the timboucher experience

Song-lines, Sight-lines & The Psychogeography of Baltimore

Australian Aborigines are said to have developed complex songs which are performed while traveling across vast distances. The songs contain, encoded within them, traditional folk wisdom about the landscape, its mythological origins in the Dream-Time and information about current inhabitants. Supposedly the languages used in certain route-songs would change as you pass through different territories of tribes speaking that language.

I’ve been building something similar in my head in Baltimore, thanks to my recent work with Monument City. Geotagging and cross-documenting monuments across the city has made me look different at how the city fits together. Monuments are markers which once I passed by without conscious awareness are now focal points, reference points, points of interest as I travel across the varied landscapes which make up the City of Baltimore’s geography.

Our project combines very specific technological information gathered at each monument, memorial or marker. But it combines it with old school analog audio sketches of each location: rendering an interpretive sense of place as a layer of intangibility and personality across the raw data we collect. I’ve also begun writing folk songs and musical fables which directly reference my experiences within the neighborhoood I live. Everyday occurrences. Characters I’ve known. Ways I’ve felt as I walked home in the rain and the dark. Experimented the other day while biking down to the Ave how many lines and verses I can sing, speak or chant as I pass from block to block. Obviously the rate varies with your method of locomotion: pedestrianism, biking or by car. I’m envisioning songs I can sing to get me from here to there around the city. Depending on where you want to go, you would string together various verses which connect bit by bit into longer routes and passages around town. I imagine, that if your song-lines are truly accurate to the City of Baltimore, you’d be able to sing through the entire thing and have, in your listener’s ears, a multidimensional psychogeographic representation of traveling through the city unfold.

I’m also getting interested in some other more overtly geomantic elements of the city: like mapping the sight-lines of every major monument statue and seeing where they all connect. Most seem to face south or east. Where are they looking? Power points on the Earth’s grid? Masonic secrets unveiled? Hidden treasure? X marks the spot.