To follow up the interview posted here earlier today with sound artist Stephen Vitiello (“In the Echo of No Towers”), here is a download (and stream) of an edit from the long-term installation he has recently unveiled at MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts. The work, titled All Those Vanished Engines, is a collaboration between Vitiello and the novelist Paul Park, who wrote a narrative that Vitiello then set to sound. This edit removes the spoken vocal, to reveal the underlying current of pneumatic activity, a kind of steampunk ambient music:
In the interview, Vitiello describes how he asked Park, a science fiction and fantasy novelist, to write a story that created a fictional world built around the Boiler House: “I then recorded the story,” he says, “and laid sound around the events that were described. From there, I took out some of the spoken language, leaving the sound itself to convey the narrative.” As the descriptive text at the museum’s website, massmoca.org, explains, “Starting with the inherent resonance of the pipes and metal drums in the space, Vitiello built a layered sound installation that can be explored throughout the first two floors of the building.”
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello. More on Vitiello at stephenvitiello.com.
The new novel by Jonathan Lethem takes place in a modern Manhattan slightly askew from our own. It’s the same Epcot for aesthetes that the borough has become in the years since Mayor Rudolph Giuliani bleached Times Square and tamed crime, but there are differences, like a giant, and likely mechanical, tiger raging through midtown, and the existence of pop-cultural artifacts with no equivalent in our world, such as films that don’t appear in the IMDB listings for Marlon Brando and Werner Herzog — at least not in our parallel universe. The novel is titled Chronic City, and true to its name, it’s a marijuana-infused story of cultural paranoia. Key among those paranoids is Perkus, a walking encyclopedia of film, pop music, and politics who spends his time weaving conspiracies from stray threads of coincidence. These insights also manifest themselves in the form of “cluster” headaches, which lead him, in the following scene, to visit an acupuncturist known as Strabo:
