Press coverage

The Financial Times, 20 June 1999

The Financial Times, 19 June 1999

"In the early decades of this century, Eugene Atget choreographed dozens of desolate, anonymous Parisian streets. Though utterly innocuous, Atget’s deadpan snapshots somehow aroused a suspicious glance. Writing in the mid-1930s, Walter Benjamin famously compared them to pictures of crime scenes, and in a prescient burst of urban paranoia, asked: “But is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? And every passerby a perpetrator?

"It’s a thought that routinely crosses your mind while walking down an empty street late at night, your imagination fired by violent scenes remembered from Hollywood movies and the nightly news. And it is precisely this phantasmagoric terrain, a quicksand of fact and fiction, which Janet Cardiff investigates with her latest work, 'The Missing Voice (Case Study B),' a noirish meditation on memory and desire which takes the form of a fictional Acoustiguide walking tour of East London." (Ralph Rugoff)

The Guardian, 18 June 1999:

"Starting with the thriller section of Whitechapel Library, Cardiff’s is a mystery tour in an eerily literal sense. The woman’s voice directs you, narrating not only her own walk but also that of someone else who’s passed this way: an enigmatic woman in a red wig. You hear elements of other stories – memories, snatches of film music, gunfire from an unidentified war zone. You try to match your movement to the narrator’s footsteps, which click away like a metronome guiding your tempo. You’re disorientated by the way the recorded street sounds merge with the real-time noise of the streets: you keep turning your head to see passing cars that aren’t there." (Jonathn Romney)

The Observer Review, 20 June 1999:

"Cardiff sharpens your senses, and unsettles them. It becomes difficult to distinguish between the music, the paper rustlings, the snatches of conversations on the tape and the sounds of Brick Lane or Catherine Wheel Alley: in the case of traffic noise, this is almost dangerous. Sometimes her descriptions coincide exactly with what you see: going down Fashion Street, having listened to a story about a violinist’s romance, you hear about a lime-green car – and then you pass it." (Susannah Clapp)

Weekend Post, 3 July 1999:

"Everyone has noticed that when they listen to music on a Walkman their sense of reality and perception shifts. But no artist has ever woven together sounds and ideas to make a soundtrack to real life. In Cardiff’s work, the movie is no longer on the screen, the art is no longer in the museum; it’s in the forest and on the street, and in our heads. It’s in life itself.

"[…] Cardiff writes a script and then she records the walk with binaural audio right on site. As she walks, she holds before her a mannequin with microphones in each ear so the recording will exactly replicate what a person hears. Sometimes she speaks into a microphone. Then, using up to 32 tracks, she and her husband add music, more voices and sounds from the past. 'It’s like watching a film,' she says, 'sometimes it’s real sound, sometimes it’s fake sound. It has multiple layers of sound added.' " (Carol Peaker)

Create, 22 Aug- 11 Sept 2000:

"Throughout the walk your attention is drawn to certain locations and sights that you would normally pass by without a second glance, buried deep in your city angst of having to get somewhere to do something. The journey however is not just in the present, as through the sound montage you are moved to reflect on these locations in another time, and the history that has created these streets that you blithely walk down in the normal course of life.

"[…]What Cardiff has given us is a chance to appreciate the power of sound and the way it plays with your thoughts and memories. When I undertook the walk it was a weekday lunchtime, and journeying the city surrounded by office workers eating their sandwiches in the sunshine I felt like an invisible interloper, so removed was I from the commonplace." (Nigel Barrett)