about

About what I do: My work, the offspring of my love affair with sound, incorporates murky atmospheres, everyday speech, and unusual field recordings.

I bear witness to current crises which impel me to respond. I also heed my impulse to conjure sonic places where raw emotion, memory, and imagination find refuge to dream. More:

To listen is to liberate. I start with myself, taking my microphones towards and sometimes beyond the boundaries of property, the law, and oppression. I make field recordings, but I’m not interested in capturing exotic locales or amassing a documentary archive. When I tape small microphones to my bald head, or button up a stout vest with sewn-in mics, or strap a stereo pair to my homemade mic boom, I am venturing into the world to ask through listening: “Who is heard?” “Who has?” “Who is here?” and “Why are we listening to this right now?” I ask these questions to open my ears and open my heart. Can I listen bravely? Can I hear justice? The struggle for personal and political liberation is the struggle to remember against forces ceaselessly urging us to forget.

I attempt to bear witness to current crises. Activist Sound is one way I describe the music, performances, and installations I sculpt from field recordings of protests, testimonies, and other pertinent sonic materials of social change. Indebted to rap, Harry Partch’s “speech-music,” and Sprechstimme, I seek oral history made in the moment – sung, shouted, spoken, and chanted in tandem with marching bands, guerrilla sound systems, police radios, stomping, drumming, and cannonades of various weapons wielded by law enforcement.

Activist Sound works such as N30: Live at the WTO Protest November 30, 1999 and Fit the Description (Ferguson 9-13 August 2014) strive to depict and demand what Marcus Zagorski calls “a critical resistance to the existing order; the preservation of subjective freedom; and the expression of the individual before the abyss of the administered world.” Doubt damns my every step.

I also make site-specific performances and excavations of interstitial musics, such as those documented by the albums including Favorite Intermissions (2007) and of silences intemporally sung (2011) as well as in live performances. Those works offer quieter – yet similarly defiant – approaches to field recording, improvisation, listening, and the nature of music itself. Today’s glitch is tomorrow’s melody.

But I never stop asking: Does what we hear – and, crucially, how we listen – harbor the power to suspend and discover alternatives to the silent social and political assumptions which implicitly guide our lives? To borrow a title from Deleuze, my imperative is to make those inaudible forces audible.

formal bio & CV
Contact me for a CV as well as for high-resolution photos for press and publicity. A prose version of my CV:

Christopher DeLaurenti is a sound artist, improvisor, and phonographer based in Virginia. His sound work encompasses field recordings, electroacoustic and acousmatic music, text-sound scores, free-improvised low-tech electronics, and compositions for acoustic instruments. Christopher’s work appears on various solo, collaborative, and compilation albums by Electroshock Records (Russia), GD Stereo (USA), Locust Music (USA), Resonance Magazine (UK), DRAFT (USA), Soccer Mom Ebonics (USA), reductive music (Spain), banned production (USA), NAISA (Canada), mimeograph (USA), Ambolthue (Norway), and/OAR (USA), SoundWorks (Ireland), dorkbot-Seattle (USA), Public Record (proudly stateless), Present Sounds Recordings (USA), elektramusic (France), Spectropol (USA), and Move Records (Australia).

Christopher has received several awards and residencies, notably the Alpert Award/Ucross Residency Prize and an Artist Trust / Washington State Arts Commission Music Fellowship as well as fully-funded artist residencies at Engine 27, Harvestworks, and CENTRUM. In 2007, his album Favorite Intermissions: Music Before and Between Beethoven-Holst-Stravinsky was profiled in The New York Times, received accolades from The Wire magazine (“…a high-concept masterstroke by a guerrilla phonographer.”), and appeared as a Top 10 pick in Artforum.

A committed teacher, Christopher has taught master classes, guest-lectured, and conducted studio critiques at many colleges and universities including Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University; The College of William & Mary; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; University of Washington; and Cornish College of the Arts.

As a music writer, Christopher’s articles, essays, and reviews have been published in The Stranger, Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, The Seattle Weekly, The Seattle Times, Signal to Noise, MSN Music, Leonardo Music Journal, The Believer, and Earshot Jazz.

Appearing in numerous exhibitions, radio broadcasts, and concert festivals, Christopher’s sound work has been heard around the world. Some notable performances: Radio National, Australia (2015), Goldsmiths (2014), Third Practice Festival (2013) Whitney Biennial (New York, 2012), Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2011), The Kitchen (New York, 2011), Chapel Performance Space (Seattle, 2011), INSTAL 10 (Glasgow, 2010), Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival (2009), Taipei Biennial (2009), the Seattle Improvised Music Festival (2002 and 2008), Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts (Minneapolis, 2008), Artivistic 07 (Montreal, 2007), Decibel Festival (Seattle, 2007), Unsafe2 Festival (Poole UK, 2006), Bumbershoot Visual Arts Festival: In Resonance (Seattle, 2005), Musica Nova (Ploesti Romania, 2003), Electric Rainbow Coalition Festival (Dartmouth College New Hampshire, 2003), Mixtophonics (Vancouver BC, 2001), Olympia Experimental Music Festival (1998, 2001), and Electromuse One (1997).

Christopher’s sound work resides at delaurenti.net along with many music-related essays and articles.

interviews
Two notable interviews on field recording: Earlid, a crucial hub for adventurous works for radio and for the Earroom blog. I did a short Q&A on Fair Use Music for one of my favorite shows, Some Assembly Required, a podcast devoted to recycled sound, plunderphonics, and sampling. Another interview – collaged with many fellow sound artists – wends and weaves through the long-awaited Sound Generation, an ebook published by Autonomedia.

photo by Kevin Goldsmith

Jimmy Bennington, a remarkable drummer and composer, conducted a thorough interview for Northwest Jazz Profile back when I lived in Seattle.

Although the text of my conversation with Kalvos and Damian appeared in a 2010 issue of eContact!, it’s actually a transcription of a 2001 interview. We talked about then-recent pieces such as cocaine and Three Camels for Orchestra.

In 1999, I answered a few questions for an absolutely inspiring issue of monk mink pink punk, which featured artist interviews and writing about Ana-Maria Avram, Eric Cordier, Iancu Dumitrescu, Francisco López, Giancarlo Toniutti, and others. My first interview spanned two issues of Dead Angel in the mid-1990s.

photo credits
I am grateful to the following fabulous photographers for these header images:

by Ian Vollmer by Jim Evans by Rachel Scott by Mark Malijan