Swimmer by James Chrzan

Recorded August 2021 in Palm Desert, CA.

Originally released on cassette and installed at Lonesome Dove in NYC, September 2021.

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Swimmer is a sonic experience that unfolds during the morning, evening, afternoon, and midday over three days in August.

Each track is labeled with date and general time of day (as if I am free from my google calendar and now exist in “actual” time).

Each track has its own cadence and is comprised of a recognizable set of sounds: splashing, knocking, bird calls, car engines.

There is no mention of a specific location in the track title. The identification of the bird calls and the car engines (if one was so skilled) might be able to give a rough triangulation of where this recording could have taken place (if it actually took place in one setting).

The sounds suggest surface conditions and velocities. At first, I try to catalogue possible gestures and materials that could create each sound. Yet, the ticks of Swimmer blur time and place. At moments, I wasn’t aware if the siren came from the piece or the street outside the window. I am still not sure.

As I keep listening to Swimmer, I slip from these exercises in classification to being subsumed within hallucinatory back and forth of swimming, splashing, wet feet walking as the cicadas rise and fall and cars pass in the distance.

When I swim laps, it is not a silent experience. It is jarring to move between aquatic and non-aquatic states, akin to the noise of a computer starting, first nothing then something. I am placed on the pool side in Swimmer, as an observer in this setting.

While reading Olivia Liang’s Funny Weather, I came across David Hockney’s painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), of an observer and a swimmer. The crisp certainty of its composition reminds me of the megalomaniacal visual awareness I have when photographing.

Swimmer, composed as intentionally as Hockney’s drawing-painting-photograph, has the same subject, a swimmer and an observer (in this case of Swimmer, I am actually the observer/listener). Yet Swimmer gives me the experience of swimming in all its euphoria and exhaustion- the duration of light changing over water, the birds moving around the pool, the transition between physical states--wet/dry, cold/warm, morning/evening.

The beauty of this piece--for me--is found not in its remove, but its presence.

- Rachel Hillery

jameschrzan.com