Listening to art. Playing with audio. Sounding out technology. Composing in code.

Tag Archives: science-fiction

Steampunk Ambient (MP3)

Pipe Organ: The Boiler House at MASS MoCA, site of Stephen Vitiello’s All Those Vanished Engines

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.

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Quote of the Week: The Music of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

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:

    Thin as threads, each with a tiny flag at their end, they entered his body at various points, neck and wrists and shoulders, painlessly. Only a hint of tightness, a feeling he shouldn’t move suddenly, confirmed Strabo had used them at all. Then Strabo lowered the lights and switched on some music, long atmospheric tones that might have been vaguely Eastern. “To someone like you this CD may sound a bit corny,” he said, surprising Perkus. “But it’s specially formulated, there are tones underneath the music that are engaging directly with your limbic system. It works even if you don’t like the music particularly. It’s inoffensive, but I personally wish it didn’t sound so much like Muzak.”

    “Okay,” said Perkus, just beginning to see that he was expected to reside with the needles a while.

    “I’ll be back for you in half an hour. Practice breathing.”

    “What if I fall asleep?”

    “It’s fine to sleep. You can’t do anything wrong.” With that, Strabo was gone. Perkus lay still, feeling himself pined like a knife-thrower’s assistant, listening as an odious pan flute commenced soloing over the synthesized tones, promising a long dreadful journey through cliché. Here Perkus was, supreme skeptic and secularist, caught naked and punctured, his whole tense armor of self perilously near to dissolved. How had it could to this?

The first chapter is available for download at amazon.com.

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Whuffie, Social Capital, Social Networks … and Music

Over at the artsjournal.com/gap of Molly Sheridan, a bunch of us are this week talking about (well, writing about) the recent book The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt, and the book from which it draws its title and inspiration, the science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Specifically, we’re looking at how arts organizations and individual musicians can adapt to the increasingly online world.

My first entry in the conversation (“Do or Die or Other?”) focuses on the way Doctorow and Hunt separately manage the theme of rapid technological change.

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Tangents: Ballard, Riley, Turntables …

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

What Pop Music Tells Us About JG Ballard (bbc.co.uk): As is often the case on the web, this solid overview (of JG Ballard references in pop music, on the occasion of his recent death) is expanded by readers in the comments section. Joy Division, Comsat Angels, Radiohead, Trevor Horn, "Warm Leatherette" …

Robert Carl on His Forthcoming Book on Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ (oup.com): With its recent revival at Carnegie Hall, Terry Riley's early maximalist work, In C, is experiencing a new audience. University of Hartford professor Carl writes about his book's development: "I’ve watched my composition students over the years become more open, fluent, and unintimidated by improvisation as part of their practice, even if they self-identify as 'classical.'" (Found via twitter.com/aworks.)

175 Art People, Places, and Things to Follow on Twitter (glasstire.com): Massive list of art-related people and places with Twitter accounts. I'm still in the process of parsing for sound-related sources.

vinylengine.com: Remarkable database of turntables. Found info on my lovely Revolver in there.

University of Akron Restores Sound Art (ohio.com): Harry Bertoia’s Tactile Sounding Sculpture (1976), housed at Akron's Guzzetta Hall, had been out of commission reportedly for about a year, but has now been reinstalled.

More online resources at disquiet.com/elsewhere.

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Quote of the Week: Spock’s Song

Star Trek‘s Spock, reminiscing in a short comic published in the May 2009 issue of Wired:

    By the time I joined Starfleet years later, I had become quite proficient at the harp.

    However, I noticed an interesting effect of the music on the human mind. For Vulcans the music was a means of purging emotions by giving them logical, ordered musical forms…

    Whereas for humans, the music was a trigger of emotions. I saw otherwise calm and reasoned shipmates become quite animated when exposed to music.

The comic is by Paul Pope and K/O, and the Wired issue was guest edited by JJ Abrams, director of the upcoming new Star Trek film. K/O is a pseudonym for the screenwriters of the new film: Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, both longtime Abrams associates who worked on Alias, Mission: Impossible III, Fringe, and other projects. Read the full comic, six pages in all, at wired.com.

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