Scott Smallwood was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up at 10,000 feet in elevation in the Colorado Rockies. When Smallwood was 10 years old, his father gave him a cassette tape recorder, and ever since he has been fascinated by the possibilities of recorded sound. His work deals with real and abstracted soundscapes based on a practice of listening, improvisation, and phonography. He has worked with a variety of artists and ensembles, including Cor Fuhler, Mark Dresser, Ensemble SurPlus, The BSC, and Pauline Oliveros. His work has been presented worldwide, including recent presentations at Roulette in NYC, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the 2006 Sonic Circuits festival in Washington DC, and the Kulturhaus E-Werk in Frieberg, Germany. His work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Televaw, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Webbed Hand Records.
Desert Winds is a series of six compositions based on the field recordings made in the Wendover/Great Salt Lake Desert Region on the Utah/Nevada border. As a sound artist who utilizes field recordings, I initially was concerned about the high desert winds causing technical difficulties for me. However, I soon discovered that the desert wind was one of the most interesting assets to me in my quest for finding interesting objects/sites to record. The sounds recorded were all produced by the wind.
"Electrotherapy is a collection of sound pieces based on studio recordings of early 20th-century electrical devices, including induction coils, a diathermy machine, an ultra violet ray oscillator, and a sectorless wimshurst machine. These devices were recorded at close range, and form the basic source material for all tracks on the CD. Thanks to Pete Barvoets, who kindly allowed me to record the devices that are part of his private collection." - Scott Smallwood