Hansen and Rubin’s “Moveable Type” at New York Times (NYC)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Heading across Manhattan via Times Square on Tuesday earlier this week, I took a shortcut through the brand new building that houses the New York Times, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano. According to the building’s website (yes, the building has a website: newyorktimesbuilding.com), it had officially opened for business just the day before.

In one hallway-like space of the Times’s public lobby there has been installed a multimedia spectacle by statistician Mark Hansen and artist Ben Rubin, the same duo who created the work “Listening Post,”which has gotten several mentions here (disquiet.com). Like “Listening Post,”this piece plucks data live from the Internet and displays it (thanks to a variety of artful algorithms) on a suspended, panoramic grid of small LED-style displays.

Whereas “Post”was a single grid, this new work consists of two facing grids, one on each wall; and whereas the former pulled information from the Internet at large, the latter restricts itself to time-sensitive material from the New York Times itself. The Times-commissioned piece is titled “Moveable Type,”after an earlier revolution in information technology.

As I approached “Moveable Type”from the east side of the corridor, it seemed that it had stopped mid-process. On the far side of the corridor I saw Rubin, who explained apologetically that the piece had been put on pause that afternoon to allow for some photography. While the photographer set up his equipment, Rubin introduced me to Hansen. He also explained some details about both “Post”and “Type.”In addition to the small but visible speakers in both works, there are tiny speakers embedded in the rear of each individual screen — and it is those speakers, not the screens themselves, that emit the little clicking sound that accompanies any change in what text is displayed.

Those sonic punctuations are an essential part of how the flow of data in “Listening Post”is impressed upon the work’s audience. Since “Type”was on pause, I couldn’t listen to the piece myself. I did ask Rubin if it’s the case, as a recent story in the Times seemed to state (nytimes.com), that the sounds in “Moveable Type”were limited to ones that suggested a vast pool of typewriters. I asked because part of the appeal of “Listening Post” is its melodic component, an entirely hummable underlay of synthetic tones. I wondered if the public setting of “Moveable Type” might have required — or even introduced the idea of — reducing the aural component.

First he clarified that despite evident structural similarities between the two works, “Post”and “Type”are significantly different from each other. He then explained that there are, in fact, additional, if subtle, other sound elements in “Type.”I hope to visit again in the near future.

David Brooks’s Corporate-Rock iPod — Or, In Praise of Fragmentation

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

In a thought piece earlier this week titled “The Segmented Society,” New York Times columnist David Brooks decried the “fragmentation” inherent in today’s diverse music scene, wishing for a halcyon era when “mega-groups attracted gigantic followings” (nytimes.com).

I pretty much never find myself agreeing with anything that Brooks writes, but what’s interesting about this particular piece of his is how he seems to put aside his vaguely libertarian, free-market mode when it comes to culture.

He is saddened that the monolithic acts of the past have given way to what could best be described as a democratization of culture. A critic of big government, he seems nonetheless to desire a big, centralized culture: “It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.” (He also seems to have not heard of Radiohead: “There are many bands that can fill 5,000-seat theaters, but there are almost no new groups with the broad following or longevity of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen or U2.” While we’re at it, how can a “new group” have “longevity”? That’s a perfect example of the stacked-deck rhetoric that makes Brooks unreadable most of the time.)

Somehow in Brooks’s imagination, the massive acts of the past were natural cultural occurrences, whereas today’s broad market is the result of a pattern of divide and conquer by record-industry executives: “In any given industry, companies are dividing the marketplace into narrower and more segmented lifestyle niches.”

Yeah, that’s right — Bruce Springsteen (whose guitarist, Little Steven, serves as a primary source of information in Brooks’s column), the Rolling Stones and U2 were cultural entities whose popularity was a natural outcome of mass appeal (no marketing or other machinations involved), whereas the rise of a more genre-aware, globally curious, shuffle-mode audience is … is what, exactly? Part of some master plan by the record industry?

Brooks’s use of the word “lifestyle” illuminates how mistaken he is. He seems to imagine that individuals elect to follow specific lifestyles and that music is then micro-tailored for them by a convenience industry. He gives no credence to the idea that rather than give their musical imaginations over to a handful of mega-groups, today’s listeners often fill their iPods (or equivalents) with a wide array of lesser-known acts — hip-hop and classic rock, soundtrack cues and novelty songs, indie-rock nuggets and non-English pop. For that is the era we live in now, which is precisely why it’s such an exciting time for music. The flourishing of electronic music in the past decade (the primary focus of this website) hasn’t been a self-contained phenomenon; it’s part and parcel of the flourishing of folk music, jazz, heavy metal, hip-hop, contemporary classical, country, etc., etc. — and the countless subgenres thereof. (Speaking of diversity, I won’t even begin to excavate Little Steven’s myopic and self-serving sense of musical history.)

But since Brooks’s usual beat is politics, I’ll just assume that he isn’t really writing in “The Segmented Society” about music — or even about fears of a multi-cultural America — at all. What he may be doing here is channeling his frustration that his own political party, after seven years in the White House, has an overstuffed block of presidential candidates who have widely differing views and who thus appeal to different segments of the party — and that there is no single evident front-runner. That is, no crowd-pleaser.

(Brooks already has been taken to task for “The Segmented Society” by various folk, including Alex “therestisnoise.com” Ross, gawker.com, playboy.com‘s Tim Mohr, thestranger.com‘s Eric Grandy and businessweek.com‘s Jon Fine.)

MP3s of Ray Lee’s Spinning Sound Works

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The artist Ray Lee uses the Theremin as a starting-off point for his sound-rich sculptural installations and performances. His “Choir” places 16 spinning devices in a single space. The setup looks like a compact windfarm, and the resulting sound is a rapturous, churning cloud of tones (MP3).

A more recent iteration of that practice, “Siren” nearly doubles the number of tripods and adds LEDs to mark their circuitous paths; the sound is an equal mix of kinetic energy and bliss (MP3). The image to the left, borrowed from Lee’s website, shows him adjusting an installation of “Siren.”

Just yesterday, Lee presented a new piece, “Force Field,” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ica.org.uk) in London: “By interacting with the electromagnetic ‘force field’ that surrounds the theremin (the instrument you play without touching), Lee activates and controls a series of kinetic sound machines, creating music and movement from the ether.”

There’s a lot of video at his website, invisible-forces.com.

Diana Al-Hadid’s Gramophone at Perry Rubenstein (NYC)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Perry Rubenstein Gallery in Manhattan currently houses a sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid titled “Record of a Mortal Universe”(2007). The work is characteristic of Syrian-born, Ohio-based Al-Hadid: a freestanding set piece that serves as a fantastic vision of an impossible instrument. True to form, it is just shy of nightmarish.

The sculpture, pictured here, shows steps leading to a distant architectural crown, and beneath those steps are the spindly pedals of some strange organ. Where an organ might have pipes, this one instead houses a massive, ornate gramophone. The gallery describes the work as a “narrative object.”

The lasting impression is several-fold: of the fragile pedals beneath decaying steps; of the gramophone that allows light to pass through like a Tiffany lamp; of the way that the gramophone’s horn narrows to a point, and how at the place where the needle that results from that point might make contact with a record, the grooves of the record look more like ripples, ripples that the point effects upon the surface of a thick, dark water that is frozen in time.

It’s not entirely clear if that those ripples (pictured below) are, indeed, concentric circles or the single, inwardly spiraling groove of a proper acetate or vinyl recording, but the suggested conflation is classically surreal.

Documentation provided by the gallery describes some of Al-Hadid’s intended narrative:

Rather than playing a record, the gramophone simulates the playing of fictive sounds of water ripples (sound waves) made by the fall of the hero from the top of the stairs. The illustrious gramophone is left to capture and echo the conjured sounds of the protagonist’s demise.

That reference to a “hero” seems at odds with how silent, how devoid of life aside from the allowance made by the piece’s title, the sculpture “Record of a Mortal Universe”appears to be — much like “Portal to a Black Hole,” the piece the artist had in the “Agitation and Repose” group show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery earlier this year (see disquiet.com, August 25, 2007).

“Mortal Universe”is on view from October 19 through November 24, and when I stopped by Perry Rubenstein earlier this week and inquired of the gallery representative if Al-Hadid ever makes pieces that actually emit sounds, pieces that make music, she said not that she’s aware of. And then she added, “You know, nearly everyone asks that.” (More information at perryrubenstein.com.)

No Music Day — Preserving the Old Ways from Being Abused?

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Today, November 21, has been No Music Day — the third of five annual No Music Days as envisioned by Bill Drummond. Drummond was one of the two founding members of the early techno-rock act KLF, and his No Music Day (nomusicday.com) pretty much speaks for itself. It’s an attempt in our age of ubiquitous music to relieve ourselves of the onslaught and to not put music in its place so much as to return it to a less utilitarian, less ignorable state.

This means not just the music that suffocates us in the form of commercial jingles, but also the musical shell in which we insulate ourselves courtesy of iPod headphones — the immediate descendant of Walkman headphones, for which there had been no such precedent.

The Walkman debuted in 1979, which may be why Drummond’s five-year plan ends on the machine’s 30th anniversary. While many of us have passed today entirely unaware of Drummond’s growing army of headphone-snatchers, appliance un-pluggers, and other sonic martyrs, some institutions have been playing along; BBC Radio Scotland (bbc.co.uk/scotland) went so far as to play no music at all for the full 24 hours — no songs, no intros or outros to news segments.

The event has been covered widely (guardian.co.uk, nytimes.com, scotsman.com), and is seen as both a genuine preservationist gesture on Drummond’s part, and as an art-prank, simply the latest among his many — and not as if the two options are mutually exclusive.

I worry that such attention to a proposed idyllic absence of composed sound might diminish the public’s potential to appreciate the musical properties of the natural and industrial sounds that are all around us. I worry that such nuance, of the sort championed by composers John Cage and R. Murray Schafer, will be lost in the one-note noise of Drummond’s propaganda.

Drummond has certainly succeeded in keeping his message succinct, no doubt fully aware that public statements can be misconstrued easily. Why, a little over a month ago, art by his fellow KLF co-founder, Jimmy Cauty, was removed from the outside of a gallery by municipal workers in Brighton, England. It had been mistaken for graffiti (disquiet.com).