Label: Dreamers Lane – DL002 Format: 150 x Cassette, Limited Edition Country: Australia Released: 20 Jul 2026 Genre: Non-Music Style: Field Recording, Sound Art, Spoken Word
Words incoming... (Mint / New)
Walking Notes is the debut recording by renowned photographer and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow Kelli Connell.
Best known for her long-running photographic series Double Life and the recent, critically acclaimed Pictures for Charis, Connell steps boldly into new territory here: a journal, a sound collage, and an ambient-shaded spoken word meditation that moves through celebration, grief, monotony, and the quiet persistence of the creative process.
The recordings often find Connell on foot, walking the streets from her house in Rogers Park, Chicago to Lake Michigan. Yet they also capture hotel rooms, bathtubs with leaky faucets, and impromptu road-trip karaoke. At the centre of it all is her own voice, sharing in-progress poetry, deeply personal diaristic passages, and unguarded moments of song that surface in real-time.
While working on an ongoing audiovisual collaboration, Kelli supplied me with a massive trove of voice memos, field recordings, and sound experiments, all made during the development of a forthcoming book. This archive of recordings, never intended for public release, gradually revealed itself as its own story to be told: a candid and deeply moving portrait of an artist navigating new work, the dissolution of a long-term relationship, and the demands of a touring exhibition. Long talks, edits, and iterations followed, but the heart of the recordings remained intact. A 40-minute mix ensued. The first half is comprised of layered, raw audio while the back half finds production flourishes bubbling to the surface, as language and musical phrases echo, decay, and revive. Walking Notes is sourced entirely from Connell’s recordings. It is her voice, her words, her hands at the piano.
Perhaps the most notable antecedent is Ernest Hood’s 1975 opus Neighborhoods, with its wistful homespun charm, while keen listeners might hear echoes of the non-sequitir daydreams of Robert Ashley or the decoupaged storytelling of Vanessa Rossetto. Ultimately, Walking Notes is a journey unto itself, a snapshot of Connell in motion, both revealing and open-ended. It is the sound of an artist at her most raw, vulnerable, and resilient, in what amounts to her most intimate self-portrait to date.
