Karen Power Interview

Karen Power is an Irish composer who uses environmental sounds and acoustic instruments in her intriguing work. She is a master field recordist who has recorded sounds in some of the worlds most isolated and challenging locations including The Arctic, Amazon, Namib Desert, Outback Australia, and Antarctica. This is the transcript of my interview with her, and linked are the podcast and video versions. She has shared clips of her work including The Bats of Namibia, Frogs of Angor Wat, fascinating bog sounds and arctic ice sounds in collaborations with the Quiet Music Ensemble and many brilliant collaboraters on her project human nature.  She’s also shared with us a raw field recording from her recent trip to record a double cicada brood emergence. She certainly helped deepen my awareness to soundscapes that brought me back to my first encounter with this idea when I took a course on Soundscapes from R. Murray Shafer. Karen and I also talked about her projects working to explore listeneing, composing and improvising with young children and other related projects to provide inclusive music making with people living with disabiliities.