Belmont Shore to host return of sound-art extravaganza to Long Beach

For one night each autumn between 2004 and 2013, four square blocks of Long Beach’s East Village Arts District were transformed into an indoor/outdoor gallery of multisensory installations/interactions and performance-art designed to disorient and recontextualize the act of listening. SoundWalk, they called it, and it was completely unprecedented locally, as if a bit of Burning Man slipped through a wormhole and landed in Long Beach for a few hours.

But despite the unparalleled crowds and energy that SoundWalk brought to the East Village, Long Beach lost this great tradition because it simply became too hard for curatorial group FLOOD to obtain cooperation from enough businesses to ensure the event would continue to live up to FLOOD’s high standards. Four years later FLOOD retooled SoundWalk as soundpedro, where each June they wield similar magic in the gorgeous heights of Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro.

But FLOOD is about to give Long Beach another bite at the sound-art apple, as Belmont Shore’s 2nd Street is set to open its arms and ears for LBsoundbrowse.

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Long before she became executive director of the Belmont Shore Business Association (BSBA), Heather Kern was a big fan of what FLOOD did with the East Village every year.

“I thought SoundWalk was the absolute coolest event,” she says. “I loved wandering into spaces I’d never been in before and experiencing totally unique installations. The urban setting, the weirdness, the avant-garde energy — it was all so alive.”

Like many who returned to the event year after year, she was mightily disappointed to hear that the 10th SoundWalk would be the last. So she was overjoyed when FLOOD launched soundpedro in 2017. She even got to take part in staging soundpedro when she became Angel Gate’s operations manager in 2021.

No surprise, then, that when she took the BSBA helm in August 2022 one of her first programming goals was to convince FLOOD to give Long Beach another try.

“The minute I stepped into this role, I kept thinking, ‘Second Sounds…Sound on Second… — some kind of play on words to reimagine this event in Belmont Shore,” she recalls. “I knew it would be a stretch, but the idea never left me. [I spent] a couple of years daydreaming, pitching, and slowly getting all the right pieces to align. […] I’d run into Marco [Schindelmann, FLOOD’s chief soundpedro organizer] here and there and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk,’ but we never actually pursued it. [But] this summer I reached out with full intent.”

Initially, Schindelmann was concerned that in staging such an event on 2nd Street — much more of a commercial corridor than the East Village — the BSBA would want a sound-art event to be watered down to cater more to mainstream tastes and conceptions of the arts. But he says that ten minutes of serious conversation with Kern convinced him that she wanted “a legit, weirdo SoundWalk-type event” to take place.

Kern reports that most of the businesses she approached about hosting an installation weren’t familiar with SoundWalk or the concept of sound-art in general. 

“Let’s be real: sound-art isn’t the easiest thing to explain,” she says. “[But] once they realize it’s free-standing, temporary, and brings in curious, respectful foot traffic, they usually get on board. A few just said, ‘It sounds weird — but fun.’ And that’s good enough for me”

Kern reports that LBsoundbrowse will be composed of more than 20 installations, with “several businesses doing receptions or open houses that night to build on the momentum.” The BSBA will have a table at Chase Bank (5200 E. 2nd St.) — the recommended starting point of your adventure — with detailed information about installation locations, including a map. 

Schindelmann sees 2nd Street’s attenuated space — one long street, busy street of businesses crowded side-by-side — as the biggest challenge in staging such an event.

“Even though it’s not a long stretch — maybe half a mile — there is a sense of distance,” he says. “In the East Village Arts District, everything’s kind of facing each other and there’s not a big, noisy boulevard. So because of 2nd Street’s layout, there’s a fear that everything could get subsumed in the atmosphere that predominates on that particular evening. But that’s part of what Heather likes: this idea of exploration, discovery, and people chancing upon things, the happy accident.”

Kern believes this challenge will be easily overcome.

“[FLOOD’s sound-art events] already have a following in Long Beach and neighboring art communities, [plus] we’ve got the built-in foot traffic of a busy Saturday night on 2nd Street,” she says. “Some people might stumble into it without knowing what’s happening — and that’s the beauty of it. Accidental art encounters are sometimes the most memorable. […] What I’ve always loved about SoundWalk and soundpedro is how they activate unexpected locations. The focus shifts from how you normally see a space to how you hear and move through it. It’s immersive, and that’s what makes it exciting.”

“In some ways, this is both a hearkening back and a sequel to Long Beach SoundWalk’s origin and interventionism,” says Schindelmann. “Whereas the East Village was a business venture tagged as an ‘arts district,’ 2nd Street has no such ‘arts’ designation. As a result, uncommon intersections of art and commerce will be more pronounced in playful tensions and sometimes jarring encounters.”

Schindelmann sees synchronicity at work in the staging of this new event: “The timing is interesting: a documentary is in the making covering the 10 years of SoundWalk and what will [i.e., at the time of its release] be 10 years of soundpedro. With the start of LBsoundbrowse, there’s a cycling back. For me, the best documentaries move beyond the documentation of narratives with established outcomes toward the open-ended tale happening in real time. In effect, the LBsoundbrowse chapter will be a movie within a movie, witnessing successes, failures, and future speculation with all of us involved, as characters.”

Although it’s too early to know whether LBsoundbrowse will become a new tradition in Long Beach the way SoundWalk was — FLOOD considers this event a “pilot” — Kern is confident it is a perfect fit for the growth she is fomenting in Belmont Shore.

“Bringing more art and culture to Belmont Shore has become a personal mission for me,” she says. “I’ve been working hard to build a more vibrant creative landscape here. We’ve kicked off quarterly art openings, installed a micro-gallery at our office, and I’ll soon be leading a new monthly guided art walk to help connect the public with overlooked art and architecture. […] The Shore deserves more art. We’ve got the foot traffic, the energy, and the independent spirit — it’s the perfect canvas for cultural programming. I’m just trying to make sure we fill it with something meaningful.”

LBsoundbrowse happens Saturday, November 15, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Admission: FREE. Do yourself a favor and arrive early, because you may find that spending time with the installations/performances or doubling back to hear/see/feel them more than once makes for a far richer experience than simply stopping at each one and rushing on to the next.