Description
Can you tell a story of a place in the same fracturing way it was experienced?
Pulling together field recordings from international soundscapes, Somewhere I've Never Been follows the author's account of loss and being alone in a self-started journey through the US, Europe and the Middle East. One part of an expanded narrative on many platforms (more at: http://thepoweroflove.cz/), and against the grain of dominant visual narratives, the book is told through the sounds of corporate expansion and pop cultural hegemony heard in an ever-uneven era of globalisation and cultural mediation.
Drawn away from the music of loaded family pasts and brittle presents to the sprawling inertia of a US road trip, Kretowicz is hooked by Jason Derulo, Fairuz, Harry Partch, Lipgloss Twins, poorly pronounced Polskibus safety announcements, the crucial influence of Celine Dion; in the end pulled back to the jarring patter and endless shifts of London.
Highly personal, and deeply implicating, this selection of research-based creative essays by a music critic-by-trade are tensely complicit with the global audio-space they are extracted from. With only her ever-present dictaphone as a constant, what Kretowicz hears–filtered by her own experience–is confronted by the moving contradictions of visualised space, histories of physical and 'virtual' mobility through geographical bubbles and the policed intersections of a world split and bound by movement.
