Michael Barth Meyers’s Sound Sculptures @ Johansson Gallery (Oakland, California)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The artist Michael Barth Meyers had an exhibit last autumn at the Johansson Projects gallery in Oakland. I missed the exhibit, but when I dropped by the gallery earlier this year, two pieces were still hanging. Both evidence Meyer’s emphasis on sound as sculpture.

“A Remoter Hello” (2007), pictured above and below, is a fantasy of two melded horns — think trumpets or discarded gramophones — capped with what could be one of Mickey Mouse’s fingertips, all marshmallow white and balloon-puffy. The two horns meet in the center, as if to explain why the piece is mute: the sound ends are muffled. The shape of the horn is approximated with strips of wood that bring to mind the latticework of a suspension bridge as well as the approximations of Fourier transforms, in which brief lines are graphed to suggest a curve.

“Remoter 2” (2007), below, takes a larger horn and twice bisects it, tilting the precariously attached pieces like hangnails or portions of a hanging side of beef. Thin transparent scrim cover the surfaces where the object was sliced, looking like the tops of drums. Again, the marshmallow white softens one end.

In his brief artist statement at the gallery, Meyers wrote:

These many-side polyheda recall ancient phonograph horns squashed into ellipses and then “broken” and hinged into misfunctioning instruments. The drooping, white blobs discharged from the ends imply a kind of “soundless” sound.

More on Meyers, including several other horns, at his webpage, studiomichaelmeyers.com, and at the gallery’s website, johanssonprojects.com.

Don Buchla Interview MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Red Bull Music Academy continues its ongoing series of interviews with under-celebrated music-industry characters. With a voice reminiscent of Tom Carvel’s, Don Buchla talks about various stages in the history of the synthesizer in a wide-ranging, two-hour conversation, all about theremins and Moogs, patch bays and and keyboard circuitry (MP3). Buchla’s knowledge of the field is on par with his substantial accomplishments. He’s the sort of guy who can say, of the traditional piano, that its design is “quite good” and you know he’s considering it amid an encyclopedic variety of instruments.

More info on Buchla and the Red Bull series at redbullmusicacademy.com.

Quote of the Week: Dinger, RIP

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

News spread this week of the passing in mid-March of Neu! and Kraftwerk musician Klaus Dinger, an early rock’n’roll proponent of man-machine interfaces. The following comment by Brian Eno was quoted frequently, perhaps because of its inclusion in the New York Times obituary (nytimes.com) written by Ben Sisario:

There were three great beats in the ’70s: Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, James Brown’s funk and Klaus Dinger’s Neu! beat.

The entry at pitchforkmedia.com includes two Neu! videos from the early 1970s. More mourning at idolator.com, nme.com, and nedraggett.wordpress.com. Dinger was 61.

Multi-Locale Soundscape M4A by Novi_sad

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Forget the proverbial best of both worlds — courtesy of the latest free download from Touch Radio, the spinoff of the eminent Touch label, you can have a 22-minute artificial soundscape comprised of elements from at least four audio worlds: Mamori Lake, Amazonia, Brazil; Alphios Bridge, Ancient Olympia, Greece; “Vibrations from the bridge which connects Denmark with Sweden; and “A bottling plant in operation.” As well as hydrophone recordings from that same Mamori Lake and, for good balance, “sounds and notes from a church organ.”

Recorded by Novi_sad (aka Athens, Greece-based musician Thanasis Kaproulias), the track is titled “Dramazon.” Compressed at a generous 259kbps, it is far less than the sum of its constituent parts, and that’s very much to Kaproulias’s credit. Thanks to his attentive digital editing, the various source material has been reduced to a gently rolling fog of field recordings.

For unclear reasons, the file is available as an M4A rather than an MP3, even though the MP3 was listed as an option in the site’s RSS feed. Also confusing, on the label website, touchradio.org.uk (from which the above image, presumably shot at one of the recording locations, was borrowed), the file seems to be available only for streaming. In any case, additional details at the artist’s website, novi-sad.net.