“I just want to do something and then it’s gone. Just make a recording or just make some photographs or just make a video.”

As a young jazz musician in New York City, Luke Moldof spent much of his youth attending music school and participating in jazz camps. To continue his jazz studies after graduating from high school, he enrolled at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with the intention of becoming a professional jazz guitarist. Soon after arriving at NEC, however, Luke became captivated by electronic and experimental music after a peer introduced him to some of their favorite records. Eager to incorporate these compelling genres into his musical practice, Luke began playing electronic music gigs, releasing music, and going on tours, while continuing to formally study jazz. After graduating from NEC in 2008, he continued to live in Boston and taught guitar lessons to young students. About three years later, he decided to move to Providence, wanting to live closer to other musicians from his community scene. While doing odd jobs around the city and continuing to play music, he happened to run into a peer from NEC at the Brown University Music Department’s experimental Bach to the Future series. After some conversation, Luke learned that his former classmate was a Ph.D. student in Brown’s Computer Music and Multimedia department. Although he hadn’t previously considered attending graduate school, he decided to apply to the program and, happily, received admission.

Since his acceptance, Luke has been creating diverse sound work, with a focus on field recording, within the MEME department. During his first year, for example, he was instructed to build a custom interface for a class and constructed a subwoofer that was both a sound source and a controller. Wanting to build a “tactile, visually appealing, and concrete” project, he engineered the speaker such that it would generate sound based on its motion; for instance, when he applied different amounts of pressure to the speaker, the speaker produced different sounds. For his second-year Master’s thesis, he created a 45-minute fixed recording that was a compilation of all location sound recordings he’d made over the past year. These recordings consisted of both naturally occurring and mechanically occurring sounds around Providence and China; however, instead of shaping these sounds into music through layering, editing, or other effects, he presented them in unaltered form. The following year, using “minimal, sparse augmentation,” he composed an unedited 17-minute recording called “KIKI&KIKI” (excerpt found here), featuring two parrots with whom Luke was acquainted. After spending two hundred hours recording the sounds that Kiki and Kiki made, Luke used the birds’ “main areas of [vocal] interest” to create his piece. In the recording, one can hear both parrots talking, one parrot screaming, one parrot chirping, as well as other assorted vocalizations.

“That was a record that I’m really proud of.”

Like many projects of this scope, Traditional Terrain’s conceptual grounding was, at first, loosely defined. From the beginning, Luke knew that he wanted to “make a book that had a CD” for his installation because he’d always had a strong appreciation for both books and sound artists who release books. What he didn’t know, however, was what his book would be or be about. He’d envisioned that it would have photographs and locations where recordings were made, along with some writing, but he didn’t expect that he would get “super into photography,” ultimately taking 11,000 photos using numerous kinds of film cameras. Deciding on his subject, on the other hand, was a more practical matter. He knew that the physical ubiquity of bridges, combined with the numerous field recording techniques that can be used around them (open-air recordings, contact mic recordings, and hydrophone recordings, to name a few) would allow him to generate a diverse set of media for the project. Keeping that in mind, he knew that his creative opportunities would be nearly endless. After he finished gathering photos and recordings, he became familiar with various Adobe software, such as Lightroom to work with the photos, InDesign to design the book, Photoshop for image editing, and Premiere for the slideshow and videos. The final aspect of creation that Luke managed was primarily logistic — to get the installation up and running, he managed the photo book and CDs manufacturing process, and also had a number of prints made. Although each step of this time-intensive process was valuable in its own way, Luke most enjoyed finding and developing his new passion for photography

“Taking the photos was the fun part — that’s what I really love doing.”