The Detroit Phonographers Union (Ben Gaydos and Julia Yezbick) has been making field recordings in Detroit over the past four years. Reeling from the economic crisis and plunging into the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, Detroit sits on a precipice of hope for change. The din of highway pedestrian bridges, the sounds of swing sets in the Mies Van der Rohe housing development that was a flagship of fraught urban renewal initiatives, the driving rhythms of a small forgings factory, the clanging of a train carrying steel to the Ford Factory, the eerie near silences of an almost empty downtown: these sounds all speak to the many realities that make up this complex city.

The works performed were composed of untreated and unprocessed location recordings in and around Detroit. Similar to other phonographers unions around the country, we explore and document our sonic environment, capturing auditory phenomena otherwise lost in order to record and playback the particularity of places within new listening contexts.