downstream / Stephen Vitiello’s Collage Enviroment (MP3)
All field recordings are alien, even the most familiar. A close-up recording of a bug or an ice cube has sonic resonances, inherent threat, surprise facets, that are utterly apart from daily experience. To bring a microphone close to something is to witness it at an unprecedented level of detail, and to listen to it closely is to hear things that one simply doesn’t associate with the object at hand.
This is no less true of environments than of objects. As an experiment, record your daily commute and listen back to it later; you’ll be astounded by the sounds you hadn’t noticed. In many ways, the more familiar the place or object recorded, the more dissociated the experience, because as time passes we take sound for granted; we listen through the familiar, and our ears focus on the occasional unfamiliar.
Stephen Vitiello, the musician and sound artist, frequently employs field recordings in his work, both sonic and visual. For an exhibit earlier this year at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center in Wellesley, Massachusetts, he took sounds from three diverse locales — “Australian outback, the Canadian wilderness, and New York City’s streets,” according to the museum, as well as “Virginia marshes” according to a story in the local newspaper — and created an installation score that is all of those places and none of them. Elements of the real world are ever-present, from rough noise to ambiguous jangling to industrial whines to what may be moving water andor traffic, but they’re less snapshots or documentation than they are just that: elements, parts of a whole given meaning through manipulation and context. The work is a collage lent a semblance of constancy thanks to what appear to be added effects, tones like those from a dying organ, and whirring buzzing like the sound design of a science-fiction film.
The idea of sound design is central to the score, because it served as part of an immersive environment, titled “Something Like Fireworks.” The Vitiello music was composed to be played in a lit space designed by artist Jeremy Choate (see the photo above). Theirs is a staged place, an unreal place, a fictional reality created by artists.
Don’t be surprised if the Carolinian/Piedmont Amtrak train line starts sporting an uptick in old-school graffiti tags at the beginning of September.
That’s the route that connects New York City with Durham, North Carolina. Durham is home to Duke University, where on September 2 the Nasher Museum of Art will be hosting The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl; the show is scheduled to run through February 6, 2011. It collects work by 41 artists, from the contemporary videos of Robin Rhode to modern classics by such artists as Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns. Bridging that gap will be work by people like Christian Marclay, who took vinyl as an occasional subject of visual interest and turned it into a full-fledged art-world natural resource.
The show will overlap for 24 tantalizing days with Christian Marclay: Festival, which has run since July 1 at the Whitney in Manhattan.
Here are four images from The Record’s promotional website, at nasher.duke.edu/therecord, in descending order by Meredyth Sparks, Dave Muller, Su-Mei Tse, and Gregor Hildebrandt.
Hildebrant’s, in case it isn’t evident from the detail photographic, is a vinyl LP created using tape from a cassette.
Judging by the age of the participants, the vast majority were at least in their adolescence by the time the CD began to challenge the LP for music-distribution supremacy — which is to say, even recent work, like Muller’s, is by people for whom the record isn’t pure retro nostalgia. The exhibit itself may serve as something of a pop-culture post-mortem, but it’s essential to keep in mind when looking at, say, this still from Marclay’s “Ghost (I Don’t Live Today)” (1985), that the experimentation, the play, was occurring then the LP ruled the record-retail roost.
field notes / Quote of the Week: Lost’s Theme-Less Theme Song
It’s Comic-Con this week, down in San Diego. Once upon a time, Comic-Con was a mix of professional business conference and geek art fair for fans of serial storytelling told in cheap pamphlets and sold in several thousand mom’n'pop stores around the U.S.
These days it’s primarily an opportunity for Hollywood to pitch its wares to fully suspecting pop-culture fetishists, and for the IT ninja at Twitter to test the fortitude of its servers.
While Comic-Con has not taken a tip from the Tribeca Film Festival and offered a long-distance pass for those who want to watch the panel discussions and other events from the comfort of their own laptops, there’s plenty of reporting from the con online, among it the tireless work by Alan Sepinwall, of the TV blog hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching.
In a post this past week, Sepinwall made note of the following comment from the panel for the upcoming Hawaii Five-0-remake series by the actor Daniel Dae Kim, best known as the tragic Korean corporate bagman from the series Lost:
“I’m happy to be on a show that has a theme song.”
What Kim’s referring to is the opening theme to Lost, which was little more than a drone that slowly contorted, as the logo for the show came into focus against a black screen, rotating as it moved, and then slipped out of view. (This is the U.S. theme — as with other shows, it varied when adapted for other countries.) But what that Lost theme lacked in whistle-along-ness it made up for with pitch-perfect, story-appropriate ambiguity. No hummable song would so well match the narrative fluidity and genre switcheroos of Lost — and more to the point, no other opening song would prepare listeners for what is one of the most sonically expressive series ever on television. Forget the proper score by Michael Giacchino (which got a lot of press coverage as the series reached its recent, and to me unsatisfying, conclusion), whose swelling strings and heart-racing beats were a red herring, while the real audio ingenuity was at work on screen: from the dastardly rattle of the smoke monster, to the nostalgia symbolism of the occasional turntable, to the thundering alarm of the Dharma clock, and on and on.
Not that the folks behind Hawaii Five-0 version 2.0 don’t have the courage of their own convictions. According to that post at hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching, the producers originally recorded a new version of the song, then realized what a bone-headed idea that was, and brought in many of the original musicians to re-record the quasi-surf-rock classic. Click through to that story for a link to video footage of the recording session.
downstream / Real World v. Composed World v. Interior World (MP3)
That’s not how the rules are supposed to work, right? If you’re combining natural sounds and electronic ones, there’s an inherent contrast, the noisy chaos of the “real” world set alongisde the considered organization of the “constructed” one. The real world is the one outside our doors. The constructed one is the one inside our minds.
Yet treehouses, which is to say Mike Rotondo, ingeniously — and, perhaps of more important, both tunefully and delectably — messes with such categories on “Goodbye Mission Dub,” a track he uploaded earlier this week to his soundcloud.com/treehouses account.
The track opens with street noise, and soon we’re faced with a handful of elements. First there’s an off-kilter rhythm that sounds automated but has a purposefully sloppy, slightly-off-the-beat thing going for it. Then there’s a woodwind, winding its way in and out of the rhythm. And finally there’s clanging percussion, what may very well be pots and pans.
The latter component seems to inherit the spirit of those field recordings, which come and go in the mix — they sound like happenstance, but they’re thoroughly functional, no less a part of the “music” (in contrast with the field-recording audio document of “real life”) than is the woodwind. And that semi-mechanized beat, with its odd metrics, is less dependable, less sturdy, than any of the other parts of the piece.
The song’s slow beat matches the San Francisco neighborhood of its title, and the dub is much more a matter of spirit than of what’s traditionally thought of as dub. There’s no heavy delay, no dank cavernous echoes. “Goodbye Mission Dub” situates itself as living-room music (or, given those pots, maybe kitchen music), a social space halfway between the outside world and the interior one. You’ll want to put it on loop and play it all afternoon.
field notes / 5 Reasons to Participate in the Creative Commons
Ever since ASCAP, the performing-rights organization, sent out a fundraising letter to its members in which it singled out Creative Commons as a underminer of copyright, the subject of the business of the creative process has sparked yet another round of online discourse. I was invited by the websbite weallmakemusic.com to summarize the arguments in favor of Creative Commons — a non-profit organization that develops licenses that help artists (musicians, yes, but also painters, photographers, filmmakers, and so on) navigate a world so mightily transformed by the Internet and associated technologies.
I’ll post, for archival purposes, the full piece here in a week or so, once it’s had its run at We All Make Music. The five most pertinent reasons I came up with are (1) Creative Commons is non-exclusive, (2) you choose the license that’s right for your work, (3) Creative Commons is optional, (4) traditional performing rights organizations don’t necessarily have your individual interest at heart, and (5) Creative Commons is wired for networked creation.
The Creative Commons is an important topic for all the art discussed on Disquiet.com — issues of authorship, of sampling, of piracy, and of free distribution (the latter being the reason there’s enough music for me to recommend a legal free download every weekday) are at the core of this site’s mission.
Beat-driven instrumental electronica often builds as it goes along — following a disorienting bit of opening noise, there’s a rhythm track, then some half-broken sound that’s treated like a lead instrument, then a sinuous unknowable that adds flesh to the bones, then variations on that sequence, one after another, perhaps one or another dropping out, momentarily, but ultimately moving forward, and gaining in dimension. The elements gather force. The overall structure may bear the hallmarks of, or otherwise hint at the structure of, the pop song — the verse, the chorus, the repetition thereof interrupted by a bridge — but the strength of it is how those elements join up, get confused, reveal something about each other as they come into conflict.
In “The Pain” by Surachai and Justin, the sounds get heavier and thicker as they move along (MP3). Patterns come into view as the piece makes its way, splintering occasionally, like a module’s short circuited or a plug-in has crashed, until the monotony becomes its own force, and then the splintering comes back for real, and the whole thing just collapses, beautifully.
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Ever since ASCAP, the performing-rights organization, sent out a fundraising letter to its members in which it singled out Creative Commons as a underminer of copyright, the subject of the business of the creative process has sparked yet another round of online discourse. I was invited by the websbite