A package arrived in the mail recently containing the above artifact, a floppy disk labeled “epulse 1997.” It contained most of the issues of epulse published that year. Epulse was a zine I founded in 1994 at Tower Records, where I was an editor from 1989 through 1996. I left the company in 1996 to join Citysearch.com, and continued writing freelance for the magazines (in addition to epulse, there was the flagship, Pulse!, and a magazine I co-founded, Classical Pulse!). Epulse, somewhat advanced for its time, was published only via email: 1997 was its third full year of existence, and it ran through 2002.
Thanks for the disk go to Jason Verlinde (of fretboardjournal.com), who took over the editing of epulse when I left the company (years later I took it back on as a freelance project).
A car honks twice, and then what follows is an inundation of descriptions of a grisly automobile accident that has taken the life of a loved one, as well as of the detached bystanders who snap mobile-phone pictures of the splattered corpse.
A rector talks at length about the intense, the unknowably demanding, emotional requisites of his funeral work, and as his measured tones come to a halt, church bells seem to ring out in the distance, muffled by solemnity and space — and, no doubt, by some manner of digital processing.
The processing is courtesy of Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud), who produced the work, titled “Sighs, Wonders,” with writer Sukhdev Sandhu on a commission from the Spitalfields Festival London earlier this year. Two versions are available for free online. There’s a nearly 20-minute “instrumental” take (albeit with a few brief spoken passages) he posted yesterday:
And there’s a shorter excerpt (MP3), about half that length, at the website of the sponsoring festival:
[audio:http://spitalfieldsfestivaladmin.new.mindunit.co.uk/images/resource/SighsWon.mp3|titles=”Sighs Wonders”|artists=”Scanner and Sukhdev Sandhu and Paul Turp”]
Scanner and Sandhu previously collaborated on the hypertextual “nocturnal journal” nighthaunts.org.uk, with visuals by the digital studio Mind Unit. For “Sighs, Wonders” they again plumb matters of urbanism and mortality. As Scanner’s characteristic ambience unfolds, voices are heard intoning about the history of the land, matters of flesh and spirit, of “Roman bones” and “paupers’ bones” and everything in between.
Scanner’s early career involved using words he snatched from the ether (hence his name), the candid words of others unwittingly sewn into his sound art, but he also works with dramatic efforts, such as these texts. In one of the many “Sighs, Wonders” spoken bits, the following is uttered:
“For the upscale slummer, it’s a peepshow picturesque. For the missionary, it’s a chance to play imperial redeemer, tamer of beasts, a human chandelier radiating the darkness.”
All field recordings are alien, even the most familiar. A close-up recording of a bug or an ice cube has sonic resonances, inherent threat, surprise facets, that are utterly apart from daily experience. To bring a microphone close to something is to witness it at an unprecedented level of detail, and to listen to it closely is to hear things that one simply doesn’t associate with the object at hand.
This is no less true of environments than of objects. As an experiment, record your daily commute and listen back to it later; you’ll be astounded by the sounds you hadn’t noticed. In many ways, the more familiar the place or object recorded, the more dissociated the experience, because as time passes we take sound for granted; we listen through the familiar, and our ears focus on the occasional unfamiliar.
Stephen Vitiello, the musician and sound artist, frequently employs field recordings in his work, both sonic and visual. For an exhibit earlier this year at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center in Wellesley, Massachusetts, he took sounds from three diverse locales — “Australian outback, the Canadian wilderness, and New York City’s streets,” according to the museum, as well as “Virginia marshes” according to a story in the local newspaper — and created an installation score that is all of those places and none of them. Elements of the real world are ever-present, from rough noise to ambiguous jangling to industrial whines to what may be moving water andor traffic, but they’re less snapshots or documentation than they are just that: elements, parts of a whole given meaning through manipulation and context. The work is a collage lent a semblance of constancy thanks to what appear to be added effects, tones like those from a dying organ, and whirring buzzing like the sound design of a science-fiction film.
The idea of sound design is central to the score, because it served as part of an immersive environment, titled “Something Like Fireworks.” The Vitiello music was composed to be played in a lit space designed by artist Jeremy Choate (see the photo above). Theirs is a staged place, an unreal place, a fictional reality created by artists.
Don’t be surprised if the Carolinian/Piedmont Amtrak train line starts sporting an uptick in old-school graffiti tags at the beginning of September.
That’s the route that connects New York City with Durham, North Carolina. Durham is home to Duke University, where on September 2 the Nasher Museum of Art will be hosting The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl; the show is scheduled to run through February 6, 2011. It collects work by 41 artists, from the contemporary videos of Robin Rhode to modern classics by such artists as Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns. Bridging that gap will be work by people like Christian Marclay, who took vinyl as an occasional subject of visual interest and turned it into a full-fledged art-world natural resource.
The show will overlap for 24 tantalizing days with Christian Marclay: Festival, which has run since July 1 at the Whitney in Manhattan.
Here are four images from The Record’s promotional website, at nasher.duke.edu/therecord, in descending order by Meredyth Sparks, Dave Muller, Su-Mei Tse, and Gregor Hildebrandt.
Hildebrant’s, in case it isn’t evident from the detail photographic, is a vinyl LP created using tape from a cassette.
Judging by the age of the participants, the vast majority were at least in their adolescence by the time the CD began to challenge the LP for music-distribution supremacy — which is to say, even recent work, like Muller’s, is by people for whom the record isn’t pure retro nostalgia. The exhibit itself may serve as something of a pop-culture post-mortem, but it’s essential to keep in mind when looking at, say, this still from Marclay’s “Ghost (I Don’t Live Today)” (1985), that the experimentation, the play, was occurring then the LP ruled the record-retail roost.
• October 13, 2016: This day marks the start of the 250th weekly Disquiet Junto project.
• November 16, 2016: I'll be sharing the mic at Adobe Books in San Francisco with my fellow 33 1/3 author Evie Nagy for an evening hosted, from 7pm to 10pm, by Marc Kate (facebook.com).
• December 1, 2016: A likely speaking engagement. Details to come.
• December 13, 2016: This day marks the 20th anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 5, 2017: This day marks the 5th anniversary of the Disquiet Junto.
• Ongoing: The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.
• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury, is now in its second printing. It can be purchased at amazon.com, among other places.
