Image of the Week: Liquid Architecture 2010

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The above image is a photo of “Manifon,” a work of art (“helmets, watertanks, netting [2010]”) by Rown McNaught. It was included as part of the exhibit The Sound Playground, a group exhibit coordinated by Bus Projects and Craft Victoria, and curated by Amelia Douglas and Nella Themelios. Douglas and Themelios commissioned various Melbourne, Australia, artists to create instruments (plus “sound sculptures and sonic installations”) that would be performed as well as displayed. The other artists include Ros Bandt and Albert Mishriki, Rod Cooper, and Emma Lashmar:

“Rod Cooper presents a new series of ”˜sonic portraits’ in which items of clothing cast in concrete become the armature for the aural conjuring of well known personalities in the Australian sound scene. Emma Lashmar offers an exquisite glass installation designed to be bowed and played percussively. Ros Bandt and Albert Mishriki’s original music-boxes place the focus on disguise and gesture in the generation of sound, whilst Rowan McNaught’s interactive Manifon offers a new take on an ancient instrument.”

There has been an explosion of sound-related art in recent years, and it’s coming from all directions — artists making sound, musicians making art, curators staking out territory in the Venn Diagram overlap thereof. McNaught’s contraption seems like a smartly put together readymade, and its apparent dual function (both as sculpture and as instrument) speaks to the challenge that artists find themselves faced with. Especially since the “Manifon” seems intended to be banged on, somewhere there may be a gallerist asking at what point the performance decreases the work’s potential valuation. More power to McNaught for apparently not being concerned with such things.

The exhibit runs July 6 through 17, and is part of the 11th annual Liquid Architecture sound festival (liquidarchitecture.org.au). More at busprojects.com.au, craftvic.org.au, and fortyfivedownstairs.com.

Quote of the Week: Dog Bark as Auditory Motif

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Rosecrans Baldwin, author of the forthcoming novel You Lost Me There and founder of themorningnews.org, takes notes as he reads. One of the things he catalogs is the sound of dogs barking — not in the world around him but in the world of the novels themselves. The appearance of these dogs, or at least the sound of these dogs, often serves as a kind of aside, a scene-setting, remoteness-instilling notation along the lines of mentioning inclement weather. Which is to say, it’s a cliche, a cliche he digs into in a recent slate.com essay, titled “‘Somewhere a Dog Barked.'”

Baldwin has located barking dogs in the work of authors not often associated with cliche, among them Richard Ford (from Independence Day: “From the linden tree shade, Kristy hears something in the afternoon breeze — a dog barking somewhere, my son in our car. She turns and looks toward me, puzzled”) and Tobias Wolff (from Old School: “During our worst dreams we are assured by a dog barking somewhere, a refrigerator motor kicking on, that we will soon wake to true life”), not to mention Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Penn Warren, Monica Ali, and Robert Bolaño.

The regularity of these barking dogs — this “auditory motif,” as Baldwin puts it — in fiction has not endeared them to him. He writes,

“For all we know, these dogs are off-camera sound machines set to woof.”

He allows they could be a kind of author-to-author wink, but ultimately he seems to think they signify laziness: “These howls are empty and cheap-and I’ll float the opinion that publishers should collar them.” At the end of his essay, he reports a realization on the part of a friend, also a novelist, who discovered that he had unconsciously put just such a dog in his own book: “But the dog then appears a few lines later, so he does exist,” the friend wrote, by way of explanation. “That’s all I ask,” says Baldwin.

In general, the element of a heard-but-not-seen sound seems promising in fiction, but Baldwin’s data-mining is tough to argue with. Presumably his “That’s all I ask” guideline has less to do with a concern for auditory motifs in fiction in general, and more to do with leashing this particular one to the story itself.

(Illustration by Rob Donnelly for slate.com.)

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum
  • Plane passing close to midnight. Very glad to be on the ground. #
  • Do all the great Neptunes productions follow the cadence of Sean Combs/Hitmen/LL Cool's "Phenomenon"? #
  • RIP, Tony Peluso (b. ca. 1950) who went from Carpenters guitarist to Motown producer to Gustavo Santaolalla collaborator: http://is.gd/cUNmd #
  • Once again astounded by how loud vacuum cleaner is. Easily the loudest object in this house, aside from potential inherent in stereo system. #
  • Is there a web site that estimates how long before a device is released and Levenger needlessly wraps it in leather? #
  • Enough helicopters circling in downtown SF to qualify as a flock. #
  • Feel bad that when the From address in an email is in Cyrillic, I immediately assume it's spam. #
  • As midnight approaches, nothing but a couple of hard drives — so much more quiet than morning. #
  • The @dropbox iOS app, as of version 1.2, "Exports doc[s]…into third-party iPad apps." Sounds promising. #
  • Realizing I still get MJ Cole and BJ Cole mixed up. #
  • Thanks to Minty Lewis / @mintylewis for drawing my new Twitter background. More info at http://is.gd/cQeEl #
  • Automatic Robert Ryman: construction-site tagging "removed" with large white painted-over rectangle. #
  • Automatic Nam June Paik: two massive old RCA televisions stacked high, screens facing in against the street-corner garbage bin. #
  • Automatic John Cage: rings of coffee cup stains on the back of my notebook. #
  • Switching (temporarily) from ear-canal buds to standard, loose-fitting earbuds is (literally) an ear-opening experience. The bus is loud. #
  • Fire up your boomboxes, San Franciscans. Unsilent Night”“style group soundscape event today at 7pm at Yerba Buena Gardens: http://is.gd/cNNA2 #
  • It really isn't a meme until there's a dance remix. #
  • Sad to learn the label Highpoint Lowlife is closing but excited for new graphic novel project by its founder, @sideb0ard — via @earslend #
  • One of those mornings when the passing bus, rattling along singlemindedly, sounds like something from 100 or so years ago. #
  • RIP, Norwegian composer Arne Nordheim (b, 1931): arnenordheim.com #
  • Haul from @issuesshop in Oakland: new issues of Neural, Shook, & Music Works, plus How to Wreck a Nice Beach. #
  • One nice thing about interviewing musicians is they generally know how to speak into a microphone properly. #

Pianotronic Duo Subterminal (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Adam Williams plays piano and Leonardo Rosado provides the electronics, and on their collaborative album, Take This Longing, recorded under the combined name Subterminal, it’s difficult to imagine either without the other. There are moments when field recordings of water lap, as if against Williams’ piano itself. And there are moments when the light beeping or woodblock beats suggest a percussive element. Overall, the effect of their commingling involves soft, dispersed chords treated by all manner of little noises — some add, others transform; sometimes they layer in little sound effects, and at others they seem introduce brief delays that lend a cyborg charm. Just as the word glitch seems to have been relegated to the dustbin of recent music history — in large part due to it having recently been set aside by Oval, an artist closely aligned with its origins — along comes a collection such as this one that refreshes the whole idea.

<a href="http://feedbacklooplabel.bandcamp.com/album/take-this-longing">To Begin by FeedbackLoop Label</a>

More details at feedbacklooplabel.bandcamp.com. More on Williams at myspace.com/themodelcitizenuk, and on Rosado at subterminal.tumblr.com.

Tangents: Cassette Noise, Bubblegum Pop, Soundwalks, …

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

Life After Transducers: Interview by Federico Placidi with sound artist and composer Agostino Di Scipio at usoproject.blogspot.com. He imagines a possible life cycle of electronic/electric music:

FP: What would happen to your works if one day there were no more possibility to perform it in a socially shared space? Where could it migrate, and how could it reconfigure itself?

AdS: If one day there were no more transducers (I mean microphones, loudspeakers, the tympanic membrane of human ear, even the skin maybe”¦) acting as interfaces between air pressure waves and nervous-electrical measures, my work and the work of a lot of other people would stop existing, it would cease. Fine so! It happened so many times in history. The music of the British virginalists, a few centuries ago, disappeared because of the extinction of their very instrument (the virginale, existing in several fashions across Europe). Then, just like it happens today with Renaissance music, at some point so-called ‘philologically informed’ interpretative approaches would be proposed, and these older technologies would be revived and again built.

Bubblegum Pop Art: Steve Roden collects sound effects from gum-wrapper comics at inbetweennoise.blogspot.com. The gallery is both touching, in how the onomatopoeia play out, and funny, in how odd some of the word choices are:

Memory Is a Mixtape Blessing: Gino Robair on the cassette tape (at emusician.com/robairreport):

Yes, there’s hiss — you can’t miss it. More importantly, there is a combination of wow, flutter, and crunchiness that warmed my heart. All the worst things about the cassette format as a playback medium were the best things for this new release in terms of sound quality. Although the live performance was from ’09, it sounded as if it was recorded in the ’50s — in a good way.

I have yet to find a plug-in that does lo-fi like this.

Ear of the Beholder: Inclusion of a sound artist in shortlist for Turner prize seen as a kind of recognition for the artistic element, sound, often overlooked by short-sighted critics, according to John Kieffer (at guardian.co.uk):

More importantly, perhaps, sound art can be as much to do with the act of listening as it is with making the work. Many of us now live in a world of visual and auditory overload. We happily make do with a pixelated version of music on our MP3 players, and end up hearing things we do not want to. We tolerate buildings and public spaces that look OK, but sound terrible. We eat and shop in places where music and noise are calibrated just short of inducing hysteria. We stick our fingers in our ears when trains screech on dirty tracks. For those of us who live under flight paths or in hectic, noise-filled cities, the recent cloud of volcanic ash brought with it something astonishing ”“ the revelation of hearing the sound of birds and insects for the first time.

Return Policy: A project by Christian Marclay for Peter Norton‘s annual family Christmas project is going for over one grand at
abebooks.com:

All That Glitters …: I’d really like to know what this book, at awfullibrarybooks.wordpress.com, contains (thanks for the tip, Eric):

Sound-Walkabout: The Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen, Australia is hosting this Sunday Touch at a Distance, a day of “music, installations and soundwalks,” curated by Ben Byrne: “Alan Lamb will set up some of his infinite music machines, Matt Chaumont will contribute a large scale installation producing sub-bass frequencies you feel rather than hear and Philip Samartzis will present recordings from his recent trip to Antarctica. Meanwhile, Anthony Magen will lead the development of a program of soundwalks that visitors will be able to take around the property”: melb.blogspot.com. The “soundwalk” seems to be a dark-horse term, increasingly likely to gain popular acceptance and usage before “sound art” does.

And in Brief: Technologically, this is an upgrade, but it’s not hard to see the addition of a microphone for DJ Hero 2 to, implicitly, downgrade the element of turtnablism: engadget.com. … A museum of musical instruments in Phoenix, Arizona (nytimes.com). … Interview with sound artist Zimoun at everydaylistening.com: “Q: What sound would you like to wake up to? A: I enjoy a lot the very tiny click sounds which our very old heating system is producing when the radiator is getting warm. Very beautiful and always different.”