A debt to Tom Phillips, and extracting music from an obituary
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
An Austin, Texas–based artist and all around generous thinker about creativity, Austin Kleon is a great admirer — as am I — of the late Tom Phillips, who died last November at age 85. Kleon is also a marvelous practitioner of one of Phillips’ primary techniques, which was to extract concrete poetry from pre-existing texts.
Phillips achieved this most famously in his ongoing project The Humument, which had several editions, all of them exacting reworkings of an earlier book, called The Human Document, by William Hurrell Mallock, who died in 1923, 14 years before Phillips was born.
Where Phillips often employed dramatic colors and textures, Kleon often brings an energetic, brutalist vibrancy to his pieces. Shown here is a recent favorite of mine, reproduced with the artist’s permission:
Kleon, who often bases such poems on newspaper clippings, explained to me that this one came from a New York Times obituary (gift link) from last August for Sy Johnson, an arranger who collaborated with Charles Mingus, the jazz bassist and composer. I love the “music” that Kleon found within an obituary that had music as its topic, and I love the idea that such a phrase could emanate from the original, unbeknownst to the overall text’s “first” writer.
The scenario reminds me of an often quoted comment about aesthetics by novelist Don DeLillo: “when I work I have a sculptor’s sense of the shape of the words I’m making.” Kleon is, as well, a sculptor in this manner, making shapes from raw materials provided, unwittingly, by another writer, who in DeLillo’s thinking is also a sculptor.
When granting approval to share this piece, Kleon also explained to me an aspect of his approach: “I don’t ‘read’ the article first when I make these — try to think of them as a raw field of words, like a word search puzzle.”
I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week (or in this case, the past two weeks). These days that mostly means post.lurk.org (Mastodon).
▰ Tried to type “Tonka truck.” My phone corrected it to “atonal truck.” Now I want an atonal truck. I assume it’s an EV with bespoke music licensed from the estates of serialist composers and revised by an AI.
▰ I’m so into the music in the TV series Rabbit Hole that last night I apparently dreamed a scene that wasn’t in the show. The composer is Siddhartha Khosla (Only Murders in the Building, The Mysterious Benedict Society, This Is Us).
▰ Morning sounds: ticking clock (the only one in the house that ticks, in the kitchen), passing cars, distant motorcycle revving (now drawing closer), overhead jet plane, low level hum of the refrigerator
▰ The foghorns are in full-blown Wookiee-in-heat mode
▰ The Roddenberry Archive (roddenberry.x.io) of all the major Star Trek Enterprise ships in 3D is pretty cool, but it feels like a missed opportunity in that, far as I can tell, there’s no sound, which was such an important part of the place-setting in the shows and movies:
▰ Now this took me back: “The History of the Bay Area’s Most Notorious ’90s Rave Warehouse” (sfgate.com). The article itself was published a year ago, but the events at the Oakland International Trade Center (near the Home Base store, from which the space took its name) were back in the 1990s, not long after I’d moved to California. I used to joke, back at the time, that it shoulda been called Home Bass. I recall one night with Juan Atkins and Derrick May, where they played for hours without seeming to look at each other once and yet remained perfectly in sync. Magic time. I remember a DJ — maybe someone in Cold Cut, or maybe Kid Koala? — had a camera focused on the turntable’s tone arm, projected on a huge screen. Anyhow, lots of great memories. My favorite spot was standing in the void between two different simultaneous acts, and enjoying how the contrasting music overlapped. Eventually cellphones changed everything. You no longer got lost in the crowd. Safety-wise, definitely a good thing, but it also changed the experience irreparably.
I knew that the band Wilco had used audio from a “numbers station” in some of its music long ago. The song, “Poor Places,” appeared on the album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which took its title from the source audio. Numbers stations were (and in some cases apparently still are) peculiar vestiges of Cold War times, simply voices sending out coded messages as sequences of spoken numbers, fully in public, usually on shortwave radio. Presuming the utilized code is strong enough, this information can exist out in the open, and be easily received by its intended audience, with no one else having any knowledge of what is actually being communicated.
This new video, from a YouTube channel called Ringway Manchester, runs through source numbers station audio that has been sampled on numerous music releases over the years. I had no idea this many songs had used numbers stations. And the comments below the video are full of additional examples and details (Thanks, Mark Rushton, for having shared this with me!)
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. It’s weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when you have the time and interest.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 1, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 27, 2023.
Tracks are added to the SoundCloud playlist for the duration of the project. Additional (non-SoundCloud) tracks appear in the lllllll.co discussion thread.
Disquiet Junto Project 0591: The Loneliest Number The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio.
Please note: While this is the start of a three-part project, you can participate in one, two, or all three of the parts, which will occur over the next three weeks.
Step 1: This week’s Junto project is the first in a sequence intended to encourage and reward collaboration. You will be recording something with the understanding that it will remain unfinished for the time being. Your part will be done, but more will happen. Read on.
Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music using any instrumentation of your choice. Conceive the piece as something that leaves room for something else — other instruments, other people — to join in.
Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly two to three minutes in length, as described in Step 2.
Step 4: This is important: be sure to make your track downloadable because it may be used by someone else in the next Disquiet Junto project, and then after that.
Eight Important Steps When Your Track Is Done:
Step 1: Include “disquiet0591” (no spaces or quotation marks) in the name of your tracks.
Step 2: If your audio-hosting platform allows for tags, be sure to also include the project tag “disquiet0591” (no spaces or quotation marks). If you’re posting on SoundCloud in particular, this is essential to subsequent location of tracks for the creation of a project playlist.
Step 3: Upload your tracks. It is helpful but not essential that you use SoundCloud to host your tracks.
Step 4: Post your track in the following discussion thread at llllllll.co:
Step 5: Annotate your track with a brief explanation of your approach and process.
Step 6: If posting on social media, please consider using the hashtag #DisquietJunto so fellow participants are more likely to locate your communication.
Step 7: Then listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow Disquiet Junto participants.
Step 8: Also join in the discussion on the Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to [email protected] for Slack inclusion.
Note: Please post one track for this weekly Junto project. If you choose to post more than one, and do so on SoundCloud, please let me know which you’d like added to the playlist. Thanks.
Additional Details:
Length: The length is up to you. Usually between one and a half and three minutes works well for this project.
Deadline: This project’s deadline is the end of the day Monday, May 1, 2023, at 11:59pm (that is, just before midnight) wherever you are. It was posted on Thursday, April 27, 2023.
Upload: When participating in this project, be sure to include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto. Photos, video, and lists of equipment are always appreciated.
Download: It is always best to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons license permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution, allowing for derivatives).
For context, when posting the track online, please be sure to include this following information:
More on this 591st weekly Disquiet Junto project, The Loneliest Number (The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio), at: https://disquiet.com/0591/
These sound-studies highlights of the week originally appeared in the April 25, 2023, issue of the free Disquiet.com weekly email newsletter, This Week in Sound.
▰ STRING THEORY: HARP stands for Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas, a program that combines data from a quintet of NASA satellites. An article in the Washington Post announces that it “is now open to citizen scientists.” HARP is like neighborhood watch — but with your ears … in space. Writes Erin Blakemore: “The hope is that volunteers can help trawl through the massive amount of data while sussing out sounds that reveal more about the vibrations. Researchers will use their increased understanding of those interactions to help humans better prepare for future space weather events.”
Learn more at listen.spacescience.org, where this accompanying image (by QiuGang Zong of the University of Massachusetts Lowell) depicts how “types of space waves are analogous to vibrations in air made by musical instruments.” (Thanks, Mike Rhode!)
▰ FIELD REPORT: I recently ordered an AudioMoth, an open-source device intended for use when making field recordings of sound in nature. It’s a great tool for acoustic ecology. (As The Economist has explained, “The device takes its name from the fact that moths can hear sounds across a wide frequency spectrum.”) I love that the mobile app for the AudioMoth does exactly one thing: it emits a chime that can set the device’s internal clock.
▰ BRAND SLAM: WPP, an advertising conglomerate, has acquired amp (the name is all lowercase), a sonic branding company with such clients as Cadillac, Adobe, Dove, and Lay’s. Michele Arnese founded amp in 2009. I think the big question now is what this means for other small agencies that focus on sound branding: will they continue as standalone entities, or will we see an uptick of such acquisitions in 2023 and 2024? For my part, I think sound branding as a standalone operation isn’t as effective as within a larger organization, where it can be part of a broader, coherent strategy — though as in any field, there will always be small teams that push norms in a way larger organizations struggle to do.
▰ PHONE HOME: The CBC reports on a payphone in the middle of a forest. It is intended for “visitors dealing with the loss of a loved one to pick up the receiver and speak to those they miss.” (My dad died last June just shy of his 87th birthday, and I have an urge to use a wind phone as I type this.) Apparently the concept of the “wind phone” originated in 2010 thanks to Itaru Sasaki, a Japanese garden designer. You can find a wind phone near you at mywindphone.com. The nearest one to me (I live in San Francisco) is across the bay in Oakland on 5th Street below where Interstate 880 and Interstate 980 connect. According to that website, it was created by Jordan Stern in the memory of the three dozen people who died in the 2016 Ghost Ship Fire. Here’s a partial map of wind phone locations around the world. (Via Christof Migone)
▰ TRACK TRACKER: If film music is your thing, then you are probably already (or should be) checking out soundtrack.net’s regularly updated news, such as that Kevin Kiner, known for his work on some great Star Wars animated series (most recently The Bad Batch) is scoring the forthcoming live-action Ahsoka (based on a character who originated in the animated series; now starring actual human Rosario Dawson), and that Mica Levi has a new assignment (The Zone of Interest, based on a Martin Amis novel from 2014 and from the director of Under the Skin, which Levi also memorably scored). Related topic: still no word on an album release for Siddhartha Khosla’s exceptional score for the TV series Rabbit Hole.
QUICK NOTES: Wind Bag: A scientist explored an idiomatic expression and learned it’s mistaken: “It isn’t harder to shout into the wind; it’s just harder to hear yourself.” (Thanks, Glenn Sogge!) ▰ Orchestral Maneuvers: “The Los Angeles Metro is using classical music on its light rail system to deter homeless people from congregating and sleeping in a downtown station.” (Thanks. Rich Pettus!) ▰ Bird Brain: The podcast from Emergence Magazine recently had an episode titled “The Nightingale’s Song,” featuring “acclaimed folk singer, conservationist, and song collector Sam Lee, who steps into the forest each spring to sing with these beloved birds.” ▰ Channel Surfing: What appears to have been an intercepted comment on a taxi radio “has become a sensation in Argentina after the driver’s taxi radio interfered with the signal from the International Space Station and popped up live during NASA’s live broadcast of a spacewalk.” ▰ App Alert:“Voicemod, the popular voice changer and soundboard, has just landed on macOS, allowing Mac users to transform their voices and trigger sound effects in real time.” ▰ Hearing Aid: A new tool in speech-to-text recognition is modeled on the human ear. ▰ Speak AI: Speech recognition software is increasingly part of the medical world, and a recent study, using mock patient encounters, explores its effectiveness in history-taking. ▰ Planet Rock: Jenna Jones and Joseph Joyce, for Ableton, summarize the benefits of data sonification as a tool for climate action. ▰ When a Problem Comes Along: A podcast called the Wind has a new episode about the politics of the whip: “How a small sonic boom came to represent homelessness in Reno, and how the city responded to unhoused people taking up sonic real-estate.” (Via Rob Walker’s always excellent The Art of Noticing newsletter) ▰ Avian Squad: One of my favorite online nature features is the “Shriek of the Week” by Charlie Peverett of Birdsong Academy, who this week highlighted the nightingale, one of the “few birds to sing reliably in the depths of night and during the day.”
