it is HAPPENING again

it is HAPPENING again
a new album by
Hal McGee
dictaphone assemblage audio folk art
​featuring Leslie Singer

view the slideshow below as you listen in free streaming audio
click the PLAY arrow above to listen
download the album for a $1 minimum by clicking on the album title in the Bandcamp audio player above

the slideshow is also available on my personal website and the pictures are bigger there: ​http://www.haltapes.com/it-is-happening-again.html

recorded January 2019 ​in Gainesville, Florida and New York City
​with five ICD-PX470 stereo digital dictaphones
​photographs by Hal and Leslie

"it is HAPPENING again" is intended to be and ideally should be experienced as one continuous 79-minute audio assemblage. For the listener's convenience and to make available access points within the assemblage I have broken the assemblage into four sections at arbitrary points and have assigned titles to the parts. Also, the entire 79-minute piece exceeds Bandcamp's upload limits, dammit!

I carry a Sony ICD-PX470 stereo digital dictaphone (I own four) in my pocket wherever I go and I made recordings every day throughout the month of January 2019. Leslie Singer used a ICD-PX470 of her own to make 28 recordings during January and sent them to me. I loaded her recordings onto one of my four dictaphones (along with recordings I made on that dictaphone). On January 31, 2019 I played all four dictaphones through a Xenyx mixer directly into Audacity on my desktop iMac computer and captured the mix of the recordings collected on the four dictaphones with next to no tweaking of the sounds as the assemblage unfolded and created itself.

In this assemblage you will hear many different sounds from my daily life in the month of January 2019, along with spoken and performed and everyday sounds by Leslie. Some of those sounds include:
spoken word poems and texts, instrumental improvisations, sounds from Apartment Music shows #32 and #33, Stanley barking (no kidding!), me (and Leslie) taking Stanley on walks, conversations, restaurants, sounds from my job, watching some of Leslie's videos from the 1980s, gadgets and noisemakers, Jiblit Dupree and Leslie jamming on guitars, excerpts from Girls On Fire's first new performances in more than three decades, Leslie reading her recollections of the Apartment Music shows, construction sounds, emergency vehicles, and much more!​
EC member Adam Naworal contributed some great spoken parts to the assemblage about "collages within collages"!