text:
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|1 October 1988; (Its predecessor was Aeronaves de México, founded on 14 September 1934, 81 years ago)
|Commenced operations
|1 October 1988; 27 years ago (as Aerovias de Mexico SA de CV)
|Secondary hubs
|Frequent-flyer program
|Club Premier
|Airport lounge
|Salón Premier
|Aeroméxico Cargo
Aeroméxico Connect
Aeroméxico Express
Aeroméxico Servicios
|Fleet size
|84 + 3
|Company slogan
|Parent company
|Grupo Aeroméxico
|Mexico City, Mexico
|Key people
|Andrés Conesa Labastida (CEO)
|US$ 2.80 billion (2011)[3]
|Net income
|US$ 267.6 million (2011)[3]
|13,745 (5 March 2014)
|Aeroméxico headquarters building
|Former names
|Edificio Centro Olímpico ("Olympic Center Building")
|General information
|Paseo de la Reforma 445, Colonia Cuauhtémoc
|Town or city
|Mexico City
|Current tenants
|Aeroméxico, Club Premier
|50 metres (160 ft)[4]
|Technical details
|Floor count
|Design and construction
|Fernando Pineda, Francisco J. Serrano, Luis MacGregor Krieger
|Emporis page[5][6]
Aerovías de México, S.A. de C.V.[7] operating as Aeroméxico, is the flag carrier[8] airline of Mexico based in Mexico City. It operates scheduled services to more than 56 destinations[9] in Mexico; North, South, and Central America; the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. Its main base and hub is Mexico City International Airport, with a secondary hub at Monterrey.[1]
Grupo Aeroméxico includes Aeroméxico mainline and Aeroméxico Connect (regional subsidiary). The group held #1 place in domestic market share with 36.6%, and #2 place behind American Airlines with 15.3% of the international market share, in the 12 months ending March 2014,[10] becoming Mexico's largest domestic airline group. Aeroméxico is one of the four founding members of the SkyTeam airline alliance, along with Air France, Delta Air Lines, and Korean Air.
- 1 History
- 2 Corporate affairs
- 3 Destinations
- 4 Fleet
- 5 Subsidiaries
- 6 Slogans
- 7 Incidents, accidents and Hijackings
- 8 See also
- 9 References
- 10 External links
The airline was established as Aeronaves de México on 15 September 1934,[11] by Antonio Díaz Lombardo. The first plane was a Stinson SR. Julio Zinser piloted the maiden flight on the Mexico City - Acapulco route on 14 September 1934.
When World War II began, the airline continued to grow with the help of Pan Am, which owned 25% of the new Mexican airline. Aeroméxico saw few changes for the next two decades. However, during the 1950s, renovation began, and the airline took over various small competitor companies across the country, including Aerovías Guest (the second airline of the country at that time) that held the routes to Madrid and Paris. Aeroméxico added aircraft including the Douglas DC-3 and its successor, the Douglas DC-4.
During the late 1950s, the Douglas DC-4's were replaced by some pressurised Douglas DC-6 and two Bristol Britannias, the first turboprop passenger plane in the fleet and in 1958, services were inaugurated to Idlewild Airport (now JFK) using the Britannias. The Mexico City-New York route would prove profitable for "Aeronaves" and its North American competitors. The airline was nationalised in 1959.
In the early 1960s, the fleet of Aeronaves de México (Aeroméxico) included Douglas DC-3, Douglas DC-6, and Bristol Britannia aircraft. Starting in 1961, "Aeronaves" began replacing its piston-engined planes with new jets. The first jet-engined aircraft were a pair of Douglas DC-8's. The planes were used on routes within Mexico and to New York City. Between 1962 and 1963, Aeronaves de México (Aeroméxico) took over Aerovías Guest Mexico the second airline, and they were merged under the name Aeronaves de México. Later in the 1960s, more DC-8's were added and service to Europe was resumed, operated by two Comet-4C aircraft dry-leased by Aerovías Guest prior to the merger.
The 1970s brought dramatic changes for Aeroméxico. In 1970, under a government plan, Mexican domestic airlines were nationalized into an integrated air transport system under the control of Aeronaves de México. The system included eight smaller carriers, although these were later disbanded.[11] During the early-1970s, the remaining Douglas DC-6 and Bristol Britannia aircraft were retired. A new color scheme (orange and black) was introduced and the airline changed its name from "Aeronaves de México" to its current, shortened version of Aeroméxico in February 1972.
Aeroméxico, as one of the launch customers of the Douglas DC-10-30s program, received the first of its two planes in 1974, registered as XA-DUG and XA-DUH. That same year the airline also took delivery of their first seven Douglas DC-9-32s. During this period the airline's popularity and visibility grew dramatically. This was due in part to Aeroméxico's involvement in Mexican movies. Basically, every time a character in any movie produced in Mexico had to fly somewhere, they supposedly flew on Aeroméxico. Service to Canada was initiated and in the early-1970s, two more DC-9-15s were added to the fleet.[citation needed]
The early 1980s were marked by expansion. A new color scheme was introduced (orange paint and silver), two DC-10-15 and a DC-10-30 planes were added in 1981, N10038 and N1003N, and in 1984, N3878P later XA-RIY. Aeroméxico, one of the launch customers of the McDonnell Douglas MD-82 (an elongated version of the DC-9), received the first two planes in late 1981. Between 1980 and 1981, eight more DC-9-32 aircraft were added. On 31 August 1986, the company suffered its only fatal accident outside Mexico when Aeroméxico Flight 498, a Douglas DC-9, approaching Los Angeles International Airport was struck by a small Piper aircraft. Both aircraft then fell to earth in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, California. All 64 passengers and crew on board the DC-9-32 were killed, as were three on the Piper and fifteen people on the ground. After three years and a long trial, the plane crew and the airline were found not to blame. This was because the pilot of the Piper had strayed into an air traffic control zone reserved for commercial flights. That same year, the airline was acquired to the charter carrier GATSA and used it for their charter operations until December. In April 1988, the state-owned company was declared bankrupt and grounded for three months because of lack of organization, a fleet with an average of 20 years without a renovation plan and a depredating administration by the Mexican Government. In August, a privatization program was underway. This involved retiring the eight Douglas DC-8's (3 -62s and 5 -51s) along with the remaining ten DC-9-15 aircraft. Starting the privatization process included a new corporate name (Aerovias de Mexico SA de CV). The airline restarted operations with its predecessor's assets, including the headquarters building, maintenance hangar, some aircraft and some former Aeronaves de Mexico employees.
The early 1990s were turbulent times, with the rise in fuel costs due to the Gulf War, and a domestic fare war caused by start up airlines like TAESA, SARO, Aviacsa, among others, as well as constant labor problems. In April 1991 the first two 767-200ERs were introduced to the fleet starting to replace DC-10's in services to Europe, New York and Tijuana, another two 767-300ER's joined the fleet later that year. This was all a part of a renovation and expansion program to introduce 24 B757s/B767s Direct flights to Madrid and Paris from Mexico City with Boeing 767s as well as services to Frankfurt via Paris, Rome via Madrid.
In 1992 Grupo Aeroméxico was among other investors that failed to consummate the acquisition of Continental Airlines.
After failing to invest in Continental, Aeroméxico acquired the bankrupt Aeroperú from the Peruvian government. They tried to use the same path that led Aeroméxico to its leadership in the domestic market with Aeroperú.
In October 1992 2 Boeing 767-300ERs were added to the fleet (XA-RKI and XA-RKJ), replacing the 2 older 767-300ER jets (XA-RWW and XA-RWX).
In 1993 Aeroméxico Group took over Mexicana, the second largest airline in the Mexican market under the same management. There was a great dispute in June 1993 with the pilot union regarding the transfer of flights to regional subsidiary Aeromonterrey, which had non-union pilots.[12] Between 1994 and 1995, the six DC-10 aircraft in the fleet were finally retired. Their last revenue flight was in 1995.
In December 1994 (3 weeks after Carlos Salinas left the office), the first of several devaluations in the next 18 months started, giving way to an economic crisis in Mexico. As a consequence, Aeroméxico had to cut capacity and flights to Frankfurt and Rome were canceled, 4 MD80s and 4 B767s were returned to the lessors, early retirement for pilots and other staff was underway, a new 767 was due on April 1995 was transferred to LAN Airlines. Flights to Madrid and Paris were operated only by 2 767-300ER jets.
In 1996 Cintra was created to prevent the two main carriers from going bankrupt. Some B757s of Aeroméxico's original renovation program were transferred to Mexicana and Aeroperú. The market and the airline recovered between 1996 and 1998; 8 MD80s were leased back along with 2 B767-200ERs.
The sale of Grupo Cintra was scheduled after several delays in September 1999, and with the looming presidential elections in 2000, everything was delayed once again. The ruling party lost the election after 70 years in office and all the policies changed. Due to the recession in 2000, the new government put everything on hold, waiting for better economic conditions to start the stock sell-off, and just when everything was about to start, the 11 September 2001 attacks occurred and nothing materialized since the two main carriers, Mexicana and Aeroméxico, were losing large amounts of money.
Between 2000 and 2005, Aeroméxico had an average fleet of 60 aircraft in main line, plus 20 in Aerolitoral, as well as five CEO's during this time. After 9/11 and the Iraq War, it pursued a fleet renovation program. In 2003, the airline acquired its first Boeing 737-700 instead of the Boeing 717 as a replacement for its aging DC-9 aircraft. On 29 March 2006 Aeroméxico CEO, Andrés Conesa announced the inauguration of direct flights between Japan and Mexico City via Tijuana. This was after the purchase of two Boeing 777-200ERs, making Aeroméxico the third airline in Latin America to fly regularly to Asia, after Varig and the now defunct VASP. Since Varig's demise, Aeroméxico is currently the only airline with this service. Aeroméxico resumed its Mexico City-Tijuana-Shanghai route twice a week as of 30 March 2010. Suspension of this flight was due to the 2009 flu pandemic.
On 29 June 2006, the International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC) and Aeroméxico announced that the airline will operate 3 Boeing 787 Dreamliners. Aeroméxico will lease the 5 787-8s from ILFC with deliveries scheduled to begin in early 2012, another 2 planes on lease from ILFC will be in service by 2013, and 2 more in 2014 (they were originally to be delivered in 2010 and 2011). From 2006, Consorcio Aeroméxico S.A. de C.V., the parent company of Aeroméxico at the time, faced large debts and had no profits to pay them off, so it offered Aeroméxico for sale in 2007. In early October, a week-long auction was held, with Grupo Financiero Banamex competing against the Saba family. On October 17, 2007, Banamex offered the highest bid and purchased the airline for US$249.1 million. In October 2010, Aeromexico's largest competitor, Mexicana de Aviacion, filed for bankruptcy and was placed in administration.
Delta/Aeromexico alliance[edit]
In 2011, Delta Air Lines and Aeroméxico signed an enhanced commercial alliance, building on an original agreement from 1994.[13] The 2011 agreement provides for codeshare on all the carriers' Mexico–US flights; Delta investing 65 million USD in Aeromexico shares; and Delta gaining a seat on the Aeromexico board of directors. In March 2014, the airlines opened Tech Ops Mexico, a 55 million USD joint maintenance, repair and overhaul facility in Queretaro City, Mexico.[14] In March 2015, the airlines filed applications for antitrust immunity, a first step in the creation of a 1.5 billion USD joint cooperation agreement (JCA) that will allow Delta and Aeromexico to jointly sell, and share costs and profits on all Mexico–U.S. routes.[13] In May 2015, Mexican regulator approved the JCA; and in the same month the Mexican Senate approved Open Skies between the U.S. and Mexico. The approval of the JCA by the United States Department of Transportation is still pending.[15]
On 25 July 2012, Andrés Conesa, Aeromexico CEO announced the purchase of 10 Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners, albeit 6 firm orders and 4 options; with this, the company will become the first Mexican carrier to have this kind of equipment. In early July 2012 it was reported that the company was looking at Airbus A320 and A350, but ultimately decided on the aircraft manufacturer Boeing. The new order is added to the package of 20 aircraft that the company had announced in 2011 and nine more Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner already provided. The delivery of the Dreamliners began in the summer of 2013. The total investment is US$11 billion and that includes the acquisition of 90 Boeing 737-8 MAX which will be delivered during 2018.[16][17] The airline took delivery of its first Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner (albeit leased from ILFC) in early August 2013 and officially launched commercial service on 1 October 2013.[18]
New technology[edit]
In 2016, Aeromexico added 2Ku wireless Internet service by Gogoto some 737-800 aircraft,[19] including access to Netflix. On its 787-8 and 787-9 Dreamliners it added Panasonic broadband Internet, and on Embraer narrowbody aircraft, streaming entertainment via Gogo's Gogo Vision.[20] In July 2016, the airline launched a completely new website, new check-in kiosks at Mexico City airport, and announced plans to launch a completely new mobile app in the Autumn of that year.[21] That same year, the airline also co-sponsored the launch of startup accelerator MassChallenge in Mexico.[22]
Corporate affairs[edit]
The company is run from its landmark headquarters at Paseo de la Reforma 445, Colonia Cuauhtémoc, Cuauhtémoc borough, Mexico City.[23] There is small U.S.administrative office in Houston.[24]
New destinations[edit]
In an attempt to gain more worldwide presence and strengthen its network and to make connections easier and more frequent, Aeroméxico has started to develop new international markets. From 2006 it started operations to Tokyo from Mexico City via Tijuana. Service to Shanghai from Mexico City via Tijuana began in May 2008. New destinations in 2014-2016 included Panama City (Panama), Santo Domingo, Vancouver, Toronto, Boston, Medellín, Amsterdam, Cozumel, and Austin (Texas).[25] The airline also plans to launch service to Beijing from Tijuana sometime in 2017.[26]
Aeroméxico has codeshare agreements with SkyTeam members
- Air Europa
- Air France
- Alitalia
- CSA Czech Airlines
- Delta Air Lines
- Garuda Indonesia
- KLM Royal Dutch Airlines
- Korean Air
Aeroméxico also codeshares with
- Aeromar S.A. de C.V
- Alaska Airlines
- Avianca Colombia
- Avianca El Salvador
- Copa Airlines Panama
- El Al Israel Airlines Ltd
- Gol Transportes Aéreos
- Japan Airlines
- LAN Airlines
- TAM Airlines
- WestJet[27]
Bus services from Tijuana[edit]
Aeroméxico contracts with Intercalifornias to offer bus service from Tijuana to cities in California. In order to board the bus, a passenger must have a ticket to or from Tijuana Airport on Aeroméxico.[28]
This section describes only the fleet operating under the "Aeromexico" brand and it does not include details of the "Aeromexico Connect" fleet which is a regional subsidiary of Grupo Aeromexico.
On 7 March 2012, the Boeing 787-8 arrived in Mexico City for promotion. As a Boeing 787 customer, Aeroméxico's CEO, Andrés Conesa, was questioned on the routes the aircraft would serve once in Aeromexico's fleet. The airline placed 9 orders of the aircraft, which will come with the new interiors and will seat around 240 passengers. The first routes were from Mexico City to New York, Paris, and Tokyo nonstop. In 2014, London and Madrid were added. Along with these, 10 Boeing 737-8NG will arrive next year with new Sky Interiors.[citation needed] At the same time, Grupo Aeromexico is looking for more 737 and Embraer jets to be added to the fleet. The firm order was confirmed for 5 additional 737-800/900 aircraft from ILFC in addition to 2 more Embraer 190 from Azul Brazilian Airlines. In second quarter 2014 Grupo Aeromexico retired one B737-700. The Company added two B787, one B737-800 under pure lease agreements.
The all-Boeing mainline Aeroméxico fleet consists of the following aircraft as of September 2016:[29][30] [31]
|In Fleet
|Boeing 737-700
|All Airplanes Equipped with Winglets.
Being replaced by Boeing 737-800.
|Boeing 737-800
|Being retrofitted with Scimitar Winglets.
New deliveries equipped with Scimitar Winglets.
Deliveries starting from September 2012 are equipped with Boeing Sky Interior.
Some options could be Boeing 737-900ER.
Delivery until 2017.
|Boeing 737 MAX 8
|First delivery begins in October 2017.
Some options could be Boeing 737 MAX 9.
|Boeing 777-200ER
|Will be replaced by Boeing 787-9.
|Boeing 787-8
|Integrated AVOD in both classes.
2 owned, the rest leased.
|Boeing 787-9
|Deliveries begin in 2016.
|Aeromexico Connect fleet
|Embraer ERJ-145
|Embraer ERJ-170
|Embraer ERJ-175
|Embraer ERJ-190
Fleet gallery[edit]
Retired fleet[edit]
Aeroméxico was one of the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 and MD-87 launch customers. Until the mid-2000s, the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 and MD-80 were the airline's workhorses, but were retired between 2004 and 2009 (the MD-80's last revenue flight was in June 2009).
- Aeroméxico Connect, formerly Aerolitoral, a regional airline based at General Mariano Escobedo International Airport in Monterrey.
- Aeromexico Contigo, Aeromexico's brand for select US-Mexico flights.[33][34]
- Aeromexico Express , a commuter airline based at General Mariano Escobedo International Airport in Monterrey. It is a partnership between Aeromexico and Aeromar.[35]
Former Subsidiaries[edit]
- Aerovias Guest.
- Aeroperú, Peru's national flag carrier based in Lima International Airport.
- Mexicana, from 1993 to 1995.
- Aeromexpress, a cargo handler based at Mexico City International Airport in Mexico City.
- Aeroméxico Travel, a charter airline based in Cancún International Airport.
- 1960s-1970s - Mexico's largest airline
- 1990s - La linea aerea mas puntual del mundo [36]
- Before 2009 - Travel the world (Vamos por el mundo) [37]
- 2010–2012 - A donde te lleven tus sueños
- 2012–2013 - Nunca nos detenemos
- 2013–2015 - La linea que nos une
- 2016–present - La linea de los mexicanos y del mundo
- English slogan: "Mexico's Global Airline"[2]
Incidents, accidents and Hijackings[edit]
- 26 March 1954 near Monterrey, México - XA-GUN a Douglas DC-3.[38][39]
- 2 June 1958 near Guadalajara, México - XA-MEV a Lockheed 749A Constellation[40][41]
- 19 January 1961 in New York, New York (Idlewild) - XA-XAX a Douglas DC-8-21[42]
- 13 August 1966 near Acapulco, Mexico - XA-PEI a Douglas DC-8-51.[43]
- 24 December 1966 Lake Texcoco, Mexico - XA-NUS a Douglas DC-8-51[44]
- 12 June 1967 near La Paz, México - XA-FUW a Douglas DC-3A[45]
- On 20 June 1973 Douglas DC-9-15 XA-SOC near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Aeroméxico Flight 229, a daily service from George Bush Intercontinental Airport to Lic. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz International Airport, crashed into the side of a mountain while on approach, killing all 27 people on board.[46]
- 2 September 1976 Douglas DC-9-15 XA-SOF at Leon/Guanajuato-Del Bajio Airport[47]
- On 27 July 1981, Aeromexico Flight 230 XA-DEN a Douglas DC-9-32 crashed while landing in Chihuahua, killing 32 of the 66 people on board.[48]
- 8 November 1981 XA-DEO a Douglas DC-9-32 in Sierra de Guerrero, México.[49]
- On 31 August 1986 Aeromexico Flight 498, operated with a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32, was on its final approach into Los Angeles International Airport when it collided with a Piper PA-28 Archer over Cerritos, California. The resulting crash killed all 67 people on both aircraft and 15 people on the ground in Cerritos.
- On 6 October 2000, Aeroméxico Flight 250 N936ML a Douglas DC-9-31 at General Lucio Blanco International Airport, Reynosa, Mexico.[50]
- On 9 September 2009 Aeroméxico Flight 576 was hijacked between Cancún and Mexico City.
See also[edit]
- ^ a b c "About Us", Aeromexico website, retrieved 2015-09-03
- ^ a b aeromexico.com
- ^ a b "Grupo Aeromexico S.A.B. De C.V. Releases Results for the Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2011". Reuters. 21 February 2012. Retrieved 23 February 2012.
- ^ "Aeroméxico Reforma" on Emporis site
- ^ "Edificio Centro Olímpico", Una Vida Moderna
- ^ "Aeroméxico, edemx.com". Retrieved 24 April 2015.
- ^ "Report on Actions of Social Responsibility." Aeroméxico. 41 (43/44). Retrieved on 4 December 2010. "Paseo de la Reforma 445, Col. Cuauhtémoc. C.P. 06500 México D.F."
- ^ "Aeroméxico, la línea bandera del país", El Universal, 10 December 2010
- ^ Aeroméxico. "Aeroméxico - Destinos Aeroméxico". Aeroméxico. Retrieved 24 April 2015.
- ^ "Aeromexico outlines its revenue and network strategy in an uncertain Mexican market". Retrieved 24 April 2015.
- ^ a b "Directory: World Airlines". Flight International. 27 March 2007. p. 49.
- ^ ITF News. Retrieved 24 April 2015.
- ^ a b "Delta and Aeroméxico: A 21-year partnership", Delta Air Lines News Hub, November 18, 2015
- ^ "Delta and Aeromexico Create Enhanced Commercial Alliance", PR Newswire, August 10, 2011
- ^ "Delta evaluates COFECE's Joint Cooperation Agreement resolution", Delta Air Lines News Hub, May 2, 2016
- ^ "Boeing, Aeromexico Announce Commitment for 100 Airplanes - Jul 25, 2012". Boeing.mediaroom.com. 25 July 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "Finanzas - Aeromexico invertirá 11 mil mdd para comprar 100 aviones". El Universal. 25 July 2012. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ Linda Blachly (14 June 2013). "Aeromexico to take delivery of first 787 in August". ATWOnline. Retrieved 2013-06-30.
- ^ "Gogo's 2Ku Technology Takes Flight on Aeromexico", PR Newswire, April 21, 2016
- ^ "Inflight Entertainment and WiFi", Aeromexico website
- ^ Álvarez, Domingo (August 2016). "Las puertas del cielo (The gates to heaven)". Aire. Grupo Expansión: 82. Retrieved 6 August 2016.
- ^ "Aeroméxico apoya la iniciativa de MassChallenge" (Aeromexico supports the MassChallenge initiative), Aeromexico website
- ^ "Report on Actions of Social Responsibility." Aeroméxico. 4/44. Retrieved on 4 December 2010. "Paseo de la Reforma 445, Col. Cuauhtémoc. C.P. 06500 México D.F."
- ^ "Contact Us." Aeroméxico United States. Retrieved on 18 September 2014. "Aeromexico Consumer Relations 3663 N. Sam Houston Parkway E. Ste. #500 Houston, Texas 77032"
- ^ Aeromexico Press Room
- ^ http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/sep/06/tijuana-beijing-flight-planned-2017/
- ^ http://airlineroute.net/2015/12/22/amws-codeshare-dec15/
- ^ "Tijuana - California Cities." Aeroméxico. Retrieved on 19 April 2014.
- ^ http://www.airfleets.net/flottecie/Aeromexico.htm
- ^ http://www.seatguru.com/airlines/AeroMexico/information.php
- ^ http://www.airfleets.es/flottecie/Aeromexico%20Connect.htm
- ^ "Aeromexico: Our Fleet". Aeromexico.com. Retrieved 2014-04-16.
- ^ http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aeromexico-announces-launch-of-new-aeromexico-contigo-product-211882931.html
- ^ http://aeromexico.com/us/promotions/fare-sales-and-special-offers/am-contigo.html
- ^ http://www.ch-aviation.com/portal/news/26699-aeromar-airlines-to-operate-its-atr72-600s-for-aeromxico-express
- ^ http://aeromexico.com/en/about-us/history-advertising/?site=us
- ^ http://www.slogans.de/slogans.php?BSelect%5B%5D=29320
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident Douglas C-53-DO (DC-3) XA-GUN Monterrey". Aviation-safety.net. 25 March 1954. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "Accident Database: Accident Synopsis 03251954". Airdisaster.com. 25 March 1954. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident Lockheed L-749A Constellation XA-MEV Guadalajara Airport (GDL)". Aviation-safety.net. 2 June 1958. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "Accident Database: Accident Synopsis 06021958". Airdisaster.com. 2 June 1958. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident Douglas DC-8-21 XA-XAX New York-Idlewild International Airport, NY (IDL)". Aviation-safety.net. 19 January 1961. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident Douglas DC-8-51 XA-PEI Acapulco". Aviation-safety.net. 13 August 1966. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident Douglas DC-8-51 XA-NUS Lake Texcoco". Aviation-safety.net. 24 December 1966. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident Douglas DC-3A-197D XA-FUW La Paz". Aviation-safety.net. 12 June 1967. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident McDonnell Douglas DC-9-15 XA-SOC Puerto Vallarta Airport (PVR)". Aviation-safety.net. 20 June 1973. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident McDonnell Douglas DC-9-15 XA-SOF Léon Airport (BJX)". Aviation-safety.net. 2 September 1976. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 XA-DEN Chihuahua Airport (CUU)". Aviation-safety.net. 27 July 1981. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32 XA-DEO Zihuatanejo". Aviation-safety.net. 8 November 1981. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
- ^ "ASN Aircraft accident McDonnell Douglas DC-9-31 N936ML Reynosa-Gen Lucio Blanco Airport (REX)". Aviation-safety.net. 6 October 2000. Retrieved 2012-10-06.
External links[edit]
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Aeroméxico.
- Official website (English)
- Official website (Spanish)
- Aeroméxico (old site) (Archive)
- Aeroméxico (old site) (Spanish) (Archive)
- Consorcio Aeroméxico at the Wayback Machine (Spanish)
- Amateur Aeroméxico Fleet Detail


text:
Curatorial Dispatches from the Nendu Archives: The Journals of Rui Chaves and Tiago Costa
Rui Chaves will be documenting his creation of Nendu—an archive of Brazilian sound artists—in real time on Sounding Out! throughout 2016-early 2017. A Portuguese version of Chaves's journals was published in Linda, an online platform created by a composers' collective called NME. Rui Chaves's postdoctoral research is funded by FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) Project 2014/15978-9.
Nendu—the title of my archive—envisages the creation of an online platform dedicated to presenting and mapping the work of contemporary Brazilian sound artists. I have based my based upon the following four objectives:
1) Creating a 'map' that enables the dissemination and discovery of local praxis;
2) Prompting conversations or different types of documentation that better illustrate individual creative processes ('journal');
3) Re-affirming the idea of the 'archive' as a research tool;
4) Writing a historical and critical report on Brazilian sound art;
Nendu's online 'map' will enable users to discover different practitioners based on location, but more importantly on what categories the artists themselves have asked to be associated with.
These categories consist of designations of practices that cross the current imaginary of sound art historiography and reflection. A porous and rizomatic territory, to be sure, the categories will echo the obvious specificity of the experience and presentation of sounding artworks — temporally, spatially and formally — without excluding practical, historical and conceptual connections with music, architecture, performance or visual arts.
My selection framework interweaves individual research with contacts with curators, friends, and other researchers. It is important to mention that this process remains open to any individual that wants to be part of the platform until the end of the project in June 2017. This openness facilitates a dialogue between the archivist and interested parties, while at the same time enables reflection regarding the relationship with the idea of "sound art" and the role of sound within different artistic practices.
The second element (called a 'journal') consists of field work (to be done until the end of 2016) where I–together with a smaller selections of artists–attempt to present different in-depth reports of "ways of doing" sound art. The journal will consist of interviews, photos, videos, audio recordings and other relevant items. I will publish this material in tandem with the map in the form of a blog and I will share dispatches from the journal with SO!'s readership regularly throughout 2016.
The articulation of the map and journal foregrounds a critical reasoning regarding the idea of the archive as a research tool. My archive will not only be a repository of artists and work done, but also a way of doing an 'archeology' of discourses, made objects, and creative processes of sound practitioners. Methodologically, I support my archive via an ethnographic approach, tracing common ideas or patterns between conversations, materials, and/or other artifacts (texts, videos, audio recordings or photographs) gathered during the project. This not only allows an understanding of a possible formal aesthetic discourse (collective or individual), but also offers insights and possible contextualizations of various thematics within a broader cultural arena. Through mapping particular ways of doing, I argue, my archive will allow participants/artists—and also future users—a better comprehension of the prevalent cultural terms.
In the end, this methodology is geared toward the creation of a historical and critical report regarding the current panorama of Brazilian 'sound art'. Because Nendu is also Tupi for "listening to one-self," it functions as a metaphor for the creation of an archive that envisages alternative reflections and historiographies from European/American narratives.
For my introductory presentation for Sounding Out!, I want to take the opportunity to present a a 'journal' that I made with the artist Tiago Costa in the town of Tiete (state of São Paulo). We perform this activity with "two-voices," each one of us writing about their experience — starting with me.
Day 1
My rendez-vous point with Tiago was at the Barra Funda metro station and bus station. Our meeting results from a series of conversations and our eagerness to record the sound of the cicadas in his home town (Tietê). He was also interested in using binaural microphones, which end up being the main recording setup for what we did in the weekend between the 29th to the 31st of January 2016. Over the course of this weekend, I ended up in a series of conversations where I try to explain how these microphones work—in a very imprecise manner.
Our trip begins early in the morning, so I wake up early and still in night time to travel to the metro station, carrying all the recording equipment. When I arrive, there is already a lively buzz in the place. I have breakfast and, still feeling hungry, I have a second. As always, I arrive way too early and I look for the travel information center in order to try to find the right bus ticket sales booth. Fortunately, Tiago also arrives really early and I get an SMS from him telling me that he had already bought the tickets. We meet up and immediately get along. The conversation between us will constantly flow during our time together. He is an artist with a vast experience in audio post-production and he's also pretty active and interested in São Paulo's experimental music scene. This type of in-depth knowledge will also be a good source of jokes and gossip regarding particular musicians in the scene.
The conversation continues inside the bus, during which I compliment the vehicle's air conditioning set temperature, quite mild at that time. Everyone that has travelled by bus in Brasil is acquainted with the cold that one has during long distance travels. While we continue to chat and get farther away from the city, we start to gaze a landscape that cuts through our daily experience of living in São Paulo—it is so hard to see the horizon in that city!
We came across and stop briefly in a town with a weird and funny name to me: Boituva!
Boituva is really well known for its paragliding activities. Sometime during our weekend together, I discover that Tiago is afraid of heights and that he is not planning to paraglide any time soon—I agree. It also during this stop over that Tiago describes to me a regional musical traditional called "Cururu": a form of song-off duel between two "violeiros"; based on that description, I commented to him that it sounded a lot like a rap battle. A smile comes up on Tiago's face, a smile that grew larger and larger due to my inability to say "Cururu" the right way: Pururu, Cururuca, Pururuca.
We arrive to Tietê early and sleepy. At first sight, the city has a contrasting scale and size in regards to São Paulo. The height of the buildings is relatively small, punctuated by a few condos slightly off the main urbanscape. The bus station has a small boteco, and not much else. Botecos are common in Brazil; to me, they seem like a cross-over between a pub, restaurant and coffeehouse. There are a few clouds in the horizon, but Tiago tells me that the city is much warmer and drier than São Paulo. He also tells me that signs of Italian immigration are quite present in the city, as well as assorted religious events. Not long after, Tiago's mom arrives and she is extremely kind.
At Tiago's place I have my third breakfast (called café da manhã here). With some effort and excitement, we go out to check a few places near Tiago's home for recording and I'm impressed by the relatively diversity of the nearby soundscape. Besides the sounds of birds, insects and some motorbikes—there is a pungent smell of sewer in the air that envelops us.
We also see a series of houses with an architecture that reminds me of other parts of the world. We make the most of this small trip and Tiago records a small route in that area using the binaural microphones.
Tiago Costa field recording // Best heard with headphones
We go back home and Tiago listens to the recording we just made. We have a small talk about this process. We sit at the table to have lunch and I try to explain to Tiago's mom my research and what the process of binaural recording entails:
The head is a filter that enables to create a 3D image during the recording process.
I think I have a limited understanding of the process.
We end up having a quiet afternoon. I'm still a bit excited, so I decide to go out to run a few tests with the camera I bought to document my research work. Tiago and his mom suggest that I go and visit the river.
I do a small video recording through the city using a gadget that enables me to strap the camera to my head. Following their indications, I find the river Tietê. The color of the water is really brown and there is a smell that I can't explain. It seems that in bygone times one could have a swim there, and that there was also a swimming club. With time that changed, but there is a small religious celebration where two boats meet in the same place.
I find a small wooden stage near a construction site and inadvertently, I hear a conversation about which national team has the biggest number of fans in the country. I start to get really tired and decide to go back home. I try to transfer the files to watch the videos. The computer has problems playing them, so I give up and fall asleep.
We wake up for dinner and after, we go on a stroll through the city, literally going in circles around the main plaza. The conversation is good and we continue talking over a few beers on the porch of Tiago's house. I don't know if it was on that day or the next, but we comment on the lack of representation of certain groups in the São Paulo experimental music scene.
Tiago also describes to me a map of the local labels. We decide that it might be interesting to have a dedicated field recording label, because there are none in Brasil. We laugh at the possibility of the project being profitable or manageable. It would be one of those things that you would do out of passion, as were most things that we talked about during that evening.
We decide to wake up early in order to do our first recording of the day and try to capture the local dawn chorus. It was a really warm night, so I fall asleep to the sound of the ceiling fan refreshing me.
Day 2
I had an idea for a possible project between us, having sent Tiago a plan beforehand. The project consisted of using the binaural recording process as a metaphor for a collaborative recording process. I soon realize that that could be too complex for the time we had, and that I didn't want to condition our weekend meeting and recording process. From now on, the focus would be on documenting Tiago's work.
The alarm rings and I prepare the audio and video recording equipment. We both look tired, but are in good moods. The idea is to document the recording/path that Tiago is going to make—so I strap the camera to my head and Tiago sets up the binaural microphones; for some reason there is a glitch with the audio recorder SD card, but I manage to solve the problem.
Tiago – Field Recording // Better heard with headphones
We go back in order to get bit a more rest; we must, as later on we are going to do a few more recordings. I try, but I end up staying awake. It starts to get hot, so I get out of bed and have have breakfast. Tiago's mom is already doing some house chores. It is a beautiful day and I am quite excited about what we are going to do in the afternoon. The area surrounding Tietê is quite beautiful with sugar cane plantations all over the place, supposedly for the production of bio-diesel.
We were meant to go out early, but we are going to meet a friend's of Tiago and he suggested that we went after lunch. So we did that, just before leaving an intense rainfall strikes Tietê. We head out anyway, toward a place whose name I forgot. After we arrive, and while we wait for the weather to improve, we decide to recording the momentary ambience.
When the rain stops, we meet up with Marcos—a really gentle and nice person. On our way, I explain my research project to him and lend him my recorder to listen to how binaural recordings sound. He tells me that it feels like the sounds are happening around him. Discreetly, I record their conversation and I am briefly taken away by stories about friends and TV shows that discuss the evolutionary nature of pain.
We arrive at the dirt track where we are going to do a few recordings. We have to jump a fence and my shoes get all dirty with mud. In the end, all of our clothing ends up wet and dirty and Tiago's mom's car will suffer the consequence of our little adventure. At the same time, I can't understand if we are actually allowed to enter this property.
The surrounding landscape is amazing and we walk, hopping a few more fences until we reach the river. We stop there in order to do another recording. The river water has an intense brown color and the sky is still cloudy. We mainly record the sound of the water coursing. After we finish, Marcos goes out to do a recording and disappears for a few minutes.
Marcos André Lorenzetti recording // Best heard with headphones
After a while, we get a bit worried about him, but he soon arrives saying that we have to change to another, more interesting place. We start walking, avoiding our initial choice of a route due to the possibility of existing spiders or snakes, crossing a small ranch where we encounter a family getting ready for a barbecue. Marcos, a former vegetarian who now eats chicken, asks Tiago if he misses eating barbecue. He says he doesn't.
At another part of the river bed, for some odd reason we decide to go through a complicated route (especially for people carrying equipment!). I worry I'm going to get wet. So it was, but Tiago and his friend helped me with my bag. We arrive to a small island of rocks and we do another recording. The weather is nicer now and it feels really wonderful. Tiago and Marcos go for a swim in the water and I get in a little bit to make a video recording. After a while, I felt obliged to go for a swim too, although I was a bit phobic regarding germs, bacteria or other nasties that could be in that water. I join them and suddenly we spot a sewer drainage pipe. I ask Marcos if the water is clean and he replies that:
Clean, clean, it never is!
Returning to the 'mainland.', I accidentally misplaced one of my feet, and slip on my back on one of the rocks. Fortunately, none of the equipment gets wet and I leave with only a few bruise marks.
In mid-November 2015, there was a strong heat wave in the interior of São Paulo. I was in the city of Tietê, my home town, two hours west. I remember being home, the seasonal dry air and the surrounding sounds picked up my attention, in particular the strong sound of the cicadas. I became interested in capturing them, and imagined myself in a recording situation in the middle of the woods, just a few meters from my house. At that time, I had been listening to a few interesting works that utilized binaural microphones and start querying colleagues that used that type of setup in their work. That's when I contacted Rui.
Rui is developing research about Brazilian sound art, and for that he interviews and documents a series of artists that work with sound. Part of his process consists in spending some time with them, documenting what they usually do and proposing interventions. I explain what I wanted to do; Rui got interested and he invited me to do something in Tietê.
Due to our agendas, our meeting had to be postponed a few months after this conversation, unfortunately when he finally had time, the cicada weren't 'sounding' as as much as before. We decide to maintain our intent to meet, and during the month of January, we left for a weekend to do some field recordings together.
We went to Tietê on the 29th of January and the soundwalk happened briefly after we arrive. With the recorder and binaural microphones in hand, we visit the outskirts of the woods in proximity to a neighborhood called Seis Irmãos (literally translating to "six brothers").
In the past, that part of town had only a few small farms (called chácaras in Brasil), and although today it has been replaced by urban development, it still maintains a considerable native green area. Well, partially native. as we encountered a mix and pipes that send untreated sewage to a water stream called Ribeirão da Serra.
During that walk, we had a go with binaural recording, and we discussed a possible 'narrative' that could be done the next day, This 'narrative' would consist of emphasizing the first morning sounds, starting in the middle of the neighborhood houses, until a particular moment when we would enter the woods for a more contemplative appreciation. We also recorded a few 'urban sounds' during the walk, inside a car on the way to the next recording spot: a brief rain storm, the car's mechanical sounds and our casual conversations.
Rui Chaves field recording // Better heard with headphones
The second stage happened in a nearby town, Cerquilho. This was a plan parallel to the cicadas that we made at the banks of the Sorocaba River, a place with less human intervention and strong currents, so it demanded the help of someone that knew it well. I invited my friend Marcos to accompany us. He had practiced canoeing and regularly frequents that spot, building a very close relationship with this river. During the trip he told us about an experience he had spending the night close to the river with only a hammock. He described how the sound part of this experience transformed his perception:
One time I went to sleep close to the river [. . .] in the hammock, and during the day the sound of water is harmonic, but during the night it transforms into something really intense. And since it was night time and our perception gets a lot sharper, more alert, because there could be an animal close, so with any noise made we become more alert. There were times where the experience of the water 'noise' became so intense that it somehow even changed my consciousness [. . .] it was incredible [. . .] because it is a constant sound, right, [. . .] the current is constant [. . .] and if you don't feel trapped by it, you set yourself free.
Tiago Costa Field Recording // Usar fone de ouvido
The sound recordings made in that afternoon captured a river with a strong presence in constituting that acoustic space, taking upstage presence in regard to all other sounds. After the recordings, we had a swim and talked until the end of the afternoon.
This multi-vocal diary manifests the methodological frame for the 'type' of archive that I am building — a performative endeavor that envisages presenting process and work through a multi-layered weave of text, audio-visual documentation, and online material. Ultimately, its format signals a dialogical movement between archivist and artist, the underlying force in building a critical and historical report on Brazilian sound art. This publication is part of a series of installments that will run until mid-2017. The next post will focus on the work of Lilian Nakao Nakahodo, a composer/performer and researcher that created the Curitiba Sound Map.
Featured Image: In a ranch between Tietê and Cerquilho. 30/01/2016. Picture by Rui Chaves
Rui Chaves is a Portuguese sound artist, performer and researcher. His research and work foregrounds a discussion of presence — both physical and authorial — in the process of making sound art. This endeavor is informed by a contemporary critical inquiry and exploration of the thematics of body, place, text and technology. He has presented his work in several institutions and events throughout the United Kingdom, Brazil, France, Canada, Portugal and Germany. He holds a PhD in music from Queen's University Belfast and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at NuSom (University of São Paulo).
Written in collaboration with Tiago Costa.
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Six Years in Nodar: Sound Art in a Rural Context–Rui Gomes Costa
SO! Amplifies: Ian Rawes and the London Sound Survey–Ian Rawes
Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil–Leonardo Cardoso
Reflective Sound Gathering via the New England Soundscape Project
–Daniel Walzer
Make a Noise Joyful: Cirm in the Old English Exodus
When the narrator of the Old English poem Exodus declares "Gehyre se ðe wille" (Let him hear who will), what sounds is he asking us to attend to? [Note: Text from Peter Lucas's edition, 7b. All translations are author's own.] This post argues that the Old English noun cirm (noise, shout, outcry) challenges our conceptualization of noise. In the Anglo-Saxon corpus, cirm most often refers to the indistinguishable, non-linguistic hum of a crowd, rather than the meaningful utterance of an individual. This accords with the popular view of noise in sound studies: whether medieval or modern, noise (as opposed to meaningful sound) is associated with alterity, disruption, and violence.
However, and strikingly, in the Old English Exodus, words for noise describe not only the terrible sounds of the drowning Egyptians as the roaring waters of the Red Sea rush over them, but also the survival of the Israelites. I argue that this cirm is a mark of the Israelites' triumphal assertion of their continued presence and plenitude, a celebration of the fact that they can still be a multitude despite captivity. That cirm may not sit easily within our definition of noise should provoke not a redefinition of cirm's joyful use, but a reconceptualization of Anglo-Saxon noise.
What is Noise?
"Noise" has a range of meanings, but most often implies "unwanted sound" as R. Murray Schafer argues in The Soundscape (73). Following the work of Jacques Attali and Jeffrey J. Cohen, noise has been associated with alterity, difference, and monstrosity. Noise, as opposed to sound, may be non-linguistic or disordered: nonsense, babble, the roar of a jet engine. According to David Novak's contribution to Keywords in Sound, noise is not present in nature, but is created by modern technology (129). In the modern world, noise is often considered negative: cities have rules about noise pollution, apartment buildings set quiet hours, and airplane passengers don noise-cancelling headphones. In the pre-industrial age, noise was not exempt from criticism, though the word could also be applied to more pleasant sounds, like birdsong.
In the European Middle Ages, Valerie J, Allen argues in "Broken Air," noise was often figured as violent, transgressing boundaries, inappropriately closing the distance between sound producer and sound receiver (310 and 317-318). According to Macrobius, it was not silence that was the opposite of sound, but noise (311). Grammar, which was "devoted to the pursuance of ratio through sound," was ethical; noise was therefore considered "a kind of audible violence; corruption [wa]s something one can hear" (305). But some medieval noises were more ambiguous: the Old English word dream (joy, joyful sound) could also be applied to the terrible sounds of Hell or the terror of Judgment Day, as in Kazutomo Karasawa's analysis in "OE dream for Horrible Noise in the Vercelli Homilies." Likewise, "clamor," which originated as a (mostly) negative noise, became an important legal instrument, as discussed by Richard Barton in "Making a Clamor to the Lord: Noise, Justice and Power in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France." But in general, we tend to assume medieval noise is negative, or marks its producer as other.
Noises in Exodus
The Old English Exodus, found in the c. 1000 manuscript known as Bodleian MS Junius 11, is a notoriously difficult and complex poetic adaptation of the Old Testament Exodus 12-14. The author and date of composition are unknown, though it is often considered quite early, perhaps as early as the eighth century as Paul Remley and Lucas argue. Few institutions were rich enough to own a complete Bible. The author of Exodus may have had access to a written Latin version of Exodus, or may have been exposed to the text via the liturgy, especially the liturgy of the Easter Vigil.
Exodus delights in sensory details, but until recently, I had always thought of Exodus as primarily visual – the gleaming of war-gear, the glittering of Egyptian spoils washed up on the shore, tents and a pillar of cloud to protect the Israelites from the desert sun, and a pillar of fire to guide them. But the poet is also attentive to the larger sensory world, including the world of sound and noise. Those who accept the poet's opening challenge to his audience ("Gehyre se ðe wille!" [Let him hear who will!]) will recognize that the poem is in fact filled with sounds – the battle trumpets that provide order and structure to the movements of the army, the rushing and later silencing of waters, the terrible evening songs of wolves eager for battle, the awful rasping of the blade Abraham draws to sacrifice Isaac in the poem's digression on the patriarchs, the triumphant songs produced by Israelite men and women in praise of God after the Egyptians are defeated. In what follows, I focus on the multiple deployments of a single word for noise (cirm), applied to both Israelites and Egyptians, asking what this word can reveal about Anglo-Saxon conceptions of noise.
It has often been remarked that the poet resists easy distinctions between Israelites and Egyptians, applying similar vocabulary to both, and this is certainly illustrated by the poet's sonic play. In a climactic scene near the end of the poem, the drowning of the Egyptians in the Red Sea is accompanied by horrible noises:
Storm up gewat
heah to heofonum, herewopa mæst;
laðe cyrmdon (lyft up geswearc)
fægum stæfnum. Flod blod gewod:
randbyrig wæron rofene, rodor swipode
meredeaða mæst. Modige swulton,
cyningas on corðre. Cyrm swiðrode
wæges æt ende; wigbord scinon.
[A storm went up high to the heavens, the greatest of cries of the army; the hostile ones cried out with doomed voices (the air grew dark above). Blood pervaded the water: ramparts were broken, the greatest of sea-deaths lashed the sky. The brave ones died, kings in a troop. The noise fell silent at the end of the water; battle-boards shone. (460b-467; emphasis added)]
Cirm occurs twice in this passage, first as a verb (cyrmdon) and then as a noun (cyrm). The manuscript reading in 466b is cyre (choice). Lucas emends to cyrm because cyre is not a poetic word, and I would argue that the echo with the Israelites' cyrm (107) must be deliberate. Even if we accept MS cyre, the passage still includes the verb cyrmdon (462a), and other sonic vocabulary (herewopa, "army's cries" [461], and fægnum stefnum, "doomed voices" [463]). The noun occurs roughly 60 times in the corpus; the verb 17 times (DOE).
In the Old English corpus, cirm is often negative, applied to the tortures of hell or the terror of Judgment Day, and indicates a particularly loud sound (DOE, Lucas). According to the DOE, the noun means "shout, cry, shriek" or "noise of non-human origin, clamour." The Egyptian cirm is obviously threatening, the meaningless cries of men who, like a raging storm, lash out in terror as the waters close over their heads. Even the visual horror of blood mingling with water maintains sonic affiliations: this line is a rare example of internal rhyme in Old English poetry (flod blod gewod). The end of the Egyptian threat is marked by the silencing of their voices and cirm, metaphorically a silencing of the army's advance against the Israelites.
Given the negative associations with noise in both medieval and modern sound theory, that the Egyptian defeat is accompanied by their terrible cirm may not seem particularly surprising. Strikingly, this is not the only such noise in the poem. Near the beginning of the poem, the Israelites celebrate their initial escape from Egypt by producing not just any noise, but cirm. On the third day, after the pillar of cloud has appeared, the Israelites awaken with trumpets, and seeing the pillar,
Folc wæs on salum,
hlud herges cyrm.
[The people were joyful, loud was the noise of the army. (106b-107a; emphasis added)]
If cirm is threatening, loud noise, associated with difference and violence, why would the Israelites produce it? I would like to suggest that cirm suggests not merely loud noise, but crowd noise. The Israelites' cirm is not an assertion of difference, or the meaningless babble of a drowning, almost non-human army, but an assertion of triumphant plenitude. Their joyful cirm is a fulfillment of God's covenant with Abraham, which the poet will remind us of later in the poem (435-442). Just as God promised Abraham innumerable offspring, his support of the Israelites in their exodus signals that they will continue to be a multitude (as they certainly are in this battle, in which they have 600,000 fighting men (224-233).
In fact, the Israelites' triumphant crowd noise is echoed at the end of the poem as well. After the defeat of the Egyptians, who make terrible cirm as they perish in the Red Sea (460b-467), the Israelites issue more celebratory sound, this time transformed from crowd noise to harmonious music:
Æfter þam wordum – werod wæs on salum –
sungon sigebyman (segnas stodon),
fægerne sweg
[After these words – the troop was joyful – victorious trumpets sang a beautiful sound (battle-standards stood). (565-67a; emphasis added)]
The Israelites' cirm (107), which they produced while on salum (joyful), is balanced and echoed by the celebratory sounds of the end of the poem, also produced by a people who are on salum (565). Whatever threat the Israelites' assertion of plenitude and cirm may have made possible is mitigated by replacing that cirm (noise) with a beautiful sound (fægerne sweg), a harmonious, if also loud and multiple, expression.
According to Attali, music can be used to produce order, but "noise is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill. It is a simulacrum of murder" (26). In this sense, the Israelites' crowd noise in the desert is violent – it threatens the order of the Egyptians, or the hierarchy the Egyptians have sought to impose on the Israelites in their captivity. But because this story ends in the triumph of the Israelites, told from the point of view of their Christian descendants, it celebrates this assertion of communal power and communal violence without fully othering them. The true violence is inflicted on the Egyptians by God in the Red Sea, allowing the Israelites to reassert their normativity, their cohesion, their power, and their non-otherness. While the drowning Egyptians produce cirm, it is silenced because the cirm of the Israelites has conquered them. Noise, or at least cirm, is therefore not merely negative or disruptive; it is a powerful claim to be blessed by God, an assertion of belonging rather than a boundary crossing.
Featured Image:Detail of a miniature of the plague of hail (Exodus 9:22-25), Add MS 15277, f. 7r
Jordan Zweck is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She specializes in early medieval vernacular literature and culture, especially Old English, and is interested in documentary culture, media studies, and sound studies. She is currently completing a book on Anglo-Saxon epistolarity and early English media, examining the representation of letters in vernacular texts such as letters from heaven, hagiography, and poetry. She is also working on a second book on sound, noise, and silence in Anglo-Saxon England, a portion of which is forthcoming in Exemplaria. Zweck is a recipient of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for the Humanities' First Book Award, has held a resident fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison, and has won several teaching awards.
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SO! Amplifies: Think About Sound App and Map
SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig. You're welcome!
What is it about the environmental soundscape which makes us 'tune-in' or 'tune-out' to particular sounds? Do we as humans tend to seek out quiet zones for our acoustic pleasure or are there those among us who find urban soundscapes a more comforting prospect? Researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK have developed a mobile phone application to allow the personalized assessment of such questions regarding environmental soundscapes. I developed the free Think About Sound interactive map–downloadable as a mobile app and viewable online–to allow users to experience various locations in Glasgow by using 3D audio recordings and panoramic visuals.
Think About Sound is a novel tool which shifts the traditional paradigm of environmental soundscape assessment using an experience sampling methodology. Over the last decade, smart phone ownership has increased immeasurably; I applied the technology here in order to allow local, in-situ soundscape assessment as participants go about their daily routine. Based on the Adobe PhoneGap Build platform, the application has been developed using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, employing jQuery Mobile to provide a simple and clean navigational structure to the user. Crowdsourcing data in this way has enormous potential to create rich and diverse data sets, where both qualitative and quantitative descriptions of environmental surroundings can be gathered in a flexible and non-invasive way.
By using a self-reporting methodology, Think About Sound removes the listener from traditional laboratory-based soundscape evaluation and locates them in real world experiences as they go about their day-to-day activities. The application aims to find out the various types of sound encountered as users understand them, asking how users feel before and after a recorded sound event and enabling them to describe the circumstances in which they heard the sound event. Think About Sound also asks listeners to provide semantic descriptors for the sound, toward the ultimate aim of creating more sophisticated environmental sound maps which communicate both location-specific sound information and the subjective effect of sound upon the listener.
To further enrich the experience, data sent from the application can be viewed online at http://www.thinkaboutsound.co.uk/ with an accompanying map where the public can view and audition submissions using the familiar Google map format. You will also find links to download the app in multiple formats.
I hoped that by collecting data in this way and to this scale, that I can obtain and share a greater understanding of how we perceive soundscapes. The next steps for the project includes the development of audio technology to analyze sound recordings, automatically predicting annoyance, valence (the emotional value associated with a stimulus), and the arousal features of environmental sounds for particular users.
While locale remains important, this research has far more reaching implications beyond my local region. Submissions on an international level can help us to understand how we perceive our environmental soundscapes, help shape local noise policy, and provide others with an understanding of sounds in their local area. What I want from you, the reader, is your help via contributions to this worldwide soundscape project. Stop for a minute and take in your sonic surroundings. What can you hear? How does it make you feel? Comfort? Anxiety?. . .Stop for a minute, listen and think about sound.
Adam Craig is a Ph.D researcher studying at Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK within the School of Engineering and Built Environment. After obtaining a first class honours in his undergraduate Audio Technology degree in 2011, Adam went on to embark on a Ph.D concentrating his research on using advanced audio technology for the creation of environmental sound maps. He Is currently a member of the AudioLab Research team at GCU and is a member of the Institute of Acoustics and the Audio Engineering Society. Out with his academic research, Adam teaches sound engineering to high-school students at a community based service within his local education authority, and at West College Scotland.
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Desiring Medieval Sound
Each of the essays in this month's "Medieval Sound" forum focuses on sound as it, according to Steve Goodman's essay "The Ontology of Vibrational Force," in The Sound Studies Reader, "comes to the rescue of thought rather than the inverse, forcing it to vibrate, loosening up its organized or petrified body (70). These investigations into medieval sound lend themselves to a variety of presentation methods loosening up the "petrified body" of academic presentation. Each essay challenges concepts of how to hear the Middle Ages and how the sounds of the Middle Ages continue to echo in our own soundscapes.
The posts in this series begins an ongoing conversation about medieval sound in Sounding Out!. Our opening gambit in April 2016, "Multimodality and Lyric Sound," reframes how we consider the lyric from England to Spain, from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, pushing ideas of openness, flexibility, and productive creativity. We will post several follow-ups throughout the rest of 2016 focusing on "Remediating Medieval Sound." And, HEAR YE!, in April 2017, look for a second series on Aural Ecologies of noise! –Guest Editors Dorothy Kim and Christopher Roman
In fall 2013, The Cloisters' Fuentidueña Chapel was brimming with bodies in motion, in relation, in sound and in silence, attracting ear and eye away from the hall's sparse collection of medieval sculpture and fresco to a performance unfolding in its midst. For the first time in its seventy-five year history, The Cloisters presented a work of contemporary art: Janet Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet (2001), a site-specific virtual performance of Thomas Tallis's famous sixteenth-century, forty-part motet Spem in alium, played on a continuous fourteen-minute loop through an array of forty high-fidelity speakers.
It was, by all accounts, a resounding success. Reviews in the The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR's Soundcheck were rhapsodic. The volume of visitors to The Cloisters, which houses most of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's medieval collection, tripled. On the day I visited, I found myself deeply moved—in part by the music, yes, but also by my weird intimacy with each speaker's singular human voice, and by the unguarded auditions unfolding all around me. One couple chatted cheerily over the music; a white-haired matron sharply shushed them quiet. Some sat on benches or the apse steps, eyes closed; many travelled from speaker to speaker, lingering. One visitor openly wept. I learned from a museum attendant this was a near daily occurrence.
How could a looped recording of Renaissance polyphony generate such outpourings of enthusiasm and emotion?
By multiplying auditions. By putting bodies in relation. By sculpting space. By dislocating time. By sounding in The Cloisters. By irrupting the Middle Ages. By desiring medieval sound.
Cardiff's installation arranges forty high-fidelity speakers on stands at roughly head height in a large, inwards-facing oval array. Each speaker emits one of the motet's forty distinct voice parts, individually recorded by singers from the Salisbury Cathedral Choir. Historical evidence suggests that Tallis composed Spem in alium to be performed this way, in the round, high in one of the royal Nonsuch Palace's octagonal towers, where the work's eight vocal quintets could imitatively pass musical material around the tower's circumference, respond antiphonally across its diameter, and bombard the center with forty-voice polyphonic counterpoint. "It was like the composer was a sculptor," Cardiff explains, "and I wanted to show how sculptural the piece of music was."
Spem in alium chimes with the whole of Cardiff's body of artistic work in its abiding interest in the physicality of sound, "in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space." The language she uses to describe her work here links sound and motion in the sculpting of space: as the sound moves between choirs, variably filling acoustic space with voice, so audiences move among speakers, plotting itineraries according to the physical, visual, and aural push and pull of bodies in relation to other bodies. Moving and being moved are the hammer and chisel Cardiff use to give sounding space its shape.
Cardiff describes the genesis of Forty-Part Motet in an interview: "When you listen on your stereo it's so frustrating because you know all these people are there, but you can't hear them. I just wanted to climb inside and hear them individually."
Syntactically, what does Cardiff want to climb inside of, so that she might hear voices individually?
The radio—but that would merely eliminate a mediating technology, putting her in the concert hall or cathedral, no closer to the individual voice. The performance—but that would render her a singer, her own voice filling her hearing so she's unable to attend to the voices of others. No—Cardiff seems to wish to climb inside each singer to hear their voice individually, intimately, as if her own. The motivation driving Forty-Part Motet amounts to a fantasy of transpersonality.
Cardiff employs these same transpersonal tropes to describe her audio walks: dream-like, site-specific, binaural soundworks narrated on a Walkman which seek to create
a surrogate relationship with a viewer… People could get this intimate connection with this virtual person in the audio walks, in the same way they can with Motet…. They hear the sound of my breathing; it's right at the back of their necks, but not in a creepy way. It's almost in a natural way; it's almost in their head.
In Forty-Part Motet, though, this intimacy is in reverse. It's not another's voice in our head. It's us visiting voices in the heads of forty others.
Latin for "Hope in another," the incipit of a medieval Sarum rite responsory from the Vulgate Book of Judith, Spem in alium is widely considered Tallis's greatest work. The motet is experimentally syncretic in structure and style. It opens with elaborate polyphony frowned upon as too Catholic in the Protestant England of the mid-sixteenth century, when the work was composed and premiered. A point of imitation percolates through four quintets of soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass, until twenty singers voice twenty distinct lines, obscuring any sense of rhythmic pulse and textual intelligibility. This mass of vocal sound passes through the eight total quintets until it completes a full rotation through the choir.
All forty voices enter at once for the first time at the fortieth breve [3:08 in video above]. The quintets then rotate back to where they began, and the mass of forty contrapuntal voices resurges [5:20], made all the more massive by slow harmonic movement between tonic and dominant. We are hit with a sonic welter, nimble and static all at once.
Suddenly, all voices fall silent [5:40]. This is the first of three caesuras in the piece, all of them crucially important: they articulate the motet into distinctly characterized segments, they offer aural contrast to the work's welters of sound, and they create opportunities for forty-strong choral entries, rare moments where all voices coordinate, where the horizontality of the vocal line temporarily vanishes before vertical harmonic coordination.
Following this first hiatus, Spem in alium adopts a distinctly homophonic and antiphonal style: the text is clear, rhythms readily discerned, as English sacred music responsive to Reformation ideals aspired to be. A transparent voicing on tonic C major precedes the second caesura, whose yawning gap gives onto alien sonority: A major [8:06]. Non-functional, unresolved, otherworldly, the chord hangs across all voices for the span of a breve before shifting mode, C-sharp giving way to C-natural, the motet resuming diatonicity and building momentum towards its final seventeen breves' worth of full-throated, forty-voice polyphony [9:08].
For a moment, though, Spem in alium cracks open, slowing time, reconfiguring voice. Something utterly other irrupts into audibility, arresting, ephemeral, ravishing—and then is smoothed away.
Carolyn Dinshaw opens her love letter to the amateur medievalist, How Soon is Now?, with an anecdote about a bespectacled young man in a dark blue bathrobe at the fall 2008 Medieval Festival at The Cloisters. "[H]e had glanced around his house and grabbed something that looked like a monk's robe or that otherwise signified 'medieval'," she writes. "The past is present in this intimate, mundane element of undressed everyday life" (2). Dinshaw gives a name to the nonce infolding of past and present that captured her fascination in the figure of this young man: "asynchrony: different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now" (5).
It's no accident that Dinshaw launches her study of medieval and medievalist asynchrony at The Cloisters: the museum building is a patchwork of medieval architectural elements spanning the eleventh- through sixteenth-centuries, lifted wholesale from their European sites and mortared together with modern materials and techniques in a medieval style. In the Fuentidueña Chapel where Forty-Part Motet was installed, for example, a twelfth-century Spanish apse's mottled limestone abuts neat grids of hewn block and smooth tile that forms the modern nave; the modern structure's recessed clerestorial apertures emulate the apse's Romanesque slit windows, permitting only the skinniest vertical bars of light.
Thomas Hoving, former curator of the medieval department and director of the Met, describes two attitudes towards The Cloisters' amalgamative architecture: critical disdain towards a "hodgepodge of ancient European architectural history, ripped out of context, pasted together to form a dreamlike but haphazard ensemble" (56); and affectionate reverie: "If you dream a little, you can float through time to the eleventh… through [the] twelfth… all the way to the beginning of the sixteenth century" (58).
In many ways, dream is the mental site of asynchrony where memory and vicissitude, anxiety and hope promiscuously mingle. The museum, that consummate heterotopia assembling traces of the past in a single moment of now, likewise manifests asynchrony in physical space. The Cloisters, then, is a dream of the Middle Ages, a locus of temporal heterogeneity we enter after crossing the greenwood of Fort Tryon Park, as if on pilgrimage into the past, still clothed in our everyday life.
Shortly before Forty-Part Motet was installed at The Cloisters, Janet Cardiff Googled one of her favorite singers from the recording, to see how he was getting on. She found a funeral announcement. "He's still singing in the choir," she remarks.
Asynchrony takes "the form of restless ghosts haunting the present" (34).
The press opening for Forty-Part Motet was visited with an apparition:
The Brother entered, listened to the nine-minute motet, and his face glowed… When it was finished, he glided out. Perhaps (Videte miraculum!) he has lived in the Funtedueña Chapel for its thousand-odd years, and appears only for special celebrations.
A photo taken at the event shows a man in a monk's habit, glasses perched on his nose, his robes a faded shade of blue.
Cardiff relates the moment she discovered sound as her medium:
I was recording with the tape recorder out in the cemetery. I had a headset on and I was walking around doing research, just recording the names of the people on the headstones… Then I pressed stop and… I hit rewind by mistake, so I had to press play to find out where I was. All of a sudden I heard my voice describing what was in front of me and my footsteps walking… I was electrified. It was really, really incredible.
1557. Spem in alium was probably commissioned by Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel. Alexander Blachly argues for a 1556 premiere, but "that premiere seems not to have occurred—most likely because of the death of Fitzalan's son and daughter in 1556, and of his wife in 1557." The motet was probably premiered under Queen Elizabeth in 1559, one year after the death of Queen Mary, its likely original dedicatee, for "a select seated audience of perhaps thirty or forty people", in an octagonal tower chamber "roughly 25 feet in diameter (almost identical to the 27-foot width of the Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters)."
"[T]he speakers are a little like the tomb effigies of knights and ladies held in another chapel space of The Cloisters, containing something of the person who lived… [while] an object that also has nothing to do with that person except in memory." That something is, of course, their voice.
The performance of Spem in alium runs to about ten minutes. Cardiff's looped recording runs to fourteen. In those four extra minutes, the singers clear their throat, mutter to themselves, chat idly, moan about last night's bender, excuse themselves to the loo. In a hall full of murmuring visitors, it's difficult to tell which voices come from which bodies, or whether voices still come from bodies to begin with. This is the acousmatic situation, as Brian Kane describes it, a phantasmagoria that "[posits a] sphere outside the bounds of the mundane world… manifested in this world only at special or singular moments" (108).
Cardiff explains to WNYC's Studio 360 that "each individual speaker is an individual singer… You realize that, yeah, these are real people" [1:30 in the audio clip below]. Reporter Jamie York goes on to remark that "in some ways, the speakers are more like people than people are" [4:06]: unguarded, approachable, vulnerable, obverses of the brusque, hardened urbanites attending the installation. One visitor draws the obvious conclusion: "What the work does, the position that it puts you in, is really one of a ghost" [6:31].
Studio 360 – Show 1443 Janet Cardiff
Dinshaw aligns asynchrony with the loving labors of the amateur, reminding us of the word's etymology, and with amateur forms of knowledge "derived not only from positions of detachment but also… from positions of affect and attachment, from desires to build another kind of world" (6). Cardiff's work is similarly about affect and attachment, about "space impregnated with memory and desire, expectation" (32), about the active construction of worlds between persons, in that word's etymological sense. Her soundwork blurs boundaries between presence and absence, inside and outside, the living and the dead, the aesthetic and the everyday; it performs the world's "slippage between the recording and the recorded, the past and the present, and the confusion of what is memory and what is our present" (35).
What memory does Forty-Part Motet slip us into?
Surely, a fraught one: we take a seat in the towers of Nonsuch Chapel, we exchange pleasantries with that select audience, we hobnob with the Queen. This is the false memory of cultural fantasy, and we do well to interrogate it for what, and who, it includes and excludes.
Yet, we don't remember, exactly. We did not, cannot perceive the soundwaves that filled the upper room in 1559. We do not sit with that aristocratic audience, stationary at the center of a compass of eight quintets. Rather, we circulate in space and in time, seen and unseen. We are ghosts who enter into relation, body to body, with persons not there, whom we cannot know, and with persons there, whom we come to know in a bed of sound. We oscillate between self and other, a hopeful vibration; we traverse and, in traversing, sculpt the space between singular voice and multiple chorus with our desire-moved bodies. We temporarily become the owners of voices not ours; we are undone and made intimate, in a visible and invisible community of intimates.
Another way of saying this is that Forty-Part Motet slips us into the structure of memory, a structure that resonates in and with the physical structure of The Cloisters, multiplying asynchronies and blurring our quotidian orientations more powerfully than either could manage alone. "We need a non-modern temporal orientation to perceive [temporal] heterogeneity," to resist modernity's "subject-object split," "to explore subjective attachment rather than objective detachment" (183n129). More attachment, Dinshaw implores, and indeed, how else could a looped recording move so many? How else to open the narrow aperture through which a medieval past momentarily irrupts into the present—non-functional, unresolved, otherworldly, in the space of sound?
Featured Image: "Janet Cardiff's installation 'The Forty Part Motet' in the Fuentidueña Chapel" by Flickr User Joe Schultz
Andrew Albin is assistant professor of English at Fordham University at Lincoln Center. He facilitates the Fordham Medieval Dramatists in their biennial performance of early English drama for public audiences at Fordham and in NYC. Publications include articles on the Chester shepherd's play in Early Theatre and on Chaucer's Prioress's Tale in The Chaucer Review, and a chapter in the edited collection Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe on Richard Rolle's Melos amoris; Prof. Albin is also currently preparing a multimedia, alliterative English translation of the Melos amoris for publication under the PIMS Mediaeval Sources in Translation series. He has also collaborated in the creation of musical works that have been performed across the United States and in Europe.
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Sounding Out! Podcast #13: Sounding Shakespeare in S(e)oul— Brooke Carlson
Maile Colbert, Rui Costa, and Jeff Cain's "Radio Terramoto" — Maile Colbert
Queer Timbres, Queered Elegy: Diamanda Galás's The Plague Mass and the First Wave of the AIDS Crisis–Airek Beauchamp

subset: commoncrawl


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|28 Reviews
|Property type
|Minimum Stay
|2 - 7 nights
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NEWS FLASH!!...Book now for Fall 2016 and winter 2017 dates as it will be a very busy season! They are predicting another pretty cold winter so book early for best dates. YOU WILL NOT FIND A BETTER MANAGED OR MAINTAINED VILLA FOR THE PRICE AND LOCATION. PLEASE CONTACT US TO CHECK YOUR DATES. THANKS!
THIS IS WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN LOOKING FOR! Come enjoy this private Villa in a truly remarkable tropical setting. This five bedroom, five bath home overlooks the Caribbean Sea and it's mountains on the island of St. Martin, French West Indies in the Caribbean. Located in the Lowlands, an exclusive residential area of St. Martin, Villa Steel Magnolias is the former home of Oscar winning actress Olympia Dukakis. This beautiful villa has apx 2 acres of land that provides privacy, spaciousness and wonderful views of the island and the sparkling sea. It offers housekeeping and houseman at no extra charge and a private cook available upon request for extra fee. The main entrance to the Villa is gated and private.
The Villa is first class from room to room offering a large indoor living/dining area with TV and stereo system both indoors and around the pool area. A large modern kitchen with double fridge, icemaker, dishwasher is just a few of the features this villa offers. The bedrooms are furnished as follows. All of the bedrooms have pillow top king size beds and all bedroom have private bathroom with shower. Three of the bedroom have double sinks and they all have very large showers. Of the five bedrooms two are Master Bedrooms of which one has a leather sofa sleeper.
The Villa offer's two master bedroom suites, one in the main Villa with 42' TV and a new master bedroom located in a building of its own overlooking the large pool and with an incredible view of the Caribbean Sea. This new very large master bedroom also has its own kitchenette with microwave and mini fridge and a 42' Plasma TV! It also has a large bathroom with separate shower and Jacuzzi bathtub! Four of the five bedrooms have French doors that open up to the pool area and with view's of the Caribbean Sea. And here's another great thing about this Villa....The white sand beach at Baie Rouge is just out my back gate and only apx 25 steps away! Very few Villa's offer a great beach just a few steps away. But best of all is the Staff at the Villa who will take care of your every need and truely want you to have the very best vacation possible. We do not add and service charges to our rates like many Villa's but you are welcome to tip the staff if you wish at the end or your visit. The Villa Adminastrator will meet you at the airport at no extra charge and return you to the Villa and help you and the rest of your group get ready for some St Martin/St Maarten fun! Over half of our guests are repeat visitors and want you to return year after your also........plus its how I feed my kids!
This private Villa is set up for fun and your total comfort so come and enjoy the good life at Villa Steel Magnolias! Contact me today for the best rates possible and we hope to see you at Villa Steel Magnolias soon! I DO NOT ALWAYS UPDATE AND USE THE ONLINE CALENDAR SO PLEASE CALL OR EMAIL ME TODAY TO CHECK YOUR DATES.
Keywords: Private Villa
We own and manage vacation properties all over the world and we know you will love staying at Villa Steel Magnolias and Saint Martin as much as we do. We know how important a good vacation is and we work hard to make sure you have the very best vacation possible! You will find that the staff at Villa Steel Magnoias make you feel like family and you will leave well rested and well tanned. Come and enjoy!
The Owner purchased this villa in 1993
The Villa is located in the very best area of Saint Martin and just minutes from the best of about everything you would be looking for.
Villa Steel Magnolias offer many things that you will not find at other Villa like, Dish Network TV, Free USA phone line, Wireless Internet, apx 2 acres of land in a tropical setting and just a few steps away from one of the very best beaches. Most of all...a great caring Staff that will make sure you vaction is the best it can be!
We have traveled to SxM for years, this time we were four couples and 5 kids. We love Baie Rouge Beach and no one could believe such a location could be possible. One hundred steps to the beach, six bedrooms full of amenities and convenience was beyond expectations.Too much of everything- poolside chairs, towels, kitchen equipment, equipped bathrooms, videos, music system, books, anything you may need for a wonderful vacation. Caretaker Jonas very helpful and understanding- no one in our group will forget this stay, great value and family fun that provided too much of everything, just waiting to get back ASAP. Thanks Mark!!!
We love the villa for our family of ten. We had seven adults and three young children. This home was clean and had plenty of bedrooms with each having their own bathrooms. It is really close to Baie Rouge beach. You just walk out the back gate then down a parking area to the beach. Baie Rouge beach is beautiful and had some great areas for snorkeling! The home has a wonderful pool which we also enjoyed! We had coffee every morning by the pool as we enjoyed the great view of Simpson bay. This villa is stocked well with bath towels and large beach towels. The kitchen is well stocked with everything you need if you like to cook. The only problem we had in the kitchen was little black ants, so do not leave any food out on the counter. The electricity did go out on us a few times and on the very last night we did have an issue with one of the shower heads, but with each issue Jonas (care taker) was always there to help! Just a few minutes from the villa is come great restaurants, Le Sand and Dreams. They are right next to each other and on the beach. Beautiful setting, great food, and very close to the villa! I also, really enjoyed that the villa had a security gate and a mango tree in the yard!
We also used a company online called shopndropgrocerysxm.com. It was really nice to order some groceries online and have them delivered and the house stocked so we did not have to go shopping for basic essentials right away. There is a service fee and tips are appreciated. I thought it was a real nice service and everything we ordered was there when we arrived. Cold items were in the refrigerator and everything else was on the kitchen counter with our invoice.
Since I was feeding a family of ten and realized the meat was expensive and not sure of the quality, I brought my own. I was not sure how this would work, but it worked GREAT! I vacuum sealed my meat (steak, chicken breast, bacon, ground meat, sausage, ham, and cheese), froze it, then right before we left for the airport I put it in a Sam's cooler bag then in my carry on luggage and carry it on the plane with me. I never had any problems in the states with security and when we arrived in St Maarten, they did not check my carry on luggage. When we arrived at our Condo (our first night stay) everything was still frozen. From the time we left that morning til we arrived at the condo was 12 hours.
Thank you Mark for your home, we loved it and hope to visit again some day!
Our party of 11 enjoyed Mark's villa for a week. The property is beautiful, in the most desirable part of St Martin, with views over Simpson bay, and with really easy access to the Baie Rouges beach. The villa's character is warm and welcoming, not unlike a roman or greek villa in Europe. The bedrooms are all spacious and have very comfortable beds with luxurious linens; each has its own bathroom well-stocked with towels. The kitchen is well-appointed and very usable. Our favorite part of the house was the pool, the pool deck, and the covered, outdoor area where we dined every night. The caretakers, who live on the property, are very helpful but also discreet. We all loved Johnny, the caretaker's gentle dog. The town of Marigot is a short drive away and has supermarkets, restaurants, and bakeries with fabulous french and creole food. The island of St Martin is a fun place to visit with lots to do. That said, our favorite place to hang out on the island was the villa. Our vacation was fabulous thanks to it.
Great location - steps from Baie beach, close to Marigot and Maho Bay fun.
Great house - all rooms are big, everything you need is there, perfect layout, wonderful pool and deck, lots of privacy and beautiful grounds.
Great service - very attentive and will go out the way to make the guest feel at home.
Great price - for this size of the house.
We were a group of 8 and thoroughly enjoyed our stay at Villa Steel Magnolias. The villa was spacious (comfortable for a much larger group) and had all the amenities required for an enjoyable stay, and then some. The Staff are very friendly and flexible. They were accommodating and available whenever they were needed. The pool area is lovely with a wonderful view of the sunrise over the eastward hills and the moonrise over Simpson Bay. Baie Rouge, which is literally steps away, is gorgeous and low key. While the main road passes below the boundary wall of the villa, traffic was unnoticeable and it does not compromise privacy. The location provides easy access to Marigot, Maho Bay, Simpson Bay, Grand Case...even Orient Beach on the eastern side of the island is a short drive away. It was a perfect spot for our vacation and I look forward to returning in the future.
We took an extended family trip to celebrate several milestones this summer! We enjoyed the layout of the house, ample bedrooms and baths which was very helpful. With a group of 12, a larger indoor table with more chairs available would be nice- we put several tables together outside on the patio to accommodate all for meals. We loved the pool, but without handrails in the lower end, it was difficult for the older family members to get in /out (there were small handrails by the deep end with very deep steps). Jonas was very helpful! I would recommend a general updating (furniture, appliances etc. ) and decluttering to help keep it cleaner. We had difficulties with the oven, and power kept tripping when we used two appliances such as the microwave and oven or toaster. Washing machine leaked terribly, and dryer took forever to dry towels so poor Jonas' wife never seemed to get it all done! Electric gates had difficulty working correctly, fence by beach gate was broken, Water in well had to be delivered daily- not sure if it was usage or the pump- since the pump went out in a storm power outage. Too many things had "special ways to get it to work correctly" which can be very dangerous to outsiders - such as lighting the stove top or oven- and it usually led to a large blow out of flames. Mark and Jonas tried to address the issues as quickly as possible, and some were out of their control such as the storm power outage on our first day. Marlon helped out on the first day, but we never saw him after that. Other issues could be dealt with by simply updating appliances etc. The bedrooms were wonderful and very comfortable, and having air conditioned rooms was a real treat. The Back right bedroom on game room side (with step up) smelled terribly of mold- and had dead bugs lingering on picture frame on wall. This house has amazing potential - just needs some updating and a good cleaning! The location is very good - for almost anything you wanted to do on the island! It was wonderful to grill outside at night and sit by the pool to enjoy dinner. We have rented many beach houses over the years, and know that with some TLC, this one could be brought back to live up to it's amazing history! I would love to see the house again after some updating and maintenance is completed- Not good for young children or older people- very steep, slippery stone stairs and around pool - no handrails on any stairs, and also back stair area.
Rental prices quoted weekly in US dollars not including 9% tax. Maximum occupancy is normally two adults per bedroom. Base rates are based on one to six people in the Villa with a small extra charge for more than six. Rates & Terms are subject to change without notice.
Payment Options: Traveler's Check, Cashiers/Registered Check, Personal/Business Check, Money Order, Cash
Check out Noon - Check In 1pm. We can work around these times if need if the Villa was not booked the night before. Rates are for one to six people in the Villa. Over six there is a extra charge per extra bedroom needed.
Cancellations and Refunds:
All payments are non-refundable once received due to the Villa being unable to be resold while space was being held. However if we are able to re-rent the Villa we can normally make a refund.
One half of rental amount is due within 7 days of booking unless its made 7 months in advance or more the just a 25% deposit. The balance is due 30 days prior to arrival at the Villa.
|Rate Period
|Weekend Night
Spring Smmer Fall Season
Apr 16 2016 - Dec 14 2016
Changeover Day: Saturday
7 night minimum stay
|Notes: Rates are based on 6 guests; add $35 per night, per additional guest
Fall and Winter
Dec 15 2016 - Dec 16 2016
Changeover Day: Saturday
2 night minimum stay
|Notes: Rates are based on 6 guests; add $50 per night, per additional guest
Holiday Season
Dec 17 2016 - Jan 4 2017
Changeover Day: Saturday
7 night minimum stay
|Notes: Rates are based on 6 guests; add $50 per night, per additional guest
Winter High Season
Jan 5 2017 - Apr 14 2017
Changeover Day: Saturday
7 night minimum stay
|Notes: Rates are based on 6 guests; add $50 per night, per additional guest
My Standard Rate
7 night minimum stay
Rates based on 6 people with extra nightly charge for over six staying in the Villa. We do not add any service charge as some hotels and Villa's do however most guest do tip the staff a little something at the end of their visit. We have a great staff. Depending on the dates I can normally offer a discount for larger groups so email me for more info and the best quote. Thanks!


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