We've been ogling over Kara Van Malssen's Silk Road audio project for a while now, so it's about time we interrogated this internationally recognized sound archivist once and for all. If you haven't heard, Kara and her team of adventurers will be driving from the UK to Mongolia this summer as part of the Mongol Rally, and she'll be collecting sounds from every country in their path that she'll then curate into a series of audio pieces. What's this year's hot jam in Almaty, Kazakhstan? TBA! In the meantime, say hello to Kara.

What does it mean exactly to be an audiovisual archivist?

In a nutshell, an audiovisual archivist preserves and makes accessible audiovisual content: film, video, audio, etc. You can find us in film archives, broadcasting organizations, movie studios, corporations, historical societies, museums, traditional archives, libraries, governmental organizations, and more!

While people come to the field from many different directions, I actually trained specifically in this profession, obtaining a Master of Arts in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from NYU. I currently work as a consultant at a small firm called AudioVisual Preservation Solutions in New York City. We help organizations manage, preserve, and distribute their audiovisual collections. My focus is on digital preservation and digital asset management, and I work with some incredible organizations, including UN Women, NPR, WNET, and the Museum of Modern Art, just to name a few. I also do a lot of work internationally: I've been helping train caretakers of moving image and sound collections in Ghana for the past four years with NYU's Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program, and have a trainer with the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property's (ICCROM) Safeguarding Sound and Image Collections (SOIMA) programme, an intensive course for professionals around the world, held every two years. In fact, the week before we depart on the Mongol Rally, I will be teaching for a week in Latvia and Lithuania for SOIMA!

When/how did you decide recording audio was your passion? Was there an inciting sound/event?

In my profession, I meet some incredible people doing incredible things with audiovisual content: creating, recording, remixing, discovering, re-discovering, preserving. I have ethnomusicologist colleagues who get out into the field and make some mindblowing recordings. People like my friend Samuel Franco, the founder and director of the Casa K'ojom in Antigua, Guatemala, who records, preserves, and disseminates traditional Mayan music and cultural practices.

Another influence was a project I heard about at an International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archivists conference called Soundscapes of Mexico, in which they were documenting the sounds of daily life in all regions of the country. (I later saw a fantastic interactive exhibition of this project at the Fonoteca Nacional in Mexico City.) There was another project that a collective in India was working on to preserve the disappearing sounds of the country as it modernizes and industrializes.

There are also awesome music-collecting projects that we are huge fans of: Awesome Tapes from Africa and Voodoo Funk in particular come to mind. We also get inspired by labels like Sublime Frequencies, which have (re)discovered all sorts of forgotten and unknown sounds from around the globe.

Recordings of bazaars and live performances from the middle of Asia sounds pretty amazing. How will you actually collect those sounds? I guess you might have some random cheers and crowd noises in the background?

Through Kickstarter, we are already in contact with musicians in the Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan and have leads in Kazakhstan. Two of us are musicians and we hope that by casually playing in the towns and villages we go through, we might attract local musicians and impromptu performances. We'll be seeking out professional performances as well and hope that the performers will be gracious enough to allow us to record. The field equipment we have should produce high quality recordings under most circumstances. Apart from music, we'll be recording other sounds we come across and interactions we have. We'll obviously be dealing with significant language barriers, but we expect that our efforts at communicating will range from amusing to frustrating to mildly embarrassing. We're sure a lot of these will be worth a listen.

What sound are you most excited to capture?

We are not exactly sure what to expect, and we'll certainly come across some amazing sounds, but one thing that really intrigues us is the sound of isolation, when we are as far away from civilization as possible. We're also super excited about digging through bins at local shops for LPs and CDs. And of course, any and all live music!

The cars people drive in the Mongol Rally look pretty wild. Any fun ideas for decorating yours? Music theme? Maybe a Kickstarter logo or two? (Joking.)

Our car is going to be decorated with the names of all our backers! It'll be completely covered in names. We are currently debating between spray paint and stencils, paint markers, vinyl letters, or sharpie for applying the names. We'd be more than happy to sport a Kickstarter logo or two if you supply them!

What's your trip's anthem going to be?

We haven't decided yet, but here are the current nominees:

• Road to Nowhere by Talking Heads
  
• No Sleep Till Brooklyn by Beastie Boys
  
• Chaiyya Chaiyya from the Bollywood Film Dil Se
  
• Start It Up by Llyod Banks
  
• Astral Traveling by Pharoah Sanders
  
• Freak Me by Silk
  

You blog about international cuisine that you find all over New York in Confined Nomad. How much food have you eaten around the city that you expect to find on your route? What cuisines are totally foreign to you?

We can't say for sure what foods we'll encounter during the trip. We have spent a lot of time in Brighton Beach, which has a large Russian population (and even some Kazakh food) so we're familiar with and enjoy typical Russian food: dumplings, fish, grilled meats, cold crisp lagers, and vodka. Of course, we know that even though the road trip will take us through a bit of Russia, we're driving through a number of former Soviet states that are comprised of many different ethnicities, cultures, and cuisines. We have heard there will be horsemeat, and anticipate eating potatoes in all styles. None of us are huge on organs, but we dislike being hungry even more. Everything put in front of us will be appreciated. Plates will probably be licked (and then argued over, photographed, and posted on the blog).

How did you create the cool radio-dial sound in your project video?

I found music from some of the countries we will be passing through on YouTube, then extracted out the audio tracks using MPEG Streamclip. The audio was cut and edited together with Audacity. I cut out the center of the radio picture in Photoshop and laid it on top of a Google map. Then everything was added to a slide in Keynote (Mac presentation software), and I used the Keynote action effects to make the red horizontal line move across at different speeds to look like a radio dial. Recorded the slideshow as I went through it to make a video. Voilà! (I claim fair use of all materials in the video.)