The Wounds Of Returning, Sound Works II 1974-1983 by Boston based sound artist Jed Speare. This  CD features audio works from the aforementioned period, representing the long anticipated complement to the CD release by Family Vineyard, Soundworks 1982-1987. It contains track-by-track sleeve notes by the artist, full colour images from his video works, and a special text by poet and artist George Quasha, Sayings Made Possible by Jed Speare’s Sound Concretions, written in response to Speare's work.
 
The works on this album range from the hauntingly beautiful early chamber music compositions, Canto and Espy, and the text-sound piece, Idiolect II, to four works for magnetic tape including the large-scale pieces, Écrier and White Strand. This unique collection of sound works, created by Speare early in his career, considers elements and concerns from music composition, industrial culture, sound art, and acoustic ecology. They all share common ground through the act of his field recordings that provide the source material for the tape pieces produced after 1980.

It’s my music when it drags me across unknown surfaces in search of identity.*

Frictive certainties allow firefly eternities.

You can't know what I hear because I don't know either which strands us in query.

(*quotations from George Quasha’s Sayings Made Possible by Jed Speare’s Sound Concretions)


Jed Speare is a multidisciplinary artist who has presented time-based arts internationally for over thirty years. His background is in music composition and in time he spent at the Sonic Research Studio of the World Soundscape Project in 1978. He has also worked extensively in other media and in 2008 The Wire magazine called him, “a pioneer of multimedia presentation.“ He is the creator of Cable Car Soundscapes (1982) on Smithsonian Folkways Records and Sound Works 1982-1987 (2008) on the Family Vineyard label. His sound work has also entailed sonic research about and implementation of urban "Quiet Zones," in conjunction with municipalities of Massachusetts and Toronto; sound advocacy in the urban planning and design of Tainan, Taiwan; and consulting as a Hearing Conservationist with workers in factories of central Massachusetts.

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Track Listing:

1/ Écrier| 23'03"
2/ Crib Death of an Astronaut | 03'00"
3/ Mettle of Metal | 11'26"
4/ Idiolect II | 01'08"
5/ Canto | 04'25"
6/ Espy | 04'49"
7/ White Strand | 22'36"