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.

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.

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.

● 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.

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.

Consider ambiguity. Or not. What do I care?

Mix forms, but don’t forget to change your underwear.

Emphasize the itchy parts

In Kadrey’s Twitter timeline, the first such stategy begin’s at twitter.com/Richard_Kadrey. Some, just to be clear, are not safe for work. Kadrey’s new novel, Sandman Slim, will be published in July.

As always, free music (i.e., free MP3s) is a major draw, though it’s rewarding, personally, that just three of this month’s top entries come from the site’s daily Downstream section: (1) Serial, asynchronous collaboration with street sounds at freesound.org; (2) DJ /rupture remixing Langston Hughes; and (3) Japan’s Fjordne remixing piano.

(4) Also in the free-music category, the third in this site’s new “Listen?” series, which provided an hour-long selection of remixes of tracks by David Byrne and Brian Eno, from the 2006 compilation I commissioned, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet.

Two “Quotes of the Week”: (5) the late novelist David Foster Wallace on the sounds of an I.R.S. office, and (6) comic-book writer (and novelist, and cultural critic, and all-around Internet presence) Warren Ellis on the siren song of outer space.

Two “Images of the Week”: (7) one of a doll made in the image of tinkerer and musician Raymond Scott and (8) one of Marina Vendrell Renaut‘s sound-emitting soft sculptures.

(9) Also up there, my announcement that I was participating in a week-long (March 15 -19) online discussion at artsjournal.com of Lawrence Lessig‘s book Remix. (Thanks again to discussion host/moderator/cruise-director Molly Sheridan for the invitation.)

(10) And, finally, the announcement of an exhibit at the Los Angeles gallery Crewest, where I’ll have an audio piece featured from April 4 through April 30. The opening is this coming Saturday — if you’re in L.A., please do try to drop by. I’ll be there, as will the artist and writer who is the focus of the exhibit, the extraordinarily talented Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca. (And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke.)

Q: What’s it like in space?

A: It sings. The vibrations from the spin of the drive arms, sir, and the motion of the heat through the casements to space, which is very cold. The whole ship sings quietly, like a gently struck tuning fork. The Earth and the sea, sir, they have a mighty number of things to recommend themselves to me. But once you’ve heard the song of a spaceship, you’d never be anything but a Royal Naval outer serviceman.

An “outer serviceman” is an astronaut in this alternate history sci-fi story. Elsewhere in Aetheric Mechanics, two other characters — steampunk visions of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson — discuss a “spring heeled jack,” but they’re talking about the British mythological figure, not the electronic-music duo.

More at the website of the publisher, avatarpress.com, and the author, warrenellis.com.

Apparently androids dream of a lot more than electric sheep. This is Battlestar Galactica‘s Number One (aka Cavil, aka John), played by Dean Stockwell, in the episode that aired on Friday, February 13. He is speaking with Ellen, the only recently divulged “12th cylon,” played by Kate Vernon.

Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star supernova?

Ellen: No.

Cavil: No. Well, I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe, other stars, other planets, and eventually other life, a supernova, creation itself. I was there. I wanted to see it, and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull. With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, with ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air.

Ellen: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible.

Cavil: I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way.

The episode is titled “No Exit.” The script is the first to be credited to Ryan Mottesheard, who judging by that monologue may be something of a Greg Egan fan. It’s also reminiscent of Grant Morrison’s Superman story about Lois Lane’s birthday (disquiet.com). The full episode is streaming for free, for the time being, at scifi.com/battlestar.