The drone in the background of a sample excerpt from Totstellen‘s recent Tunnel Brücke CDR has a sonar quality and the sublimated buzz of distant industrial activity (MP3). In fact it’s an augmented field recording, taped in a tunnel below traffic. The tunnel reverberations reveal a sound many times removed from its source — first by distance, then concrete and other construction materials, then recording equipment and its attendant compression algorithms, then whatever processing Totstellen chose to employ (including the addition of one quiet phrase in German — which for someone, like me, who only speaks English, supplies yet another sense of remoteness), then further compression to the MP3 format. Each step away from the source serves as a kind of cultural, procedural sediment: a thicker, deeper tunnel from which the sounds struggle to emerge. The album is a co-release by the labels Reduktive Musiken (reduktivemusiken.de) and Totes Format.
Aero-Mic’d @ Meridian Gallery (San Francisco)
Due to some impending travel, I could only stay for the first set at Friday night’s Meridian Gallery triple bill in San Francisco. Meridian co-founder Anne Brodzky opened the show by commenting on how the evening’s performances served as kind of a fourth partner in the current exhibit that Lawrence Rinder, Dean of the College at the California College of the Arts, had curated for the gallery’s three narrow floors: on the entry level, abstract illustrations by a half dozen area artists; on the second floor, anonymous tantric drawings from the collection of French poet Franck André Jamme; and on the third floor, an array of small, postcard-sized mirrors with koan-like text, by Jamme, written on them in white. Brodsky also mentioned that the night served as a kind of anniversary for the Meridian, which moved into its Union Square location this time last year (after two decades at 545 Sutter Street, it’s now at 535 Powell Street).
Rinder meta-curated the evening’s music, titled OF + OM + OR, having sub-contracted the duties to local artist Dean Smith, whose illustrations are part of the ground-floor exhibit. On the bill were Joshua Churchill playing processed guitar with a light show by Paul Clipson (whose show with Robert Rich I saw at SF Camerawork a month ago, but I haven’t had the opportunity to post here at Disquiet.com on it yet), a solo performance by Greg Kowalsky, and, for the opening set, the trio Aero-Mic’d.
Aero Mic’d is Wayne Smith on triggered samples and synthesis, along with Cliff Hengst on percussion and Scott Hewicker on electric guitar. Their half-hour piece, a kind of multi-part suite, opened and closed with edited audio from the game show Jeopardy — just the answers, like “Who is [this]?” and “What is [ that]?” spliced into a rapid-fire trivia spew. Those cathode-hearth incantations served to bookend a kind of modern-primitive tribal music, with Hewicker pushing cycles of fuzzed-out chords and Hengst pounding repetitive patterns, the simplicity of which belied the sensitivity and expertise he brought to their implementation. At times the trio’s playing suggested the art-brut rock of the band Savage Republic and the dervish-like trance-pop of the Feelies, though Aero-Mic’d contributed its own unique vision to this mode. In particular Hewicker’s guitar was carefully amplified so that for all its sublimated ferocity, his strumming against his strings was also fully audible.
This all occurred against a quiet backdrop, by Smith (Wayne, not Dean), of field recordings, some transformed into distant drones, others left to let bird song, car noise, and the like fill the gallery. At one point a skateboard could be heard coasting across the stereo spectrum.
I wish I could have lingered longer, in order to hear the other sounds that were to fill the gallery. Clipson’s 16mm projections at SF Camerawork a month back were a beautiful stream of images that drew from a broad range of photographic schools, and Kowalsky’s performance promised to use small tape recorders and radios that had been set along the floorboards for spatial diffusion (see photo below), much as Steve Roden had done to fine effect at last year’s Activating the Medium festival at San Francisco’s Exploratorium.
Related links: Meridian Gallery (meridiangallery.org), Aero-Mic'd (aeromicd.com), Scott Hewicker (scotthewicker.com).
Quote of the Week: Millhauser’s “Next”
From Steven Millhauser‘s short story “The Next Thing” in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine:
And I seemed to hear, along with the clatter of shopping carts, and voices in the nearby aisles, the dim sounds of a summer night: laughter on a front porch, dishes rattling through an open kitchen window, a shout, a screen door, a thrum of insects.
I turned back into the Under. It was very bright. There was a steady sound of goods dropping into bins, and all up and down the aisles you could see people lifting items out of the bins and putting them in their carts. Then it seemed to me that I was about to understand something, as I stood there watching the shoppers and listening to the unheard sounds of an invisible town.
A Twilight Zone episode tailored for a symposium on New Urbanism, the story tells of a small town where a large superstore is built, and of the social transformations that result as the town and the superstore slowly merge. (To say anything further about what’s meant by “Under” in the excerpt above would give too much away.) “The Next Thing” has echoes of David Foster Wallace’s fascination with everyday economics, George Saunders’s focus on the intersection between simulacrum and closed social systems, and Charles Stross’s extrapolative fantasies.
Live Madlib Mix MP3
The estimable left-field hip-hop label Stones Throw’s latest podcast entry is a contribution by prolific producer Madlib. Recorded live at the Hella International event at last year’s Miami Winter Music Conference, it’s a short live set that emphasizes the rudiments — not just killswitch edits but simple, almost elemental musical elements, from a downtempo reggae snippet, to some mid-period John Lennon solo work, to rap instrumentals at their most automatic, all in a compact 20 minutes (MP3). At a time when so much rap music can sound like it was produced poolside on an diamond-encrusted laptop, this label is always ready with the muddy and sloppily soulful. More info on the event at Stones Throw ‘s website, stonesthrow.com.
Tape Music MP3 (And OGG)
The tape work “Dreaming in Darkness” was performed at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco last month — and already at the festival’s audio catalog at archive.org there’s a downloadable MP3 (and OGG) of the piece, along with six other works performed that evening, March 7, 2008, plus a panel discussion, all as separate files. “Darkness,” by Ã…ke Parmerud, has many of the characteristic attributes of classic tape-based sound: extended drones, near-silence, chance percussion, orchestral (or chamber music) fragments, and street noise. Parmerud blends them into a quasi-narrative that is more disorientating than haunting, more about sense perception than about thrills. According to the Other Minds notes, the work was intended to be “an attempt to create surrealistic fragments of a blind person’s dreams.”