Month: August 2007

Oppenheim, Growing, Burns at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NYC

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Two compact Roland speakers sit toward the top of the blank white walls. The speakers are set diagonally across from each other in the back room of the Spencer Brownstone Gallery in lower Manhattan. A voice, female and soft, doesn’t fill the space so much as lightly accent it. It sings, “Sail on ”¦ sailor ”¦” out of one speaker, then out of the other. The voice is that of artist Kristin Oppenheim. This is the most basic form of round, and it’s all the more beautiful for its simplicity; the bars slightly overlap, like waves.

Waves come to mind not just because of the tune, itself a reduction of a Beach Boys song, but because to make it to the back room, one must wade through a variety of sea-based and otherwise aquatic-themed work. It’s a group show, titled ‘Til I Die, which Spencer Brownstone is hosting through August 18. Like Oppenheim’s piece, the show takes its title from a Beach Boys song, and though many of the pieces here are based in photography, sculpture or printing, there is a considerable amount of sound.

On opening night back in mid-July, the duo Growing performed, and they left behind a video, which is shown projected on a wall. At first it appears like footage of the seashore, but in fact it is two images of the seashore, one upside down; they meet at the horizon. The audio, played on headphones — an increasingly common art-gallery accessory — is crunchy, mangled, psychedelic noise. Growing’s participation in ‘Til I Die is a great example of how the worlds of music and sound art are intermingling.

 

Nearby, Tara Sinn‘s mix of surreal images atop op-art motion graphics plays on a bright red television. The headphones emit a run of notes on electric piano, as hypnotic as the visuals. Not all video art with sound is, necessarily, sound art; some is simply audio-visual. The score to Sinn’s piece in ‘Til I Die brings to mind the rigors of minimalism.

Sound plays a lesser role in Ian Burns‘ “Ice (Version 3): Ode to Lady Jane,” but the work is astonishing. At first it seems like two separate pieces. First, a video screen showing slightly out-of-focus images of some arctic seascape ”¦

”¦ and next to it, a Rube Goldberg”“like contraption of framed images, plastic, lights, wood, wire and gears. Here is a detail:

What takes a little while — or, fortunately for me, a helpful gallery employee — to sort out is that the two aren’t just related; they’re one single piece. That small black box seen near the center of the photo above contains a very small camera. The camera is aimed to the right, and thanks to Burns’ visual alchemy that blue plastic sheet becomes water, the white sheet becomes an iceberg, and the red light becomes a setting (or rising) sun reflected in the ocean. The ocean bobs and weaves as the sculpture itself moves up and down.

There’s also audio in Burns’s piece, what sounds like a field recording. According to the gallery, the audio, unlike the image, is pre-recorded. Perhaps in Version 4, Burns can mic something in the sculpture to provide the sound. We may know soon. Starting September 12, he’ll have a solo show up at Spencer Brownstone.

PS: Ian Burns later wrote to me via email to clarify the audio aspect of his piece. The additional information is greatly appreciated:

The soundtrack on my piece is made live by the sculpture as well as the video. The small camera has has a microphone on it and a fan blowing air across this is used to generate the audio feed. All the pieces of this type that I do generate live video and audio feed — either via the camera microphone or a piezo disc.

Related links: Spencer Brownstone Gallery (spencerbrownstonegallery.com), Ian Burns (ianburns.net), Growing (growingsound.com), Tara Sinn (tara-sinn.com). Listen to audio of Oppenhein's "Sail on Sailor" (MP3, ubu.com). There's also a Beach Boys”“themed group show, titled If Everybody Had an Ocean, at the Tate St. Ives in England (tate.org.uk).

Proto-Monolake MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Once upon a time in the mid-1990s, the name Monolake referred to two people working in tandem: Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. Behles eventually took a leave of absence when the audio software company he founded, Ableton, makers of Live, got up to speed, leaving Monolake as a useful pseudonym for Henke, who has a role in Live’s development.

For an interesting peek into Behles’s role in Monolake, give a listen to the 1996 track “Silicea,” which has been posted as a free MP3 download at monolake.de/downloads. (The site’s license requests that no one links directly to its free files, but only to the pages on which they are hosted.) While Monolake is appropriately associated with the birth of minimal techno, thanks to its work with the Chain Reaction label, “Silicea” couldn’t be less concerned with the dubby corridors and steady, monotonous beats inherent in that genre. Instead, it’s all small bursts of tinny beats that could have been built from coin drops, sighs and telephone rings. The one thing it has in common with minimal techno is its patience — at nearly eight minutes long, it takes its time.

Cascone Field Mix MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sequence of events goes something like this:

  1. dripping water
  2. heavy rain swallowing distant church bells
  3. machinery in motion mixed with spoken instructions
  4. objects moving in water
  5. digitally clipped vocals
  6. a voice transformed into something mechanical and menacing

Those are the apparent half dozen real-world elements that serve as the foundation for the six tracks that comprise Kim Cascone‘s The Astrum Argentum. In each, Cascone takes a field (or in the likely case of the vocals, studio) recording and mixes the sounds with an ear less to transformation and more to investigation. The results vary from the low-level, non-intrusive whorl that supplements those water drops in the opening “Blue Fluorescent” (MP3), to the layered verbal cut-ups of “Spectral Space II” (MP3), to — the real keeper here — the way that near and far sounds collude between the rain and carillon on “Grayscape” (MP3).

More info and the complete set of downloads at the releasing netlabel, excentrica.org. (Thanks to Larry Johnson for the recommendation.)

Galapagos/vertexList Media Art in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Galapagos performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last night played host to two hours of installations, video shorts and music performances. I caught the L Line out from Manhattan with a friend. We went for the music (Bit Shifter on software-controlled Game Boys; Jamie Allen, pictured below, on a home-made noise-box), but happily stayed for the videos — several of the best of which had strong sound elements.

Near the Galapagos front entrance, above a reflecting pool, Charles Beronio‘s large-scale banner project (phrases like “Pretty Vacant” treated with the vinyl lettering generally favored by strip malls) contrasted with Zachary Biberstine‘s “Flag”video, which looped throughout the evening; in the video, a man works at an American flag with a pair of scissors while drinking water. The event was presented by vertexList, an artist-run space nearby in Brooklyn. And if the collected works themselves unfolded beneath a banner, it was the broadly defined one of “new media art.”

Last night, “new media art” meant anything from Joe McKay‘s video “Robots NoFollow,” in which he interviews a coy automaton at the Sony store; to a stunningly beautiful one-minute piece by Aron Namenwirth, who alternated between photographs and colorfully pixelated, bitmap-like renditions thereof; to plays on Hollywood, like Kara Hearn reenacting scenes from ET and Gladiator, performing each role herself. All the screened material (13 shorts total, divided into two sets) benefited from the increasing availability of low-cost digital tools, whether the resulting art embraced the tools as a constrained form of artistic process, commented on the technological mediation of everyday life, or simply utitilized the equipment to create brief narrative or abstract films.

Among the highlights was a piece by Marcin Ramocki, who treated high-contrast images of faces as 21st-century piano rolls. Lee Arnold‘s “S-Bahn” set side-scrolling footage of what appeared to be Berlin shot from a moving train against a dubby, dank brand of electronica.

Between the two sets of video shorts, Bit Shifter was introduced by the night’s MC as “the Segovia of the Game Boy,” though he sounded a bit more like the Monolake of the Game Boy. The software he employs, Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ, gives technologically adept musicians access to the same controllers that rendered blippy background music for early portable video games. In the hands of Bit Shifter (born Joshua Davis) this means upbeat minimal techno that benefits from a live PA system. I’d heard his music previously as MP3s, streaming audio and on CD (it’s also featured in the documentary film 8 Bit, directed by Ramocki), but none of that compared with the fuzzed-out quality of the sound in live performance. (In an example of commerce immitating art, the video game company Eidos recently released beatmaking software for the Sony PlayStation Portable, called Traxxpad; traxxpad.com.)

After the second set of videos, Jamie Allen took the stage and announced, “I’m going to attempt to play some circuitry.” Like Bit Shifter, he works deep in the technology. If Bit Shifter does so by edging past the intended surface interface of a common household toy, Allen lays the circuitry bare. He accomplished this last night on a device of his own making, anchored in a wine crate and called circuitMusic. It’s pictured here:

He played squelchy, funky noise to start, resembling the Beastie Boys circa Check Your Head, much of it resulting from highly processed warpings of sounds he mouthed into something he’d purchased from RadioShack, ripped the casing off of, and plugged into his equipment.

Just as the audience began nodding along, Allen dove even deeper into the sounds, working single tones like the sonic equivalent of clay, shaping drones from raw static, feedback and electricity. The design of his circuitMusic is ingenious, especially from a live performance standpoint. It consists of six triggers, each of which simultaneously turns on or off a headlight at the front of the box. It’s fascinating how such a simple addition can give audience members something on which to focus their imaginations and curiosity. Behind Allen ran video footage of colorful circles that suggested what Josef Albers might be doing today, were he in his late 20s and living in Brooklyn.

Separate from the night’s event, but still well within its realm, was Katja Loher‘s installation, assembled in the Galapagos back room. A performance video was projected on a massive globe, to a mix of sung material and field recordings; the images featured a bird-person hybrid amid flocks of pigeons, and the video, mapped as it was on a sphere, gave new meaning to the phrase bird’s eye view.

Related links: Galapagos (galapagosartspace.com), vertexList (vertexlist.net), Jamie Allen (heavyside.net), Lee Arnold (leearnold.net), Zachary Biberstine (biberstine.com), Bit Shifter (bit.shifter.net), Kara Hearn (karahearn.com), Katja Loher (katjaloher.com), Joe McKay (mac.com/joester5), Aron Namenwirth (aronnamenwirth.blogspot.com), Marcin Ramocki (ramocki.net); more info on the other artists at galapagosartspace.com/dates/081207.html.

Three MP3s at Dawn

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Three tracks trace a dawn-like arc on Pausal’s new self-titled net-album on the netlabel Highpoint Lowlife. The pieces individually move from near-silence through a creaky murmur through an enveloping warmth that grows and grows. This sense of a real-world soundtrack is abetted by cricket chatter on the opening entry, “Heroes=Dogs,”in which rich, long chords suggest a solo for organ (MP3). The world peeks out of the second track, too, “Songs from a Cloth Pocket,”in which birdsong plays hide and seek amid the ebbs and flows of swelling synthesized drones (MP3), before those drones begin — slowly, mind you — to take on the quality that might — again, only possibly — be mistaken for — hold your seat — a melody; a light, tension-building bustle of what could be orchestral strings would be obvious were they not employed with such economy. The third track, “Place,”is a kind of drone chamber music in which little motifs, akin to minimalist repetition, gather in layers that overlap to form varying permutations (MP3); if you close your eyes — and this is the sort of music that makes you want to close your eyes — you might mistake it for some pastoral moment in Debussy. More info at highpointlowlife.com and pausal.net.