Transmissions
All-American Ruins: Sober
Blake Pfeil (US 2023)
Blake Pfeil (US 2023)
15 min
A multimedia travelogue where Blake Pfeil recounts experiences exploring abandoned spaces across the United States and reimagines them through multimodal storytelling.
The cornerstone piece of the project is abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast, an award-winning audio series which guides listeners through immersive sonic fantasies, recreating experiences exploring abandoned spaces across the United States and around the world. Along the way, the show asks critical questions about American history and culture, community, capitalism and economics, the environment, and mental health while encouraging folks to activate their imaginations as a tool for healing.
The show was recently featured as an Official Select at On Air Fest in Los Angeles, California. The finale for season two is the most personal journal yet. In the episode, which takes place at an abandoned brewery in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Blake reflects on his journey to sobriety, and how his spiritual connection to abandoned places pulled him through the darkest time in his life
Produced by Blake Pfeil
Music by Indigo Days, Lotus, Joseph Beg, Lama House, and Brett Gregory
Featuring Isabel Wilder, Nik Magill
These Places Should Only Ever Be Imagined
Isobel Anderson (UK 2015)
Isobel Anderson (UK 2015)
15 min
The document of a week spent walking on the Isle of Harris, one of Scotland's Outer Hebrides islands. Through field recordings, an oral walking journal, photographs and objects, the piece interrogates realities of remote locations amid their idealised associations of nature and wilderness. This work examines relationships of ruin and survival, the remote and the fetishised, body and decay, an has existed as a fixed audio piece, an installation and a live performance.
These Places... asks if solely imagining places of wilderness is preferential to inserting our human presence. Places of the remote and wild live and breathe just as our bodies do, but perhaps some places are better left to the mind?
These Places Should Only Ever Be Imagined was performed at Sound Thought Festival in CCA Glasgow in 2016.