Feedback Light as a Fjærlett

Feather, that is

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This beautiful instrument from Norway feeds back through spring reverb, and then lets the player adjust the audio with a 10-band graphic equalizer. It was created by Kristoffer Gard Osen, who is based in Oslo. The resulting sounds range from ethereal drones to industrial clanging, and the drones have a metallic vibe while the clanging has a rich resonance. Which is to say, this instrument isn’t about either/or; it’s about the varieties of sound in between. The name of the instrument is Fjærlett, which apparently is Norwegian for feather, or feathery. Which is to say, as Osen has noted, “You have to play it as light as a feather.” While this video serves as a product announcement by a small, one-person company, I’m sharing it based on the beauty of the sounds made during the performance. (In a June 30th update, Osen wrote that [an audio-input jack](https://mailchi.mp/b1e30d191773/fjrlett-waitlist?e=ddf84cbb79) will be available as an option.)

Video originally posted at [youtube.com](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WujMGqerd4). More on the Fjærlett at [tilde-elektriske.com](https://tilde-elektriske.com/fjaerlett).

Overnight Field Recording

Robert Rizzi leaves his rig alone

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

By definition, most field recordings are reflections of civilization, inhabited by the presence of whoever is doing the recording. Whether you’ve dropped a hydrophone into the bay or held a portable device up to catch the birdsong, you are there, physically connected to the recording tools. And the world that you are recording notes your presence. Animals avoid you. The wind curves around you. The device’s direction is determined by you.

But there are alternate approaches, such as Robert Rizzi’s. Rizzi, who is based in Kolding, Denmark, left his gear out in the wild, and then returned the next day to hear what his device heard when he wasn’t around. As he recounts:

>Last week I dropped a rig again in the Solkær meadows/wetland near my home. I have a friend who owns a large chunk of land there and he took me on an inspection/expedition of the area. I went back later the same evening and set up next to the little waterhole in the picture. I left the rig there until the next morning…

Even with his active absence, however, civilization managed to intervene. As he explains, the nearly 20 minutes heard here required post-production to remove the presence of planes, to adjust sound levels, and to filter out unwanted audio:

>This track is excerpts from the evening, night and dawn – it was pretty quiet so I have been fidling a bit with eq, compression and RX7 to enhance the result…(I’ll go back this week with my “big” rig to get a better recording hopefully without muchwork in post)
>
>Right at the beginning you hear a deer? really close to the mics eating, and finally running away, there’s swans flying by, heron or cranes vocalizing, frogs blackbirds etc… quite a few planes, and even a helicopter, over the 9 hours of recoding – I edited those out

Nonetheless, the sounds are special. The animals heard chomping in the foreground early on do disappear, and when they do the meadow opens up, and the ear hears further than it did previously, deep into the night.

Track originally posted at [soundcloud.com/rizzi](https://soundcloud.com/rizzi/solkaer-meadows-june-17th-2020-overnight). More from Rizzi at [twitter.com/RobertColeRizzi](https://twitter.com/RobertColeRizzi).

The Sound of One Gallery Clapping

A room tone test from the Fridman in Manhattan

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Like so many so-called “non-essential” businesses, art galleries largely sit empty right now. Some have been finding uses for the social distance, maintaining connections — and building new ones — through virtual events. The Fridman Gallery in Manhattan, for example, has been hosting live performances, under the title Solos, starting back on May 14. The gallery’s Vimeo page just yesterday uploaded a 12-minute video titled “SOLOS 04 – Room Noise Test.” Presumably it’s for the event scheduled tomorrow, June 23, at 8pm New York time (5pm here, I say to myself, as I enter it into my calendar). The footage, which is continuous and unedited, opens with actual room tone: near silence against the sheer absence of visible activity, aside from cars passing in the street just outside the distant glass front. Then a voice begins speaking and there is clapping, signals testing out the space’s reverberations (the sound of one gallery clapping, as it were), and the actual reverb on what must be the house sound system. There’s an extended bit of reverb right around 10:30, the echo so long and deep that sounds layer atop each other, spoken statements rendered unintelligible as the syllables cascade into a pile. The video is a strange thing, and a welcome one for someone who is used to spending lots of time in art galleries and who hasn’t been in one since February.

Video originally post at [vimeo.com](https://vimeo.com/431273180). More about the series at [fridmanlive.com](https://www.fridmanlive.com/).

A Work Tailor-Made

A twin in art

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A friend forwarded a story by Michael O’Donnell about the [Aubrey-Maturin books](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aubrey-maturin-series-my-captain-jacks-11592578818?emailToken=9b103e7ce825661a36b7475e1b8d210d08kETaSHFpE6mldror9SgU22ow8RGGY/gsRseCglaicja/e9Ltl2X5l7WncmT9Q7wSQtkG0RyfPv+JcOGJuCWOq8W5Ow5WDcJqv3w1Mz+lk%3D&reflink=article_gmail_share) of novelist Patrick O’Brian. The article, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week, opens, “I don’t know anyone but me who’s got a work of art that was tailor-made for him.” My friend wanted to know if the friends to whom he forwarded the article had a work they felt was tailor-made for them.

O’Donnell goes on: “Not tailor-made in the sense that the author or artist made a personal gift of it: I’m not referring to dedicatees. Nor do I mean favorites. Everyone has favorites. I mean stumbling across a film or novel that is pitched so finely to your particular sensibilities that encountering it is like discovering a twin sibling. You understand that it will be a part of your life from that point onward. The closest I’ve come to meeting another person who’s had this eerie good fortune was my grandfather, whose love for the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff was extraordinary to behold. He would sit in his rocking chair and close his eyes as the sound washed over him. From the expression on his face, you would almost think he was in pain. But those who knew him well understood that the look was rapture.”

I gave it some thought. Earlier in life this would have been an easier question to answer, an immediate one. At various stages of life I would have answered instantly: the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; or Brian Eno’s album Thursday Afternoon; or Dennis Potter’s TV mini-series The Singing Detective; or Don DeLillo’s novel Mao II; or J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin; or Terence Davies’ film Distant Voices, Still Lives; or the Latin Playboys’ debut album (the album I pitched to the 33 1/3 series before I pitched Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II); or Fernando Pessoa’s prose collection The Book of Disquiet (yeah, yeah, which translation?); or Janet Cardiff’s 40 Part Motet sound-art installation; or DJ Krush’s album Kakusei.

Short version: I don’t think I have one. I’m a serial obsessive art monogamist (SOAM for short). Right now the closest I could get is the Agnes Martin room at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Which of course, due to the pandemic, feels quite far away, even though it’s just across town.

Current Listens: Sadnoise’s Drones + Note-less Patches

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is my weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)

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NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases

▰ Femi Shonuga-Fleming records as Sadnoise. The just-released album *Droner* is far more exploratory and aggressive than its title might suggest. It’s filled with dense atmospheres, yes (numbered “Droner 00” to “Droner 09”), but they generally feel like the listener is on the receiving end of some intense industrial power plant’s exhaust. Which is to say, it’s exhilarating.

▰ Julianna Barwick has a new album due out July 10, and judging by the first two tracks to be made available, “Insight” and “In Light” (the latter featuring Jónsi of Sigur Rós), Healing Is a Miracle is going to be a masterpiece of melted pop, deep in shoegaze territory. Also guesting: Nosaj Thing and Mary Lattimore. Due out on Ninja Tune.

▰ The one downside about Fact Magazine’s Patch Notes series on YouTube is there aren’t actually any patch notes. That peculiar shortcoming aside, the latest is up to the series’ high standard: a solo performance of slow-motion, pastoral ambient from the excellent r beny.

▰ Robert Henke has added another archival bit to his Bandcamp account. Two bits, actually, from 2015. There’s the 90-BPM drones and clangs of “Dolores,” by Anstam (Lars Stöwe), and Henke’s own “VT-100,” antic yet spacious techno recorded entirely using one instrument: the Linn Drum.