Entre Mar y Montaña
Roberto Lange

When I was nine my family took my brother and myself cross country in Ecuador. We traveled throughout the countryside, beaches, mountains, cities and towns. My uncle had a huge clunky portable VHS recorder to document every waking moment of our journey. At the time the recorder was a bit of a nuisance, but now it's turned into a treasure in my life.  

My immediate reaction to these lost tapes was to create a non-linear narrative through sound and video montage. Most of my detailed memories of this footage have escaped my mind and the only way to for me to remember them is to reform and reinterpret the films. This process has been evoking ideas that I never realized and aspects I've learned about myself. The process is based upon musical scores that are created, followed by the gathered footage that is cut to the score.

The images featured here are based on a morning in the city of Manta, Ecuador. We (my family and I) awoke early one morning, dragged out of bed and after a quick breakfast, ventured down to the beach. When we arrived I was speechless. The view was filled with half a mile of fish being pulled to shore cleaned and sold. As we walked by I felt the hustle and bustle of a different time. The realization at that age that fish (normally sold in glass encasing at local supermarkets) was being sold right by the water from which it came (fish came from the sea, not the super market, that too was new) was completely bizarre to me. I had never seen anything like this and it's a memory that clings.

The stills and audio created from this experience are to be heard arbitrarily or as per the audiences wish, thereby making the work more interactive, syncretic and reflective of my bizarre experience.

Rob Lange is a sound designer, visual artist and musician based in Atlanta, GA. As a multi instrumentalist and digital animator, he creates experimental audio work with stuff- traditional and non-traditional. He recently toured Japan with the Beta Bodega Coalition (betabodega.com) as an accompanying musician. In 2004 his group Boom and Birds performed at the Sonar Advanced Music and Multi Media Art festival in Barcelona, Spain.