As this year?s festival theme is “East meets West” and it occurs just before the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall we initiated the “Berlin Wall of Sound” Project – a sound map of field recordings of the route of the former Berlin Wall. Jon Dickens aka J-Lab started thinking about his project when he came to Berlin in winter 2008/2009 – he began thinking about how netaudio and creative commons are breaking down barriers and walls in the music industry.

During these days Jon was living in the Lohmüle trailer-park, which sits on the former death strip (like the Maria), the no man?s land between the two walls. Thinking about all the different commemorations of the Wall, the chunks that are left remaining, the way the route has been marked through the city, and now the Mauerweg path that follows the Wall all the way round he realized: no one?s done a sound map of it so far. In an interview with Musik Line J-Lab talks about the idea of the project: “The thing about it is to capture the essence of what has been left behind. Has that scar disappeared? Where is that scar? Because in some places of the city you’d never know the Wall was ever there. Then in other places, on the edge of the city for instance where the Brandenburg and Berlin boundary is, there’s a huge scar in the forest 150 metres wide.”

The team of TRIoon will present the field recordings as an audio-visual live jam session using cut-up, spliced, looped, and sequenced sounds as well as pictures and film material taken along the route of the former berlin wall. TRIoon is an international collaboration between producer and musicians Dr.Nojoke (Germany) and J-Lab (UK) and Spanish musician and visual artist Servando Barreiro operating mainly in the Netaudio and Open Source community. J-Lab explains the idea of the performance: “The great thing about digital music technology is the fact that you can take field recordings, samples and stuff, and completely destroy their original reference and context, move things. It’s like painting an impression in sound of what is now at the Wall, where the Wall stood. [...] I’ve put some musical motifs in and really all I do is select a sound which I think is apposite – just playing some field recordings, you get an emotional response to what you’re hearing, colouring it, putting the recording in a kind of frame.”

radio aporee is responsible for programming and hosting of the Berlin Wall of Sound project. When J-Lab got in touch with Udo, he was really keen, keener than some of the other people he spoke to. aporee is an open project for the creation and exploration of public soundscapes and an open channel for the work and experiments of sound artists and musicians. It collects and organizes sound recordings from daily surroundings and environments all over the world. The sounds are organized within a mashup system of mapping software, databases, telephone networks and the Internet. The project reflects on actual changes and developments in mobile computing and so called locative media, which we assume to be crucial to the way we experience our near future daily life.

The field recordings will be presented on a multitouch-wall from Tentable. The device features a touch-sensitive screen measuring 180 cm diagonally. Through its interactive and intuitive concept, the Tentable opens up a virtually unlimited field of possibilities of presentating and communicating information. It has been used for painting graffiti with fingers and hands or playing flipper on various events this year, such as the Berliner Kunstsalon, the Urban Affairs Exhibition and the Long Nights of Museums and Sciences. For the Netaudio Festival the Tentable will be adapted to present an interactive map of the field recordings in which users can zoom in and out, move along the route of the wall and listen to the recordings.

The Berlin Wall of Sound is an ongoing project and will be continued after the Netaudio Festival, so if you are in Berlin in the next weeks and months, take your field recorder and explore the sites of the former berlin wall. Everybody is invited to contribute! By participating you are creating a timeless document of contemporary and historic value ? matching perfectly the spirit and sense of this year?s Netaudio Berlin Festival. ?We would like this to be Netaudio Berlin?s gift to the people of Berlin, without whom the festival would not be possible.?

We are very grateful to have all these imaginative creative heads participating in the Netaudio Festival this year! Thank you!

For all of you who like to dive into some memories of the divided Berlin – there’s a brilliant foto collection “Die Mauer” at flickr done by m.joedicke with images of the Berlin Wall from 1980 to 1989. Do some timetraveling into an era – where no one wants to get back to again…