tangents / Stockhausen, venues, samples

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

News, Quick Links, Good Reads: (1) One of the most formidable figures in 20th-century music has died. Karlheinz Stockkhausen, born August 22, 1928, passed away on December 5, 2007 (washingtonpost.com, washingtonpost.com, therestisnoise.com, nytimes.com, guardian.co.uk, guardian.co.uk). The obituary from the news service bloomberg.com seems particularly unfriendly. It poses the following as a kind of question, though a rhetorically unsympathetic one, judging by the piece as a whole: “Stockhausen’s later works do a disservice to the sage and savior who became seen as a shamster and a simpleton.” A blog post by musician Steve Roden balances the ups and downs of Stockhausen’s career without coming down so firmly on the downs: “well, first it was the death of evel knievel, now karlheinz stockhausen has passed. they say deaths come in threes, but i can’t imagine there’s a third person out there who’s such a combination of genius and trainwreck” (inbetweennoise.blogspot.com).

Since this summer, when I received it as a birthday gift, I’ve been listening often to a recording by Paul Hillier and his Theatre of Voices of Stockhausen’s Stimmung (Harmonia Mundi), an extended, trance-inducing choral work that finds a common ground between Western liturgical tradition and what’s come to be grouped together in my imagination as “Tuvan,” singing that treats the vocal chords like a jaw harp. I was fascinated on a recent trip to and from New York via the Virgin America airline to have found an excerpt of Stimmung on the in-flight entertainment system (disquiet.com). If you’re hankering for something to listen to immediately, the Disquiet Downstream entry of August 16 of this year was a mashup of a Stockhausen’s “Helicopter String Quartet” and a riveting chunk of techno by Plastikman (MP3, disquiet.com). If that sounds in any way disrespectful, then it’s all the more likely that Stockhausen would have approved. As for the image (detail left) selected by the New York Times to accompany the obituary, written by Paul Griffiths, I’m not so sure.

Also recently deceased: (2) Pimp C, born Chad Butler (December 29, 1973 ”“ December 4, 2007), a rapper and producer, was a founder of the deeply soused sound that’s come to define the hip-hop of his native Houston (chron.com, nytimes.com); (3) music historian H. Wiley Hitchcock (September 28, 1923 ”“ December 5, 2007), who is quoted in an obituary on the subject of the antipathy by musicians, especially jazz musicians, for certain genre terminology: “Schoenberg didn’t like the word ”˜atonality’ either, and Philip Glass doesn’t like ”˜minimalism.’ That’s tough!”(nytimes.com).

(4) Concert-goers in the San Francisco Bay Area were alerted to tough news about the great Oakland performance space, 21 Grand:

We are prevented from having live shows due to permit issues resulting from our unfortunate proximity to another venue being visited by the Alcholic Beverage Action Team of the Oakland Police Department that took notice of us after 7 1/2 years. We have been allowed to present our next two scheduled events, but with a capacity limited to 49 people. Other events will be relocated, and information will be posted on our website. If you want to make reservations (advisable) – please call or email. Please be there at least 10 minutes before the scheduled door time, or your place will be given to someone who is here. There is also to be no alcohol at events at 21 Grand. We are working towards complying with the copious regulations and requirements of the City of Oakland to get a cabaret license and maybe, if we’re lucky, a beer and wine license. We also greatly apologize for the last minute-ness of this information.

21 Grand is central to the Bay Area music scene, and in particular it’s a spot where various eminent instructors at nearby Mills College — permanent and visiting, including Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, and John Bischoff — frequently play out (21grand.org). … (5) In related (good) news, the Chicago performance space Lampo, under direction of Andrew Fenchel, has successfully relocated (chicagoreader.com, timeout.com, lampo.org).

(6) The website of Powell’s Books has been posting guest blog entries by contributors to Continuum Books’s 33 1/3 series, including Drew Daniel, whose book on Throbbing Gristle‘s Twenty Jazz Funk Greats is due out soon, and who wrote at powells.com about the writing of his book, and at one point quite well summarizes the challenge of writing about music in general: “The result is, hopefully, a compromise between private obsession and public user-friendliness.” In related news, Daniel finished his Ph.D. in English this spring at UC Berkeley (dissertation title: ‘I Know Not Why I Am So Sad’ : Melancholy and Knowledge in Early Modern English Portraiture, Drama, and Prose) and is now on the faculty of the English department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (jhu.edu; bio excerpt: “In his spare time, he is also one half of the electronic duo Matmos“).

(7) Galactic drummer Stanton Moore has published a call to assist the great New Orleans drummer Johnny Vidacovich, for whom a perfect storm of Hurricane Katrina and arthritis has caused much hardship: “I want to keep him from having to play every single gig that comes his way so that the arthritis doesn’t get worse.” I lived in New Orleans for four years and saw countless concerts during that time, highlights among them often having at their core the Zen presence of Vidacovich’s lanky percussion work. Info on how to help at jambase.com. … (8) There’s also a benefit for Todd Blair of Survival Rearch Labs (karenmarcelo.org). He is suffering from cancer.

(9) A conversation at newmusicbox.org with the authors of Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter: “Music has become a much more a private experience than a manifestation of social cohesion.” … (10) Also at newmusicbox.org, composer Carl Stone in his ongoing blog: “I’m willing to bet that Tokyo has the most intentionally introduced sounds.” … (11) I missed the recent concert by Chris Watson (of Cabaret Voltaire) and Florian Hecker at RML in San Francisco, but fortunately for those of use who didn’t attend, Erik Davis did: “Towards the end, in one corner of the vast mix, I could swear I heard a deep dark growling voice that sounded neither like a seal or a man but some primeval Grendel-like dweller of the threshold. My spine crackled” (techgnosis.com). … (12) The music critic Simon Reynolds (Blissed Out, Energy Flash) has launched reynoldsretro.blogspot.com, in which he is reprinting his past pieces. … (13) A brief interview (createdigitalmusic.com) with Norman Fairbanks, who made an album with the Tenori-On instrument, the subject of the November 19 Disquiet Downstream (disquiet.com).

(14) Artist Tom Moody contributed on his blog (tommoody.us) the following proposed correlations:

largo: chopped & screwed
adagio: downtempo
andante, moderato: hiphop
allegro: house, garage
vivace: hardcore
presto: gabber
prestissimo: speedcore

(This paragraph has been updated; I’d mistakenly misread Moody’s entry the first time, and thought he’d simply located that list on Wikipedia.) … (15) Composer and critic Kyle Gann notes a literal-minded Wikipedia correction of the definition of “downtown music”: “The term ‘downtown music’ can mean something entirely different, depending on the type of downtown a city has” (artsjournal.com/postclassic, wikipedia.org). The apparent misunderstanding on the part of the editor is humorous, but it also helps point out what could be deemed a little presumptuous about the use of a term as generic as “downtown” to refer solely to the downtown of Manhattan. And I say that with full respect for “downtown music,” as someone who once lived “downtown” (in the late 1980s) and who spends far too much time, to this day, listening to albums on John Zorn‘s Tzadik record label.

The best hip-hop blogs have long since morphed from places to snag MP3s for free to intensive research institutions: (16) visit earfuzz.com for an investigation of the myriad samples that went into the Dust Brothers‘s backing track to the Beastie Boys‘s “Shake Your Rump,” listing 10 identifiable sources; and (17) visit 33jones.com to read about how the recent team-up of the late producer J Dilla and still extant rapper Busta Rhymes, on the excellently titled album Dillagence, includes another notable contributor, Raymond Scott (1908-1994), the inventor and cartoon/library/jingle-music genius, who was sampled for a track. (Just to close this out, I previously mentioned Oliver Wang‘s soul-sides.com‘s “Who Flipped It Best?” series, in which he compares various uses in different songs of the same sample — disquiet.com.)

(18) The new-music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, perhaps best known for adopting work by Aphex Twin, has been doing a piece by pop-minded, digital-music noisemeister Mochipet (aka David Wang) in recent concerts (rgable.typepad.com). … (19) Intermorphic is a new generative music system; its development can be tracked at intermorphic.com. … (20) The major classical-music record label Deutesche Grammophon has launched an online digital-music store and it includes a “special website” for its contemporary holdings: deutschegrammophon.com. … (21) Jazz keyboardist and composer Joe Zawinul, who passed away back on September 11, 2007, released this year a new arrangement of “In a Silent Way” (title of the Miles Davis album on which it originally appeared), on an album titled Brown Street (Heads Up); I didn’t know this until I saw that he’s up for a posthumous Grammy for the piece, for “Best Instrumental Arrangement.”

Kabir Carter’s Ghostly Room Tones at White Box (NYC)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At exactly 6:02 pm on Saturday, November 17, the ghosts entered the White Box gallery. This is a few weeks back, when Kabir Carter performed at White Box, a basement exhibit space deep in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.

The ghosts were sounds, and those sounds were of the room but not presently evident in the room. The space was momentarily full of clanking and voices, none of it emanating from the small group of people, among them myself and some families with small children, who had arrived in time for the scheduled start of show. We were all still as sculpture in the space, which was empty aside from Carter’s modest setup: a folding table, some mixing equipment, three speakers, and a telltale microphone stand.

The ghostly noises, and then silence: an extended pause, followed by more noises, some familiar, some not, some seemingly transformed by digital devices. Carter’s mode had been made evident: he was recording sounds in the room, then playing them back to us, having altered them in a variety of ways. Hence the work’s title, Overexcited Recaptures. The most prominent elements included the footsteps of people entering and exiting (notably some of those families) by way of the long ramp that connects the gallery to the street above. Late in the piece, children were literally heard but not seen. At one point I thought I heard cellphone that had rung earlier on, but there’s always a chance its owner had simply stuffed it deep in a bag so as to muffle the sound.

A lot of the sounds weren’t noticeable until Carter drew our attention to them, especially the tones inherent in the space, small noises that had been amplified well beyond their natural volume levels. Thick tones appeared occasionally, with no self-evident point of origin.

Though the sounds themselves were fascinating, their root in the near present gave them an added visceral dimension. I had the urge one might get in a cave or at the base of a canyon, to scream or clap in order to witness how the nature of the space — or in the case or Carter’s piece, the nature of the system — would transform and reflect the sound back at me.

The gallery is called White Box but its most characteristic architectural element is like a mortician’s idea of a catwalk, a concrete slab that extends partially across the floor and supports a load-bearing column. The initial batch of attendees first stood up above the sunken level where Carter had stationed himself, but as time went on, many of us made our way onto the main floor and spread out — out among the ghosts.

Carter’s piece was part of White Noise II, a month-long series of sound art events and exhibitions curated by Esa Nickle. These included work by Michael Northam, James Fei with Kato Hideki, and Eva Sjuve, as well as a restaging of a seminal John Cage work. In related events, Phill Niblock performed on December 7 and Michael Schumacher is scheduled to do so on December 13.

Additional info and documentation, including photos, though no apparent sound, at whiteboxny.org. Kabir Carter’s webpage is kabircarter.com.

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).