“Smart & sexy work”
Seth Horowitz, PhD, Bioacoustics Technical Committee, Acoustical Society of America
"The bleeding edge of creative sound",
Lance Massey, Creative Director, NeuroPop Sound Design
“…a little Duchampian mischievousness”,
Ken Johnson, NY Times
“Blue succeeded in encouraging viewers to investigate the energetic and diverse content of the gallery
– which in this case was twittery, and a little bit literary.”
Sarah Valdez, Art in America
She is "pioneering a really challenging terrain and doing so with incredible formal strength"
Ed Winkleman, Winkleman Gallery, New York, NY
"Her work is real art. It can effect my emotional environment. The complex sonic layering is calming, bright, elevating and woven with a rich visual palette. Brilliant work in the vein of early Terry Riley."
Paul Hasegawa-Overacker, Producer of “Guest of Cindy Sherman” and writer for ArtNet
"The idea, the execution and the word story/frame all feel especially congruent and brimming with the integrity of the truly remarkable "
Howard Olivier, Flying Pie Pizza, Boise, ID
China Blue is a unique artist in all she does and her ventures into music are as original and creative as the visual work she is known for. She has an instinct for form and structure, and a lyric feeling in all she does, and she can make ambient sound have a new life within the context of her work. Hearing her music is an extension of seeing her art.
David Amram, Composer, Conductor, Multi-instrumentalist
China Blue has a romantic relationship with the Eiffel Tower. In 2005, her then boyfriend proposed to her from the top of this Paris landmark. Ultimately this led to a fascination with documenting the acoustic properties of the tower, using a combination of special seismic and binaural microphones. What results is a varied album of mostly ambient pieces inspired by the sounds of environmental forces on architecture.
Rather than approaching the project as academic exercise in acoustic ecology, China Blue's heart inspires how she paints with her collected palette of sound. It isn't sappy, much of the recording is comprised of distant drones created by wind on metal and the clanking of the Tower's internal gears, but there is also a mood of nostalgia.
Under Voices begins the recording with a pleasant Eno inspired ambient track. Without knowing the context, it's quite possible to mistake the field recordings for highly modulated synthesizer sounds. China Blue introduces other thematic samples in Crypto Keys, a piece that reminds me of classic Musique Concrete, which begins with continuous auto-dialer telephone touch tones, and shortwave frequency noise with voices. Intermittent ringing telephones and operator samples reinforce the concept that towers are not just monuments but places to receive and transmit data. I might be missing a connection here but it's evident that China Blue is really just following her heart, and if a little incongruous at times it's not such a bad direction.
Derek Morton, Further Noise, February 2009
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