When is a trombone not a trombone? Never — certainly gauging by “Bone Drone” by Mystified, aka Thomas Park. It’s a rich, eerie drone, and one that’s seeming as far from the trombone as could be. Yes, it mines the familiar depth of the instrument, but also spends a lot of its energy investigating upper frequencies. Followers of Park have wondered what this trombone would sound like. This past February 19, he tweeted “Just bought a trombone. Haven’t played one of those in years” at twitter.com/mystified131, and then just this morning “Earlier today, New trombone arrived. Box was beat up, horn and case are fine. Now to work on my chops.” There are two chops at work: his trombone playing, and his digital efforts. It makes one wonder, what is the digital equivalent of embouchure?
Thicket app co-developer Morgan Packard currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and a local alternative weekly for which I do some writing, the Colorado Springs Independent, picked up my interview (“Being Decimal: The Anticipatory Pleasures of the Thicket App”) with him. The app is his co-creation with Joshue Ott. The new version has a different introduction and has been trimmed for a more general audience, and it includes some additional information about the local community he’s found in the area, having moved there from New York with his wife. Packard focuses on the Communikey Festival (communikey.us), to be held next month and at which Monolake, William Basinksi, and Radere (Carl Ritger), among others, many from Colorado, will be performing. Read the piece (“There’s a Thicket for That”) at csindy.com.
Sun Studio: Listen to the sound of Ai Weiei’s Tate installation of millions of handmade sunflower seeds.
Following up yesterday’s entry on Susan Philipsz, another recommended entry from the Tate Museum’s extraordinary podcast series: Ai Weiwei is by no means categorized as a sound artist, but he is a protean figure in contemporary art, and sound is neither an inconsequential nor an infrequent aspect of his creative work. In the past on this site, I’ve noted the soundscape aspect of his video work “Beijing: Chang’an Boulevard” (2004). And here in an extended conversation dating from last October, Weiwei engages an interview with Katie Hill, starting off with the famous piece involving 100 million handcrafted ceramic sunflower seeds in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (MP3).
[audio:http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/podcast/mp3/2010_10_12_Ai_Weiwei.mp3|titles=”Tate Modern Interview (October 2010)”|artists=Ai Weiwei with Katie Hill]
The podcast appears to have been recorded before visitors to the Tate site were cordoned off from the installation due to health concerns. The sound of footsteps in those seeds had been noted in reviews and other coverage of the exhibit. And once the exhibit was closed off from public interaction, its silence became an unintended yet intrinsic part.
High Tide: A brief video document of Susan Philipsz’ Turner Prize”“winning work “Lowlands”
Like those of many major (and, for that matter, minor) museums, the podcasts of the Tate are both archivally inspiring and digitally (information-architecturally?) puzzling.
For example, they tend to pop up in large batches, hours upon hours of art-related lectures and panel discussions that appear simultaneously in your RSS feed in a way that is more overwhelming than enticing, making for what may best be described as institutional tantalization.
The experience can be a bit like receiving one of those film festival flyers so packed with a month of rare movie-going opportunities that the end result is you see no films at all, and just stay home reducing your TiVo and Netflix queues.
To some extent, the Tate’s batching of lectures is emblematic of the museum’s outsize ambition, which may have its closest rival in the Getty, at least in terms of online audio of art history and criticism. (I write that previous sentence eager to be proven uninformed, so I can add even more rich feeds to my RSS reader.) One recent batch of Tate podcasts included several dozen individual recordings, and those dozens included among them such multi-part events as “Urban Encounters: Routes and Transitions,” “Museums and Mobiles in the Age of Social Media” (this is England we’re discussing, so “mobiles” means phones not Calder scupltures), and the alluringly alliterative “Sexuality and the Surrealist Sensorium,” together consisting of a dozen lengthy MP3 files.
But the batching is also seemingly unnecessary. These MP3s invariably date back several months, and could more palatably be rolled out evenly and sequentially.
For example, recently popping up was a talk from November 26, 2010, by Susan Philipsz (MP3), who a week later would win the Turner Prize, the first ever such award for a work of sound art. (It was in defense of her winning that I organized the Lowlands: A Sigh Collective response album, and wrote about her work for BoingBoing.net.)
The talk is a solid overview of her work, explaining in detail the various historical threads that led to the development of “Lowlands,” the piece that won her the Turner, and other of her works. Included are extended sequences of various pieces, including one where her live singing voice was played in a Tesco supermarket. (There’s a Tesco subsidiary, Fresh & Easy, opening in my San Francisco neighborhood soon. Perhaps we can stage an American installation of her piece?)
One final peculiarity about the Tate feed. The URL leads to a page (tate.org) that appears to offer tickets for sale for an event that has already passed.
And should you wish to subscribe via Google Reader or any other feed reader of choice, the URL for the Tate feed is: tate.org.uk.
The top nine searches for February were: “egypt,” “ambient,” “autechre,” “bird,” “cairo,” “christoph schmidt,” “drone,” “hassan khan,” and “zimoun” (with a whole lot tied for 10th place).
Thicket app co-developer Morgan Packard currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and a local alternative weekly for which I do some writing, the Colorado Springs Independent, picked up my interview (