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.”
Michael Barth Meyers’s Sound Sculptures @ Johansson Gallery (Oakland, California)
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
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.
Marble Music (San Francisco)
The marble blocks that hold up the railings at One Bush Plaza in downtown San Francisco always look to me like sheet music:
Quote of the Week: Dinger, RIP
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.