumped out of bed and run out to the balcony with my recorder and the camera. There I found Michael, who was filming it. It looks like there are at least two fans of these kids :) The songs still play in my head sometimes. I love the English accent of the teacher :) I noticed some of my posts were read almost 200 times. Funny, because I have no idea of who is reading these words :)
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Two days ago I woke up with these beautiful sounds.
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Today and during the next days I will be mostly working, so I won't go around so much. I've been learning new things about programming for the Android phone I use here, the ADP1. For those who don't know, this phone is very much like a computer. It has a qwerty keyboard, GPS, google maps, a web browser, WIFI, Bluetooth, runs Linux, you can take pictures, scan bar codes, has a touch screen... and you can download thousands of programs for it. It's similar to the iPhone.
On my breaks I've been recording bird sounds and videos. Today I was amazed with so many different birds right in front of our house. Listen to the attached sound :) I saw hawks, other birds that sounded like monkeys, birds dropping straight down like a kamikaze. The photo below is from one of the noisy birds.
In our walk to the supermarket I took some photos of the area we crossed two times during the last days. It's weird to see nice houses and good cars in the same picture, together with people living in poverty. Also surprising to see nice dressed people living there.
To get used to blood I will now watch a video of an operation. This Thursday I should take photos of an operation myself. Miquel will be doing the video shooting. This will be part of an online training for doctors, part of the online distance education project.
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This is the recording of my performance in Mallorca. This was meant to be played in the Pitch Festival, but it was cancelled last minute, so I played in an open air bar next to the cathedral (Ses Voltes). I find this piece as a movie without images. It includes different types of sounds: field recording I did using SoundMan binaural microphones outdoors, sometimes I mounted the recorder in my SoundGun:Those microphones are normally mounted in your ears, and they record the true 3D sound as we humans hear it. The 3D effect is so real that, when using headphones, I kept turning around when I heard my cellphone beep to realize again that it was coming out of my headphones and not from my phone.The piece also includes synthesized sounds, classical instruments, and non conventional instruments too. To me the track represents life on this planet, including beauty, rain, destruction, money...
