tangents / Score Keeper (Vangelis, Golijov, typewriters …)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

News on Quiet, Minimal and Otherwise Atmospheric Music on the Big and Small Screens: (1) It isn’t yet listed in imdb.com, but according to Movies That Rock (Condé Nast magazine supplement this winter), Gustavo Santaolalla (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) is scoring I Come with the Rain by Scent of Green Papaya director Anh Hung Tran. Tran’s three previous feature-length films were all scored by Tôn-Thât Tiêt.

(2) A reviewer of the score to No Country for Old Men suggests that by limiting the amount of music in a film, a composer might do himself, or herself, a disservice: “There is music during the end titles, but it’s not enough to qualify composer Carter Burwell for any serious awards consideration” (soundtrack.net).

(3) Grammy nominees for “Best Score Soundtrack Album for Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media” are Babel (Gustavo Santaolalla), Blood Diamond (James Newton Howard), The Departed (Howard Shore), Happy Feet (John Powell), Pan’s Labyrinth (Javier Navarrete), Ratatouille (Michael Giacchino). I don’t take much stock in the Grammys, but I’m still disappointed James Newton Howard’s Michael Clayton, which I’ve listened to endlessly since it was released on CD, was passed over; I’ll have to give his Blood Diamond another listen. In related news, Philip Glass is up for “Best Instrumental Composition” for “I Knew Her” (from the movie Notes on a Scandal). For the additional award info: grammy.com.

(4) BioShock won “Best Original Score” at the 2007 Spike TV Video Game Awards, which is especially interesting because it’s the rare orchestral (largely non-electronic) score for a game
(music4games.net). It was featured as a free download in the October 18, 2007, Disquiet Downstream (disquiet.com).

(5) Director Ridley Scott isn’t the only person involved in the recently re-released Blade Runner who fiddled with it after its original release; theplaylist.blogspot.com unpacks the decision-making of Vangelis, who composed its score. … (6) Also in that post, news that Osvaldo Golijov did the music to Francis Ford Coppola‘s forthcoming Youth Without Youth. And according to imdb.com, he’s already at work on Coppola’s next one, Tetro, rumored to star No Country‘s Javier Bardem.

(7) From yesterday’s New York Times review (nytimes.com), by A.O. Scott, of the film Atonement:

Boxy cars rolling up the drive; whispers of scandal and family secrets; coitus interruptus in the library, all set to the implacable rhythm of typewriter keys.

Two characters make significant use of a typewriter — one is an aspiring playwright, the other a yearning rural swain — but the sound of the machine is co-opted by Dario Marianelli, who wrote the movie’s score and who conjoins the clack-clacking of mechanical composition with the steady plink of a repeated piano note. At a climactic moment Brenda Blethyn, who can be as subtle an actress as Mr. Marianelli is a composer, leaps screaming from the darkness and begins beating on the hood of a car with an umbrella, a tocsin that joins the plink and the clack in a small symphony of literal-minded irrelevance.

That pretty much describes the rest of “Atonement,”…

By coincidence, this is from a review of a new Tan Dun classical work also from yesterday’s New York Times (nytimes.com; the website doesn’t list the author, and I’ve already recycled my print copy):

A typewriter, closely amplified, taps away. A few string players operate from balconies. None of the sounds produced are particularly striking by themselves, but watching them being made, on camera and at close quarters, passes the time pleasantly. “The Gate”glides by in much the same manner.

(8) News on a remix album of music from the video game Lumines (music4games.net). … (9) A completist’s guide, with video accompaniment, to “video clips from classic films featuring tasty electronic music” including Logan’s Run, Suspiria and more (audiolemon.blogspot.com).

Kwan’s Emergence Closing Reception (San Francisco)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Much sound art is fixed for its presentation in a gallery, but that doesn’t mean improvisation isn’t occasionally called for. Last Saturday, December 1, was the closing reception for David Kwan‘s Emergence exhibit at Mission 17 in San Francisco (mission17.org). I dropped by to take in the two works in that dark room one last time (mentioned here previously twice: an initial review, disquiet.com; and a subsequent correspondence with Kwan, disquiet.com).

Something seemed different about “Terminus” (2007), shown below. The work consists of five screens. Four small ones show moving images of environmental landscapes, and a large one shows overlapped projections of all four at once. An audio track is recognizable as field recordings. What had changed since my previous visit was that two of the four small screens had died and been replaced by larger CRTs, as seen below. Though the change could have been distracting, the new variety of sizes and formats of monitors worked, as it emphasized differences between the single-channel images and made more of the room as a space to be navigated. (It also brought to mind the Douglas Gordon exhibit currently at SFMOMA: a room full of simultaneous projections on myriad screens — more in a November 24, 2007, disquiet.com entry.)

Directly above is a somewhat blurry image that shows how the quartet of images appeared simultaneously on one large screen. (At left in the image is the wisely installed dark curtain that blocked light from the gallery’s main entrance.)

Kwan was at the reception, and we had a chance to talk about “Terminus.” He graciously explained a few things. While the images are untreated, the audio is processed: slowed down and run through two filters. Each screen shows images from a DVD, and each DVD consists of 10 chapters that play at random. It takes about an hour to witness all the segments, but of course far longer to take in all the possible combinations. The work had shown previously this year at the gallery Jack Straw in Seattle from February 9 through April 20 (jackstraw.org), so Kwan wasn’t entirely surprised that two of the screens had finally given up the ghost.

tangents / Sound Art (Basel, sonoluminescence, performativity …)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Recent Items from the World of Sound Art: (1) From a New York Times overview of the Art Basel Miami Beach festival, which closes tomorrow (nytimes.com):

Installations by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, the subjects of a survey at the soon-to-expand Miami Art Museum, had riveting soundtracks that ranged from opera to strange mutterings to ambient noise. I wished I had had time to see Ms. Cardiff and Mr. Bures Miller’s achingly harmonious “Forty-Part Motet,” which was in the show but installed off-site at the Freedom Tower in Miami.

Music was also the basis of one of the fair’s biggest word-of-mouth hits, an installation at the Kate MacGarry Gallery’s shipping container by the British duo Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard [image at left, courtesy of the artists]. Titled “Silent Sound,” it led me into a dark, padded chamber to hear, and feel, a recording of a specially commissioned live performance by the English rock musician J. Spaceman. Maybe it was the “ambisonic” technology, an ocean rather than a wall of sound. Maybe it was the subliminal message that was supposedly encoded in the music. Or maybe, after three days of nonstop looking, it was a relief just to sit and listen.

(2) Also happening as part of Art Basel Miami Beach, presentations of George Antheil‘s Ballet Mécanique, including an all-robot version put together by Paul Lehrman (rhizome.org). … (3) Drawings by Sonic Youth‘s Lee Ranaldo are exhibited as part of The Visions Come along with work by Leah Singer and Philippe Vandenberg, curated by Jan Van Woensel, on display at Art Basel Miami Beach (railsf.blogspot.com). … (4) Apologies to composer and technologist Jason Freeman for my posting this late in the game, but this evening is the final of three performances in Miami of the ingenious Flock (jasonfreeman.net/flock, carnivalcenter.org/tickets), in which “a computer vision system determines the locations of the audience members and musicians, and it uses that data to generate performance instructions for the saxophonists.”

(5) The Silent Dialogue exhibit of bio-tech art at the ICC in Tokyo includes several sound works, among them “Call <-> Response” by Tanaka Hiroya and Cuhara Macoto (collectively known as tEnt) in which a “coconut shell is fitted with a small speaker which emits varying bird calls via a continuous algorithm-based signal” (image at left, courtesy of the gallery) and “Paphio in My Life” by botanist Dogane Yuji and composer Fujieda Mamoru in which “the inaudible sounds of plants are picked up by connected wires then converted to manifest a plant’s ”˜voice’” (we-make-money-not-art.com, ntticc.or.jp). The exhibit is open until February 17, 2008, and I hope to catch it when I’m in Tokyo around Christmas. (This is, to be honest, what I was hoping the exhibit Biotechnique through January 6, 2008, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco would be more like. I visited that exhibit a few weeks ago and it was more industrial biotech than artistic technique.)

(6) Ensemble is the title of a group show guest-curated by artist Christian Marclay at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the website for which lists participating artists, including Terry Adkins, Doug Aitken, Darren Almond, John M. Armleder, Fia Backström, Harry Bertoia, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Angela Bulloch, Martin Creed, David Ellis, Mineko Grimmer, Tim Hawkinson, Jim Hodges, Evan Holloway, Pierre Huyghe, Paul Ramirez-Jonas, Nina Katchadourian, Martin Kersels, Jon Kessler, Katja Kölle, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Carolee Schneemann, Noah Sheldon, Yoshi Wada, and Angela White. The exhibit runs through December 16. The image to the left, courtesy of the ICA, is Tim Hawkinson’s “Music Box (Time in a Bottle)” (1994). More info at icaphila.org. … (7) While in Philly: A description of artist Michael Grothusen‘s Life’s Joys, Life’s Disappointments, currently up at the Drexel University’s Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, for which I cannot seem to find a website: “The chain drags along the base, scraping it and sounding like a set of keys being fumbled with on a metal desk” (fallonandrosof.blogspot.com).

(8) A little further south, at the Contemporary Art Center in Virginia Beach through December 30, 2007, is Stephen Vitiello: Slow Planes, Fast Trees (sound works and documents): “Working with sounds recorded from Virginia environments, artist Stephen Vitiello has created an exhibition of sound installations, photographs, and a video.” The work focuses in part on the constant planes overhead that are part of the area’s modern soundscape. (Image at left courtesy of the gallery.) More at cacv.org and dailypress.com.

(9) Just over in Vienna, Austria, is Shut Up and Listen! 2007, a three-day festival of music and sound art put together by Bernhard Gal and Ernst Reitermaier. It ran from December 4 through December 6 and included work by Lasse-Marc Riek, Christopher DeLaurenti, Lale Rodgarkia-Dara, Astrid Schwarz, and others (sp-ce.net). … (10) Details on the conference Sound, Art, Auditory Cultures organized by Søren Møller Sørensen, Torben Sangild, Erik Granly, and Brandon LaBelle and held in Copenhagen late last month. Among the many interesting-sounding papers were Jacob Kreutzfeldt on “Acoustic territoriality in a Japanese shopping area,” Mads Krogh on “Rap music’s spaces ”“ between music and soundscapes,” Carolyn Birdsall on “The Sounds of Tradition? Radio Aesthetics and Karneval Rituals in Interwar Germany,” and Juliana Hodkinson on “Listening to the drone: aural performativity without event” (hum.ku.dk). … (11) News of the honorary-mention recipients in the decade-running VIDA competition, founded by Fundación Telefónica, included mention of Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand‘s “Camera Lucida (Light Chamber): “The ‘sonic observatory’ converts sound waves into light by means of a phenomenon called sonoluminescence” (telefonica.es/via, via we-make-money-not-art.com).

(12) Jon Brumit‘s Neighborhood Public Radio, which I witnessed earlier this year at the Southern Exposure Gallery in San Francisco, will be part of the Whitney Biennial 2008 (dailyserving.com). The Whitney has posted a long list of participating artists, which I’m still parsing, but at least one more sound-worker is in there, DJ Olive (whitney.org).

(13) Among the upcoming exhibits at the Manhattan’s new New Museum (building, to left, in a photo courtesy of the museum) is The Sound of Things: Unmonumental Audio from February 13, 2008, to March 23, 2008: “three programs of short audio collages by thirteen international artists with backgrounds in music, poetry, and visual art.” Participants include Vito Acconci, Anthony Burdin, Trisha Donnelly, Paul Elliman, Andy Graydon, Language Removal Services, Ulrike Müller, Nautical Almanac, Keith Obadike, Pauline Oliveros, Susan Philipsz, Seth Price, Stefan Tcherepnin (newmuseum.org). The exhibit is “organized by Lauren Cornell, Director, Rhizome, in collaboration with New Museum curators Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions; and Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.”

(14) Endless coverage of the recent Blip Festival 2007 that ran in New York City from November 29 through December 2 (blipfestival.org, wired.com, boingboing.net, joystiq.com, kotaku.com, nymag.com, villagevoice.com, etc.). Performers and presenters included Bit Shifter (whose August 2007 show at Brooklyn’s Galapagos I attended and wrote about earlier — disquiet.com), odenständig 2000, and Bubblyfish, among others. “You may think we’re splitting hairs,”Mike Rosenthal, director of the Tank, where the events were held, said of the distinction between the Blip Festival and the Tank’s Bent Festival, “but it is different”(nytimes.com).

(15) Applications to participate in Sound Travellers (“a two year project to facilitate and promote the national touring of sound art/electronica, improvised jazz and contemporary classical music”) are due December 17, 2007 (soundtravellers.wordpress.com). … (16) The Lab, a gallery space in San Francisco, has an open call for
“visual or sonic art exhibitions”; deadline: January 11, 2008 (thelab.org).

Quote of the Week: Talking Guns

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

From African Feedback (Errant Bodies), the new book by Alessandro Bosetti:

For example, there are old men who have guns, weapons that they killed animals with. Then you put the sound of these guns into the computer and they can talk about the animals they killed.

That’s the recorded statement from an unidentified man in the African city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, responding to music that Bosetti, an Italian musician and sound artist, plays for him on a pair of headphones.

The music auditioned by Bosetti for the man included pieces by Bernard Parmegiani, Steve Lacy, and Linoel Marchetti. Bosetti traveled around Mali and Burkina Faso, playing experimental music and simultaneously recording the reactions of individuals to the presumably unfamiliar sounds.

African Feedback contains a CD pieced together from those reactions, which are paired with the original music. The text of the book is a transcript in English of the interviews, most of which had been conducted in French or, with the assistance of an interpreter, in the languages Moré or Dogon.

A free MP3 download of African Feedback was the subject of the August 21, 2006, Disquiet Downstream (disquiet.com). More info at errantbodies.org and at Bosetti’s homepage, melgun.net. Thanks again to Aaron Ximm, of quietamerican.org, who introduced African Feedback to me, and to Bosetti, who agreed to an interview when he passed through Berkeley late last year.

Christian Marclay Interview MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The sound artist Christian Marclay, the creator of such landmark works as “Video Quartet” and “Guitar Drag,” doesn’t listen to much music. He’s a big Marcel Duchamp fan — not a big surprise for one of the most prominent utilizers of “readymades,” like found records and record covers. He’s not a philosopher. He thinks nostalgia isn’t a bad word. He ignores copyright issues — this from the man who ran the video of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup against the audio of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. His mother was a collector of Christmas music. He thinks it’s too early to employ an iPod in his art.

We know this, and much more, thanks to a lengthy and highly informative interview recently distributed as part of a podcast series of the British museum conglomerate, the Tate (MP3). Interviewed by art historian Gilda Williams, Marclay talks in detail about numerous of his individual works, and takes half an hour of questions from the audience, most of whom are surprised (as am I — as probably would be most people familiar with his work) about his stated relative distance from music.