The Port of Long Beach Recordings

Phil Peters’ practice explores our relationship with the built and natural world through video, audio, and sculptural installations. The artist directs our attention to the “slippage” between industrial and geological using custom-built subwoofer systems engineered to play infrasonic field recordings; sub audible frequencies felt, but not always heard. In The Port of Long Beach Recordings, Peters’ durational field recordings capture the subsurface vibrations of sand, surf, and distant cargo ships traversing America’s largest port. Where the artist’s previous recordings broached the sonic crossover of industry and ecology, The Port of Long Beach Recordings establishes the artist’s practice by fully dissolving the distinction between sound, system, and site.

Two, ten-foot tall subwoofers rise out of the darkened gallery like immense industrial smokestacks on a tanker ship. These stacks quake the building in waves of deep vibrations that collapse the gallery into a single breathing sound-sphere. As viewer and structure rock in tandem, Peters’ installation demonstrates the power of sound to knit disparate spaces together: the body, the harbor, the mass of container ships out at sea, and the distant churnings of our industrialized world. These indexical recordings serve as a document of our supply chain, evoking our abstract relationship to a system that’s too massive to grasp.