Morning and Other Times is a multichannel sound composition that was recorded in the city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, over a period of four weeks in early 2014 — a few months before the military coup which led to the dictatorship under General Prayuth. The piece attends to the multidimensional nature of the city, not just in terms of human multiplicity, but also in terms of the ways it’s inhabited by beings of different species, and so the piece takes as its starting point the voices of nonhuman participants in the urban environment. In one recurring case, that of dogs, the voices are literally in dialog with audible religious and political aspects of life in the city: namely the ringing of bells in temples (which are places that shelter street dogs), and the bugle calls which emanate from a military training facility on the outskirts of the city. The piece also relies on overhearing, on listening through, in order to convey something of its setting by what is revealed in the background. For example, when I was going through my recordings some months after making them, I found that I had more than once inadvertently recorded the Thai national anthem being broadcast somewhere in the distance; including them in this piece contributes to the theme of a pervasive background of nationalism and militarism.

Made from stereo recordings, Morning and Other Times was composed in 7.1-channel surround sound, and was first projected at EMPAC in Troy, New York, in November 2014. Other projections include Harvard Art Museums (in 7.1), Media Arts and Design, Chiang Mai University; DocLab, Hanoi; GEGENkino, Leipzig; ‘Sound Studies: Art, Experience, Politics’ conference at University of Cambridge; and MassArt Film Society (in 5.1), and OBORO, Montréal (in quad). If you would like to listen to or present a multichannel version of the piece, please contact me at ekarel [at] klingt.org.

Special thanks to Gog Gimmig, Pukkawarin Tharinpongsiri, and นวรัตน์ สุกัณศีล for welcoming me into your home and family beginning back in 1989-90, and for continued kinship over the years. Thanks to Anocha Suwichakornpong for bringing me back to Thailand in 2019 to record spatial sound for Krabi 2562 [Anocha Suwichakornpong and Ben Rivers, 2019] and Jai jumlong (Come Here) [Anocha Suwichakornpong, 2021]. Thanks to Pathompong Manakitsomboon and Bigg Thatchatham of Aesthetics of Error (Chiang Mai Collective) for organizing the 5.1-channel presentation of Morning and Other Times at Media Arts and Design, Chiang Mai University, in 2019.