Month: January 2008

Archival Robert Henke MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The “free track of the month” at the website of Monolake (aka Robert Henke, at monolake.de) continues his excavation of his old hard drives. The January 2008 entry, titled “Fragment Endlos,” layers a rising and descending single-note piano line through a slowly evolving audio montage of field recordings, silence, and synthesis. That’s “through,” not “over” or “under.” The piano at times stands alone, but for most of the piece it’s heard in a specific setting: complemented by artificial strings or muddied by crowd noise, for example. Henke describes the track’s origin as follows:

On one of those tapes I found the track Fragment Endlos, and I immediately remembered when it was made and under which circumstances. This is a very personal piece for me, created in a time where I felt quite dark and lived in an appropriate environment. I just had moved from West-Berlin, Neukoelln, to the east, to Prenzlauer Berg, which at that time was not the expensive hippster neighborhood it is now, but the very opposite. I lived in a small place on the ground floor in a backyard, with a coal oven and a toilet outside the building… It was the end of winter, cold, unfriendly, and very dark. …

Musically this is influenced by ‘The Pearl’ (Brian Eno, Harold Budd). Sound design wise it shows that I just go the TG-77 and SY-77, and then there is this one long brass-like sound that I made as a result of listening to John Chowning.

For the free track of the month version I slightly edited the original 45 minute version and added field recordings of Bahnhof Zoo and the S-Bahn here in Berlin which I also captured in 1992.

There’s additional information, including technical specifications, at monolake.de. Henke posts these MP3s on a regular basis, but with a strict stipulation that no one link directly to the file, but instead to the page itself.

Beatbox Poetry MP3 by Christian Bök

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The discussion about whether rap counts as poetry is still ongoing (count me among the affirmative), but how about human beatboxing? That’s the performance practice in which the voice emulates the instrumentals of hip-hop, instrumentals usually performed on technology, such as turntables and drum machines. Beatboxing is a nimble onomatopoeia that yields music.

The writing.upenn.edu/pennsound website, hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, is to modern poetry what Charles Amkirkhanian’s Other Minds catalog at archive.org is to 20th- century (and now 21st-) composition. It’s a deep repository of audio (and video, and much more). And allowing for a particularly expansive definition of poetry, among those many files is a recording by Christian Bök, titled “Synth Loops,” that is, in fact, a human beatbox performance (MP3).

It’s an excerpt from his Cyborg Opera. In an interview at the academic journal Postmodern Culture last year he described the project as “a kind of ‘spoken techno’ that emulates the robotic pulses heard everywhere in our daily lives” (virginia.edu). There’s some sibilance in the track that made me wonder if Bök is German (the umlaut helped, too), but he’s from Canada. Perhaps it was the accent of techno I was hearing.

Doze Green and David Ellis Exhibit at Fifty24 (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There’s a lot of street art in San Francisco, so much so that the art has long since filled the streets and, hungry for additional bare walls, begun to take over the city’s galleries.

Last month, driving by Fifty24 — that’s a modestly proportioned two-floor gallery in San Francisco’s Lower Haight area, a mecca neighborhood for gallerized and otherwise comodified street art — I saw a strange object just inside the gallery’s store-front window. Even from a distance, it was clear what it was: a sculpture modeled on Sutro Tower, affixed with disassembled speaker parts.

The exhibit, titled Rubicon Sun, was a collaboration between David Ellis and Doze Green. (It ran from December 13, 2007, through January 4, 2008. More info at fifty24sf.com.) Both are widely exhibited, and the Fifty24 show was the result of a residency in which they produced individual and collaborative works. The show coincided with the release of their new book, Shaft. Ellis works with paint, sound and installations, among other media and formats, and Green is primarily a painter and muralist whose work is deeply informed by graffiti and collage. (More info on Green at dozegreen.com. He was a member of the Rock Steady Crew of breakdancers and appeared in the 1983 film Wildstyle. At least one other artist who appeared in Wildstyle, Lee Quinones, is an exhibiting artist; I saw several Quinones pieces at PS1 in Queens early last year. More info on Ellis at freshwatercatfish.org; his work was part of an exhibit curated by Christian Marclay at the ICA in Philadelphia late last year.)

The main room at Fifty24 is a narrow, street-level gallery. At the center stood the speaker-tower. It was non-functional, in that the speakers emitted no sound, but by anyone who has lived in or spent time in San Francisco, those speakers might be read to represent the presence of Sutro Tower, which stands silently high above the city, like a totem in a Hayao Miyazaki film. I may be overstating its resemblance to Sutro Tower; the sculpture looks more like if Sutro Tower had been constructed from girders purloined from the Golden Gate Bridge. Below is a close-up of the Tower, and how it appeared from outside:

The Tower’s presence likewise permeated the gallery, as it appeared in several of the paintings — as did, in one collage work, a piece of the menu from Rosamunde Grill, an excellent sausage shop around the corner on Haight Street.

Fifty24 has a second exhibit space, located upstairs, and it included additional paintings and two particularly unusual works. There was in one corner a human-height owl built out of chicken wire, bottles, and other materials. A gallery employee explained that the bottles — which included tea, beer, wine, and water — were culled from what Ellis and Doze had drunk during their residency. The owl had speaker-cone parts for eyes, and when it was plugged into a nearby outlet it emitted a tribal jug-band music.

Pictured here are some of the internal parts that made the sound. There’s a paint can and a sauce pan in there:

Also upstairs, in a small dark room entered like a cave, was a mysterious, oblong, nearly car-size object that resembled a chunk of lava, or perhaps the Horta from Star Trek. Embedded in it, as shown here in this detail, was a rusty old speaker:

The exhibit served as a kind of homecoming for Doze Green. A two-story mural of his has, since mid-February 2007, ruled over the Lower Haight. It’s one block away from Fifty24, over on Steiner Street, just off Haight Street, on the outside of the Lower Hater Gallery (formerly Future Primitive). The alien backpacker, shown below, is the neighborhood’s spectral night watchman. This work replaced a previous mural in the same spot, also by Green. I believe Green collaborated on both pieces with different muralists, and that Ellis had worked on the earlier one.

Quote of the Week: Audio Infidelity

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Not so much a defense of audiophiles, who pursue audio-fidelity at financial expense that many would consider excessive, but an interesting distinction:

Perhaps audiophilia and musicophilia are two different things that are sometimes, but not always, present in the same brain.

So there’s music and then there’s sound. A lot of people like both, but maybe some who like sound don’t much care for music…

That’s from a response by Matt Corwine (at lineout.thestranger.com) to an excoriation of audiophiles by Clive Thompson (at collisiondetection.net), who was himself responding to an article by Robert Levine (the pop music critic, not the classical music critic) about the “death” of high fidelity (at rollingstone.com).

The distinction between audiophilia and musicophilia isn’t as clear as Corwine’s post might suggest. For one thing, the jazz fusion, warhorse classical favorites, and overproduced classic rock often favored by audiophiles has plenty of fans with mid-fidelity iPods and low-fidelity AM radios.

Also, in our current moment of “field recordings as art” (and as raw material for art), many people are more than happy to listen carefully and casually to un-composed sound (bird calls, traffic, the wind), regardless of bit rates and speaker quality. Not all phonographers — that is, active producers of field-recordings — are audiophiles. And many phonographers would be comfortable using the term “music” to describe their found sounds.

Still, Corwine has posited an interesting hypothesis. The pursuit of sound as an end unto itself — and thus the idea that the optimal stereo system is less a machine intended to play music than it is a machine fine-tuned to replicate the real world — is certainly supported by the popularity in the past of records, such as those on the Command label, that served as sound-system tests. (The Command album pictured here was “arranged for dynamic stereo performances,” according to the cover blurb, and the op-art image below that blurb presents a stylish visualization of the stereo experience.)

Of course, audiophiles may be enthusiasts of neither sound nor music, however those two words are defined. Audiophiles may simply be fixated on technology.

Terry Riley Interview MP3 (1969)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

To close the week out, a recently uploaded interview with softspoken minimalist composer Terry Riley, dating from 1969. The interview is by Charles Amirkhanian, founder of Other Minds, the catalog of which (at archive.org) houses the file. Also interviewed are Robert Ashley and William Maraldo, then co-directors of the Mills Center for Contemporary Music in Oakland, California. Riley talks about, among other things, the positive influence rock musicians might have on classical musicians (MP3).