Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer: Water Days (ZagZig)

A book and audio CD, Water Days documents an exchange of pictures, texts, sounds and voices between multimedia artist Leah Singer and Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo. During their 2007 and 2008 residencies at the Centre national de l'estampe et de l'art imprimé (CNEAI) in Chatou, near Paris, Singer and Ranaldo created a body of printworks in the museum's etching atelier, as well as field recordings made in the studio, on their houseboat and in the community at large. Water Days began as two texts inspired by the conflict between wanderlust and the desire for home. When invited to do a radio piece for Atelier de Création Radiophonique de France Culture, the sound recordings made in Chatou were combined with recordings of electric guitar, as well as pre-recorded voices including those of artist Robert Smithson and writer Carson McCullers. The current volume attempts to create a filmic sequence of photographs to augment and accompany the recording.