Marc Weidenbaum's Blog, page 484
August 29, 2012
Listening to ‘Loom’
Loom is a short science-fiction film by writer-director Luke Scott. Scott is the son of director Ridley Scott and the film is, in various ways, the offspring of one of Scott’s great achievements, Blade Runner. It’s as much a matter of setting (dystopian future) and characters (a scientist and his mysterious house guest) as it is of plot (manufactured lifeforms). The score to the film, which is about 20 minutes in length, is particularly effective. Its credited to Colin Smith and Simon Elms, who for the first three quarters provide something more akin to sound design than score — or, more to the point, sound design as score. The music heard in the film could very well simply be an enhanced recording of the environments in which the film is set: the audio from the ventilation systems of a laboratory and a stark apartment complex. Certainly, the sounds are heightened and given tonal and rhythmic structure, so perhaps it’s more to the point that it’s as if we’re hearing the sounds of the environment as discerned by the main character — the ventilation triggering, or reinforcing, his anxiety, claustrophobia, and scheming. As a nice touch, the pulsing with which the film opens brings to mind a heartbeat, telegraphing the story that will follow.
This “sound design as score” is the case for the first 15 minutes or so in Loom, at which point the film’s climax begins, and the score becomes more formally musical, more conventionally musical. These things are purely relative, of course. The score remains gauzy and hazy as the climax gets underway, but the synthesis is readily apparent. More to the point, there’s no longer a material correlation between what’s heard and what is seen, and thus the score takes on a more traditional role. This final segment comes across more like a synthesizer being played, and the music at this stage brings to mind mellifluous passages of the original Blade Runner score by Vangelis.
The closing credits feature a vocal that seems to have been put through a lightly glitchy filter. (The credits include this line: “Punjabi Folk Song performed by Mrs. Mohini Bangera.”) Given what occurs in the film, it’s touching to hear a woman’s voice, especially one that has been conjured to seem partially artificial.
The film was shot on the “RED EPIC in 3D” system, and serves as a showcase for the digital technology. As a note at red.com states, Loom is intended to be viewed on a laser projector, but the web version was posted for general consumption.
More on the film at deadline.com. Located via io9.com. More on the film’s composers, Smith and Elms, at eclectic.tv.
August 27, 2012
Asylum Transmission (MP3)
The 11th in Tuonela‘s Asylum Transmission series is the latest in an ongoing series of experimental music releases. At less than five minutes in length, it’s a static-infused foray into composition that disregards harmony, melody, and rhythmic metrics in favor of attenuation — in particular the way that attenuation influences a listener’s expectations. “Asylum Transmission #11 Tinfoil Hat Time” unfolds as a transformed recording, or so it appears, some sort of carnival or otherwise celebratory music that torques into chainsaw sine waves that, depending on the ear’s perspective, might sound like New Year’s Day bells or the underlying sound design for the next Saw movie. There’s an intrinsic sense that the source material will return and reveal itself, but this never occurs.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/tuonela-1. More music from Tuonela at tuonela.bandcamp.com. More on Tuonela, who is from Sydney, Australia, at drugdealerrecords.com.
August 26, 2012
Plumbing the Buchla
The musician who goes by ngngngng continues to post short experiments in modular synthesis — brief excursions into rough notions of causality channeled through spaghetti bowls full of patch cords — at the soundcloud.com/ngngngng account. The efforts were noted here back in February (“The Dada of the Buchla”) and they continue apace. The recent “30,” a mostly delicate array of insectoid chatter, is annotated, as has largely been ngngngng’s habit, solely with a brief list of modules involved, in this case: “259e-292e-206e-281e-250e.”
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ngngngng.
August 25, 2012
Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet
Not a speaker, and yet quite loud. (Ceiling vent.) http://t.co/cUwKwN6w #
The third time the Sirius/Muzak/whatever "radio" in a café plays Norah Jones in two hours, everyone should get a free espresso. #
10.8.1 #
Details to come, but I'll be in Long Beach (CA) on Sept. 1 for 9th annual SoundWalk sound-art festival: http://t.co/uWlsJM2C #
Already 3 @djunto tracks exploring what @the_radius broadcast's jingle would sound like as the root of a composition: http://t.co/lSzme8ob #
At the most basic level, quick/informed customer service means: "Our products work sufficiently that we're not inundated with complaints." #
The 34th weekly @djunto project explores the idea of a radio show's theme song bleeding into the feature presentation: http://t.co/XdREURGZ #
Car dealer's wifi is super slow. Other guy in waiting room with laptop & I just gave each other the "You downloading Game of Thrones?" look. #
All the more timely thanks to Curiosity: I spoke with @ChristofMigone about his Martian Chronicles sound art: http://t.co/XrOMnQfM #
Also found in my closet: A Fistful of Turkeys, Saga, Starfire II. All in all, a turn-based time capsule. #
Found a ton of old Steve Jackson (and related) games today in my closet: Hot Spot, Car Wars, Annihilator/One World, One-Page Bulge … #
Mostly for @pauladaunt + @compactrobot, here's my 1993 Depeche Mode interview: http://t.co/z1umtvKB + thoughts on it: http://t.co/BcQTSYft #
Between @soundcloud & @internetarchive, the Instagr/am/bient collection has been streamed/downloaded just shy of 40,000 times. #
Warmed-Up Leatherette #
Apparently this camera at the entrance of an abandoned movie theater is just taking notes. http://t.co/6mLyVBq6 #
For folks who watch Alphas, last night's episode was the one with the infrasound plot I mentioned in my recent @naturemagazine interview. #
I check the weather some mornings, but I always find myself listening to field recordings from around the world. #
With 4 Radiohead albums in Pitchfork's top 20 albums of past 15 years, the title Amnesiac takes on a deeper meaning: http://t.co/QNYa1R4Z #
2 more notes about public outdoor pianos on Denver's 16th St: (1) lots of homeless people play piano; (2) heard 3 people play "Mad World." #
I listened to the Bourne Legacy score before seeing the film, and really dug the "Cognitive Degrade" track. It's all the better in context. #
Tuesday noon siren in San Francisco after return trip from Denver: a welcome alarm. #
I joined in with some folks on a sonic @GAFFTA Urban Prototyping project. Hopeful it gets approved. More on the expo at http://t.co/vRkSd2zR #
Amazing. MT @benjamindauer: My first @djunto track, “A Glimmer of Hope,” has nearly 4,500 plays. Thanks for listening! http://t.co/zNAWWBh7 #
Waking, following Denver trip, to the fog horns of the San Francisco Bay. That's home. #
Pleased to learn in last week's Alphas that Dr. Rosen, like his drug-addled peer Dr. Bishop from Fringe, keeps Yes LPs in his office. #
At airport watched over shoulder of someone power-consuming Reddit-filtered images & videos; feared for future of the paragraph. #
DEN -> SFO / Headed home after tremendous Denver visit. #
When the tile on a bar in a Mexican restaurant looks like a Monome. http://t.co/GhX9dxWI #
One of the few restrictions we have faced this evening: http://t.co/rq6t2dOh #
Junto concert set up is going well but the @ustream is not so we likely won't be streaming live. Apologies. We will post audio post-concert. #
Ten and Tracer's brobdignagian @djunto glass (note laptop for scale). http://t.co/zdXczaYY #
Cody Yantis' three-glass set up for tonight's @djunto show. Not pictured: guitar. http://t.co/BvnNZGsg #
C. Reider's glass with dual contact mics for tonight's @djunto show. http://t.co/1dQeX9Sh #
Almost certainly. RT @debcha: @disquiet I won't be able to listen to the livestream tonight—any chance it'll be archived somewhere? #
Mysterybear's seriously stabilized wine glass for tonight's @djunto concert in Denver. http://t.co/WHuhUX39 #
Wine glass and guitar for Radere's #djunto set tonight. http://t.co/LipNiUwA #
Three and a half hours until the @djunto show. It'll stream live here: http://t.co/9FQFu1YM (music for digitally enhanced glass harps) #
Less than 6 hours until @djunto showtime. An evening of music for electronically mediated glass harmonica: 7pm at Denver's Walnut Room. #
Having a Scotch & soda at a Denver bar, watching photos pop up in Instagram of the current @djunto project (turntables as sound objects). #
We should be streaming the @djunto show Sunday (around) 7:00pm Denver time from this @ustream channel: http://t.co/9FQFu1YM #
Come visit, listen, perform! MT @vuzhmusic: Alright, slackers, you have exactly 25 hours to get on a plane for Denver: http://t.co/ONxoRmEi #
Electronic musician setting up Bucky covering. ("lt took 12 hours last year; this year: 4.") http://t.co/i2JbBBKq #
Not a pipe organ. (Robert Mangold sculpture in Denver Civic Center.) http://t.co/JqfwjXUh #
August 24, 2012
Shostakovich Remixed Remixed
The Berkeley, California–based composer and sound designer Kent Sparling remixed a Shostakovich chamber symphony along with dozens of his Disquiet Junto colleagues, back when the 13th project was underway (the series has now had almost three times as many projects). The projects have a strict deadline inherent in their definition. In part this is an organizational matter, but it’s also part of the ethos of the projects, which is to provide a situation in which the musicians are comfortable failing in public — if you aren’t entirely pleased with your work, you can always just point out that it was made under demanding restrictions, but no matter what you have attempted the challenge and produced something.
And, if you are somewhat pleased, you can subsequent to the project work on it some more, which is precisely what Sparling — whose work in films include the score to Wayne Wang’s The Princess of Nebraska — did, taking the drone he exuded from the source material and lending, to these ears, more tonal diversity.
This is the earlier version, “Parcel [disquiet0013-wildup],” created for the project in its original time frame:
This is the further refinement, “Designs,” completed subsequent to the initial project:
The tracks were posted for free download to Sparling’s SoundCloud.com account (“Parcel,” “Designs”). More on and from Sparling at jicamasalad.net and jicamasalad.bandcamp.com.
August 23, 2012
Disquiet Junto Project 0034: Radius Joint
Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.
This week’s project is a shared-sample one, which is to say everyone will work from the same initial sound source. The shared sample for this project is the jingle, or sound logo, or opening cue, or theme song — or, in the term preferred by the famed BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the “signature tune” — for the Radius broadcast/podcast, an avant-garde radio program out of Chicago run by Jeff Kolar (who was, by the way, one of the performers at the Chicago Disquiet Junto show back in April). The first time I listened to one of the Radius programs, I mistook the opening sound as part of the featured presentation. Only the second time I listened to a Radius program did I realize that the initial 14 seconds were, in fact, the show’s opening cue, or jingle. While I’ve always enjoyed listening to the Radius series, I am sometimes disappointed that such a great sound ends after less than a quarter of a minute’s playing time. So, I wondered what it would sound like if that cue were, in fact, the starting point for a composition.
The idea for the project also came out of some research I’ve been doing on the idea of the jingle, which was once the hallmark of commercial advertising, but has faced something of a rocky road as consumers have (supposedly — I have mixed feelings about this subject) gotten more media savvy. In this case, we’re exploring the concept of the theme song bleeding into the feature presentation.
The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, August 23, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, August 27, as the deadline. View a search return for all the entries as they are posted: disquiet0034-theradius.
The above image is the logo for the Radius.
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). They appear below translated into German, Japanese, and Spanish, courtesy of Tobias Reber, Naoyuki Sasanami, and Norma Listman, respectively:
Disquiet Junto Project 0034: Radius Joint
This is a shared-sample project. The sample is the opening jingle (or “sound logo”) for the excellent Chicago-based series called Radius. The series is broadcast in Chicago at 88.9 FM. Its jingle is titled “Radius loop.”
You will make an original piece of music in which the sample will serve as your sole sound source. Your track will open with the jingle/logo running in full. As it comes to a close, you will segue into an original piece of music built from a transformation of that jingle/logo. You can transform this source audio as you please, but you cannot include any additional sounds.
The jingle/logo, which is just 14 seconds long, can be downloaded from here:
Background: The Radius show’s goal is “to support work that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum.” The goal of this Disquiet Junto project is to explore the idea of a radio show’s theme song, its jingle/logo; we’ll do this by imagining that the jingle/logo is in fact the subject of such a show’s entire content, rather than simply its opening introduction.
Deadline: Monday, August 27, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 2 and 4 minutes in length.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0034-theradius” in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: As always, you don’t have to set your track for download, but it would be preferable.
Linking: When posting the track, please include this information:
The source audio for this track is the jingle, or sound logo, for the Radius broadcast series, based in Chicago. More info at:
More on this 34th Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2012/08/23/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
. . . . .
Project in German:
Disquiet Junto Projekt 0034: Radius Joint
In diesem Projekt wird es um die Arbeit mit einem zur Verfügung gestellten Sample gehen. Bei dem Sample (oder “Sound-Logo”) handelt es sich um das Opener-Jingle der Radio-Sendereihe “Radius”, die im Raum Chicago auf der FM-Frequenz 88.9 gesendet wird. Der Titel des Jingles ist “Radius loop”.
Die Aufgabe besteht nun darin, ein eigenes Musikstück zu komponieren, als dessen einzige Klangquelle “Radius loop” dient. Am Anfang des Stücks soll das komplette Jingle stehen. Wenn dieses langsam ausklingt, gestaltest du einen Übergang in deine eigene Komposition aus dem transformierten Jingle-Material. Du kannst das Sample so stark verfremden wie du willst, aber keine anderen Klangquellen verwenden.
Das 14 Sekunden lange Jingle/Logo kann unter dem folgenden Link heruntergeladen werden:
Hintergrund des Projekts: “Radius” hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, “Werken, die die tonalen und öffentlichen Teile des elektromagnetischen Spektrums erkunden, eine Plattform zu geben”.
Ziel dieses Disquiet Junto-Projekts ist es, das Jingle einer Sendung zu erkunden – als ob das Jingle der ganze Inhalt der Sendung wäre, und nicht bloss das Eröffnungsmoment.
Deadline: Montag, 27. August, 23.59 Uhr wo immer du bist.
Dauer: Das Stück sollte zwischen 2-4 Minuten dauern.
Information: Bitte füge dem Stück eine Beschreibung deines Arbeitsprozesses bei, wenn du es auf Soundcould veröffentlichst – mit Planung, Komposition und Aufnahme. Diese Beschreibung ist ein zentrales Element im kommunikativen Prozess innerhalb der Disquiet Junto.
Titel/Tags: Versehe deinen Track mit dem Tag “disqiet0034-theradius” wenn du es der Disquiet Junto-Gruppe auf Soundcloud beifügst.
Download: Wie üblich wäre es schön wenn du deinen Track downloadbar machen würdest, aber es wird nicht erwartet.
Verlinken: Füge deiner Track-Beschreibung bitte auch die folgende Information bei:
The source audio for this track is the jingle, or sound logo, for the Radius broadcast series, based in Chicago. More info at:
More on this 34th Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2012/08/23/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
. . . . .
Project in Japanese:
Disquiet Junto Project 0034: ラジウスの集い
今回は共通のサンプルを使ったプロジェクトです。そのサンプルはシカゴをベースに88.9 FMで放送されている、『ラジウス』と呼ばれる素晴らしいシリーズ番組のオープニング・ジングル（またはサウンド・ロゴ）です。タイトルは“ラジウス・ループ”といいます。
そのサンプルをただ１つの音源として使用してオリジナルの音楽を作ってみましょう。あなたの作品は、まず全体がそのジングル／ロゴから始まる構造にしてください。終わりにいくにしたがって、そのジングル／ロゴから変形加工したあなたのオリジナル音楽と、途切れずにスムーズに移行するように制作してください。その音源はあなたが望むように変形加工してもかまいませんが、他の音源を追加してはいけません。
14秒の長さからなるそのジングル／ロゴは以下からダウンロードできます：
背景：『ラジウス・ショー』という番組は「調性音楽と電磁スペクトルの空間が共に連動するためのサポート」を目指しています。今回のDisquiet Junto projectは、ジングル／ロゴを通してそのラジオ番組のテーマソングを探求します。それはむしろ番組の簡単なイントロオープニングというよりは、ジングル／ロゴがその番組の完全な内容コンテンツを想起させるようなものであることを目指しましょう。
〆切：8月27日月曜日11:59pm あなたがどこに住んでいるかかわらず
長さ：2～4分の長さにしてください
情報：作品をサウンドクラウドのグループに投稿する際には、あなたの採用した構想、作曲、録音の過程についての説明をつけてください。この記述がこのグループの本来の目的であるコミュニケーションに大事なものとなります
タイトル／タグ：Disquiet Juntoグループに作品を投稿する際には“disquiet0034-theradius” という言葉をタグとしてタイトルに追加してください
ダウンロード：いつものように必ずしもダウンロード可能にする必要はありませんが、望ましい
リンク：投稿する際には以下の情報を追加してください
More on this 34th Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2012/08/23/disqui...
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
. . . . .
Project in Spanish:
Disquiet Junto Proyecto 0034 Radius Joint
Este es un proyecto de compartido de sampleo. El sonido a samplear es el sonido que ablre (“sonifo logo”) la excelente serie de radio en Chicago, Radius. El programa se transmite en Chicago en el 88.9 de FM radio.
El objetivo es hacer una pieza musical, para la que dicho sonido te servirá como la unica fuente sonora. Tu track deberá abrir con y usar los 14 segundos de tu fuente sonora. Cuando este llegando esta este llegando a su final, deberá seguirla otra pieza compuesta por ti, a partir de tu fuente original. Puedes transformarla como tu quieras, pero no puedes aumentar otros sonidos.
El “Sonido Logo” dura solo 14 segundos y lo puedes bajar aquí:
Antecedentes:
El objetivo de “The Radius” es apoyar obras y trabajo que exploran el espectro electromagnético, con respecto a tono y espacios publicos. El objetivo de Disquiet Junto, es explorar la idea del “Sonido Logo”, para lo cual imaginaremos que dicho sonido sera el tema y contenido de un programa entero.
Fecha limite: Lunes 27 de Agosto a las 11:59pm del lugar donde te encuentres.
Duración: Favor de mantener tu pieza de dos a cuatro minutos.
Información: Incluir una descripción de tu proceso de plantación, composición, y grabacion. Tu información es esencial para la comunicacion en Disquiet Junto.
Titulo: Por favor incluye el termino “disquiet0034-theradius” en el titulo de tu track cuando lo subas al grupo Disquiet Junto en Soundcloud.com, también usalo como tu tag cuando lo quieras buscar.
Descarga: Es preferible que tu mezcla se pueda descargar, pero no es necesario ( es tu decisión).
La fuente del audio para este proyecto y para mas información:
Mas sobre Disquiet Junto 34:
http://disquiet.com/2012/08/23/disqui...
Enlaces: Cuando subas tu track, por favor incluye la siguiente información:
Mas información en Disquiet Junto:
Listening to Ray Bradbury’s Mars
The following piece first appeared at the website nomorepotlucks.org and is reprinted here with permission. At the time of its initial publication, July 1, 2012, I made some initial comments about it on this site: “Listening to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.”
Toronto-based artist Christof Migone revisited Ray Bradbury’s classic tale of sci-fi colonization, The Martian Chronicles, and came away with cascades of sound.
His work, The Rise and Fall of the Sounds and Silences of Mars (2010) consists of a page-by-page excavation of all sonic terms that appear in Bradbury’s original text. These terms appear as columns of words, all actively dislocated from their original context. For example, early on in the original novel, we read: “a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam” – but in Migone’s version all we get: “voice sang voice.” This work has appeared in various formats; in 2011 it was published as a book by Parasitic Ventures, and mounted as an outdoor installation at the Electric Eclectics festival in Meaford, Ontario. There’s also a freely downloadable PDF.
Migone has a long history in sound-related art. His work playfully skirts the lines between exhibition, music, and sound poetry. With Brandon LaBelle he co-edited the anthology Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Errant Bodies, 2001). He performed as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, he is a lecturer in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, and is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery.
In the realm of the artist’s book, Migone’s “Mars” suggests itself as a Spartan rendition of Tom Phillips’ Humument, in which fissures of text serve as canvases for visual images and micro-narratives, or, of Brian Dettmer’s objects that mix sculpture and collage.
Despite the piece’s formal rigor, Migone’s “Mars” is also quite personal in that it depicts the text as it appears in Migone’s personal copy of the original Bradbury book. Because he elected to collate the sound-related terms on a page-by-page basis, the project is an elegy to the rigid paginations of physical books, something that is rapidly evaporating with the popular advent of the ebook. This concern for the book’s fragility is just one of the ways in which Migone’s “Mars” draws on themes from Bradbury’s best-known work, Fahrenheit 451, the author’s clairvoyant expression of anxiety about a screen-obsessed culture.
In a lengthy conversation, Migone discussed his broader sound practice, about the decision-making that led to the “Mars” project, and about the promise inherent in sound art that is itself devoid of actual sound.
This conversation occurred on the phone in spring 2012, shortly before Bradbury passed away at age 91, and it is presented here, in a lightly edited version of the original transcript.
Marc Weidenbaum: How did this specific book, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, become the focus for your piece?
Christof Migone: I was curating a show in Montreal and one of the artists — he makes little robots — referenced The Martian Chronicles in his artist statement. It seemed that it was my due diligence as a curator to research his inspiration and, also, I guess I happened to have the time, and it rekindled something I hadn’t really explored since high school: my interest for science fiction. I am not a huge connoisseur of the genre, but I was definitely a fan at the time, and I had not really kept up with it, except for J.G. Ballard, and I hadn’t read all the classics, and that is definitely a classic.
Weidenbaum: At what point while reading it did the density of the sonic references occur to you?
Migone: It was at some stage through that initial (research) reading. I’m not sure at what exact page or chapter, but I started circling. Well, first I started underlining, which is what I usually do, you know, bits of interest, and moments where sound or sounds were referenced. And that wasn’t even for that particular curatorial purpose, but since my field is primarily sound, the evocation and linking of this Martian landscape to these inhabitants and the way they are communicating, and Bradbury’s embodiment of that through sound piqued my interest. And the more I noticed, the more my underlines became circles, and so I circled those parts, which I usually never do in books, and even just in the act of circling, it made me realize that it might not be fulfilling my own interest for a nebulous future purpose, but it was becoming a piece. It didn’t quite have a form, but I knew fairly quickly that I was going to do something with it.
Weidenbaum: Not long ago, I happened to re-read The Martian Chronicles, for the first time since high school, I think, and I had forgotten how much the book is a premonition of Fahrenheit 451. That book ends with an intrinsically sonic depiction of cultural memory: the idea of people keeping texts alive by memorizing them, so they’ll continue to be available even after the printed versions are burned. To what extent were you investigating the manner in which Bradbury explores sound as a means of sustaining a culture?
Migone: It was purely on the surface, meaning, I wasn’t thinking of the intent of the author, or the repercussions of the text, but thinking just within the internal logic of the fiction; how characters are being characterized and animated within the narrative, and the author’s awareness of the aural. That was basically what I was paying attention to.
Weidenbaum: How did the outdoor installation of Rise and Fall come to be?
Migone: Gordon Monahan, a composer and sound artist, who lived for many years in Berlin, and now lives on a farm, north of Toronto. There he runs an annual arts festival called Electric Eclectics. I was invited by him to create an installation at the 2011 edition of the festival, and it coincided with the book version of this project coming out. I had been to this festival a couple times, the year before to play live, and the year before that to accompany my partner, who was doing an installation. So, I had a good sense of the place and the nature of the festival – the kind of acts that would appear and the tone of the event – and I knew that I wanted to do something with text, with signage. You have to drive up a dirt road, and you’re going fairly deep into the country to end up at this place called the Funny Farm. That is an apt description of this farm; it is a surrealist place. It isn’t a working farm. It’s a place where two artists live, and given the space that they have at their disposal, they really concoct these magical spaces – both indoors and outdoors – and they’ve converted several small silos into spaces where people can do installations. My initial idea was to do a piece that would be something that the visitor to the event would come across on their way into the farm, up the dirt road. I wanted to have some kind of evocation of sound in the text in some way. Once I narrowed it down to this book, I thought that rather than have an excerpt, I wanted the whole piece to be present, and so the dirt road didn’t lend itself to that. So I switched my idea to this field, which is just below the stage where people perform. You don’t really see it in the images documenting the piece on my website, and there’s a whole other half of the field that you also don’t see, where people who are attending the festival are camping. It turned out to be a good decision because as you can see from the images, the landscape, even though it is very much of Earth, I think paradoxically, evokes the barren landscapes of Mars, mostly because they are dehumanized: it’s just grass and it seems to be endless. That’s a hyperbolic expansion of what’s actually there, of course. Part of the way I arranged them in the field was in a line, so once you’re in amongst the signs, you can look at either end of them and you have this idea that you are in a book; the panels are all in order, so you are walking from page 1 to page 182.
Weidenbaum: Your banners in the outdoor installation bring to mind the idea of planting a flag, which is something we associate with colonization, inter-terrestrial and otherwise.
Migone: Right, right. Yeah, they obviously aren’t staking ownership or territory, but at a formal level, there is that kind of placing a mark. I have always really enjoyed text pieces that are in situ; that you encounter in the city, be it Lawrence Weiner, or any artist who works primarily with text. Sometimes they allude to the history of the place, or spatial aspects of the place, but having that presence of language in the space – as opposed to a sculptural intervention or in an architectural way, or with color – the use of language brings a kind of poetics to it, which also makes me think of traffic signs or signs that are more utilitarian. In short, I find the presence of the literary in an open space a nice contrast to how one usually engages with the literary, for instance, at home on a bedside table.
Weidenbaum: Can you talk about the title of the piece?
Migone: One of my initial ideas as I was circling these words was to reproduce their placement on the page – in a temporal way – be it a video or a computer animation, so that you would see the worlds related to sound and sounds move in different places. I tried a few versions of that but it seemed to stick too closely to the text, and it seemed a bit labored for what I wanted to do. Whenever things get a little bit too complex at a technical level, I try to resist that. I prefer works that are kept simple: economical and elegant. So even though I tried a complicated process, I stopped. But in the process of doing that I had already come up with the title, The Rise and Fall of the Sounds and Silences from Mars, which is riffing off of the David Bowie album [The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars]. I like that connection between the title of that album and the connection to The Martian Chronicles. The [sense of a] rise and fall [within the work] became a little bit looser, but the way I arranged the words – because they’re arranged in columns – you get this movement. There’s more distance now from this idea of movement, but the idea is there.
Weidenbaum: There is something elegiac to the book, and the title reflects that.
Migone: Right, I see the connection to a deeper interpretation of it, but I like the literalness of the title.
Weidenbaum: On the two-page spreads in the printed version – the physical book – the words are justified right and left, which create an intense separation. What was your decision-making, typographically?
Migone: I hadn’t thought of that mostly because Michael Maranda of Parasitic Ventures Press in Toronto did the typesetting. He came up with the cover, and he came up with the idea of the frame within the page. The frame is sized exactly to my own paperback copy of The Martian Chronicles, and he also did some research with the font and tried to approximate the font that appears in my book. I think it’s a Bantam edition, and the left and right was his decision. Obviously I approved it, but we didn’t have a discussion about that decision. I can see the symmetry of it, especially in relation to the page numbers, but that’s as far as it goes.
Weidenbaum: You’d made a decision not to reproduce the placement of the words on the page. How did you decide on the direction you did take?
Migone: I wanted to make it systematic. This was a thought — that I could acknowledge the amount of lines, but just keep them in a column and not think of their left and right movement — but I was in a mode of thinking that, well, if I’m not going to reproduce their placement on the page, I can abstract it even further. However, I did keep their appearance in a column, so that, let’s see, on page 140, the word “said” appears first and that means it’s the first appearance of a word dealing with sound or sounds on that page. The next word is ‘voice’ on the same line in the original text, and that means they both appear on the same line in my text. Those were the basic structural devices, so that I had a system from the outset and I just applied it. I could have had a different system for every page, or every chapter, I guess. And I wanted to have some variety; the fact that one line could have more than one word if it appeared on the same line in the original book provides that variation, but aside from that, the column was the structuring rule.
Weidenbaum: Was there a page with no sound-related word on it?
Migone: Yeah, oddly enough, the very first page. I kept going back to the first page — “Can I find a word in there?” — because I was concerned some people would think it was a mistake or something. It was uncanny that it was the first page.
Weidenbaum: There are two questions I want to ask at this juncture. The first is: When did you decide to include the word ‘said’, which seems like it would significantly increase the ratio of words?
Migone: It came late. Basically, there was a second round of going back into the book and looking at what I had culled from it and making sure I hadn’t made any mistakes. While the word ‘said’ clearly denotes dialogue, I initially feared that it would overwhelm my project; be too present. But I came to the decision of including ‘said’ during the second stage because it became obvious that it would have otherwise been a glaring omission. I had several categories in terms of selection. It could be words in a scene where sound is very clearly being engaged by the author, or words that could allude to sound but weren’t necessarily intended that way in that particular place in that book. I also wanted to up the number of words selected, and since I was already abstracting the words into a different arrangement, it seemed fitting to the project to include any words that in and of themselves had sound properties. But obviously I didn’t add any words.
Weidenbaum: And that would have been the second question: Do you include words that suggest sound but that don’t specifically mean it? Like, if someone says: “I can hear the sounds” that includes two words – ‘hear’ and ‘sounds’ – and mean sound. But if someone says: “it sounds like you’re headed north not south”, that’s different.
Migone: Yes, in that second case, I would include that. I like the fact that obviously those words had more than one usage.
Weidenbaum: I think the reason it’s right for this project is because you’re taking words that have a formal and rhetorical purpose, and you’re abstracting them. So if the words already have a layer of abstraction, serving as the metaphorical rather than the literal, then those words should be included because they’re primed for the exact act that you’re encouraging.
Migone: Yeah, exactly.
Weidenbaum: One thing that drew me to this work was that it is sound art that doesn’t include sound. We might call what you’ve done? “Sound art for the deaf”?
Migone: Yeah, conceptual sound, or sound art, which has a mode that is more referential to sound, rather than actual sound. As an artist who started through radio, and then transitioned to audio publications — CDs primarily, in the early 1990s — it took me quite awhile to exhibit in a space. In that transition, I was very uncomfortable with the presence of sound in a gallery, for the known factors that: galleries are reverberant spaces; in a group show, you are sometimes intruding, so you’re forced to exhibit your work on headphones; the presence of bare speakers seemed to be overdone very quickly. It seemed, at least to me, that the strategy was to not take that route, but to think of ways where the presence of sound could be quite loud – quite prominent – but not in an audible way. That’s a challenge that I think is still ongoing for me, and obviously, I am not the only one mining this territory. I have always enjoyed that thwarting of a sense, but still providing sensorial input to that sense, via a conceptual or intellectual route.
Weidenbaum: Another piece of yours that is sound art, yet has no sonic portion, is As Palestine as Possible, which you’ve described as a combination of work by composers Charlemagne Palestine and John Cage, along with “street protests concerning Palestine.” How did that piece come about?
Migone: As Palestine as Possible is a very quick piece that has never been realized beyond the extent of a page on my website. But I am glad you pointed it out because it is almost as purely conceptual a piece as you could get in that it’s a title that alludes to a sound piece that doesn’t exist. It only exists as a title.
Weidenbaum: When you proposed the “Mars” installation for Electric Eclectic, was there any pushback? Was anyone disappointed there wasn’t any actual sound?
Migone: Oh, no, not at all. Gordon Monahan, and his partner Laura Kikauka, are very open. It’s a very casual, very loose context, so it was just about choosing the location, and then after that, it was carte blanche. I could do whatever I wanted.
Weidenbaum: Was copyright violation a concern for you at all?
Migone: Not at all. If anything, this is an homage to the book and brings attention to the book. To say there would be a copyright issue is like suggesting the word ‘said’ is copyrighted, and it seems ludicrous to go that route.
Weidenbaum: The book exists as a physical object, and there’s the installation you did, and then there is also the PDF, which seems like an increasingly valuable tool for sound poets. What do you think of the PDF as a form unto itself?
Migone: I haven’t seen that many instances of that. They seem to be mostly electronic versions of what would exist in print. I have seen some in which the electronic form has been used to its fullest extent in terms of some interactive aspects. I think the more exploration of any medium that is used, the better. I wouldn’t value one over the other. I think it is natural that whenever a new platform is introduced, there is a kind of relishing of the new possibilities it introduces. That initial stage is often overwrought before the work settles and becomes more transparent.
Weidenbaum: There’s a muscle memory to the process of looking for these words. When you were done with that part of the process, how hard was it to stop finding words in everything you read?
Migone: It keeps happening: whenever I am reading something, what I am currently writing or curating, or working on as an artist will skew my reading. I only seem to find the things I am currently thinking about, which obviously is what I am bringing into the act of reading. Sometimes I have had the opportunity to go back to a text I have read and annotated, and I see I have missed other stuff. As I go back to that text for another reason, I am finding another thread in the text, which is great. In some cases it’s frustrating, because it means I missed certain things, but I think it is normal that you will have your reading filtered by whatever is preoccupying you at the time.
Weidenbaum: This was a time-consuming process, I imagine, finding all the references in the text. How did you know you were done? How did you decide when you were done culling this text?
Migone: Well, there was that second stage, where I added the word ‘said’, and it was another opportunity for me to go back through it. I had my studio assistant assist me for some of it, for the sake of time, but whenever she does some work, I always check it to make sure everything has been done properly. I felt that I have been as accurate as possible. I’ve done other projects much more involved than this, much more prone to mistakes, where I get very anxious that someone checks that, say on page 57, I might have missed a word. Actually, I think that’s fine. I might have missed a word, but it doesn’t ruin the work in my view. I would be happy to hear from someone who tells me that I’ve made that type of mistake, in case there’s ever an opportunity to revise the work and make the correction. Plus, just the knowledge that someone spent enough time to check on my work is rewarding. I think the mistake of anyone would be to dismiss the work because of a mistake. That would be silly. Getting back to your question, I am a sort of (sort of a…) perfectionist, but I am also interested in failure as a concept; as a concept that one lives with and accepts.
The following bio of the subject of the interview ran at the bottom of the article as it appeared at nomorepotlucks.org: Christof Migone is an artist, curator and writer. His work and research delves into language, voice, bodies, performance, intimacy, complicity, endurance. He co-edited the book and CD Writing Aloud: The Sonics of Language (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2001) and his writings have been published in Aural Cultures, S:ON, Experimental Sound & Radio, Musicworks, Radio Rethink, Semiotext(e), Angelaki, Esse, Inter, Performance Research, etc. He obtained an MFA from NSCAD in 1996 and a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University in 2007. He has released seven solo audio cds on various labels (Avatar, ND, Alien 8, Locust, Oral). He has curated a number of events: Touch that Dial (1990), Radio Contortions (1991), Rappel (1994), Double Site (1998), stuttermouthface (2002), Disquiet (2005), START (2007), STOP.(2008), and Should I Stay or Should I Go (Nuit Blanche 2010 – Zone C), and eleven others for the Blackwood Gallery. He has performed at Beyond Music Sound Festival (Los Angeles), kaaistudios (Brussels), Resonance FM (London), Nouvelles Scènes (Dijon), On the Air (Innsbruck), Ménagerie de Verre (Paris), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Méduse (Québec), Images Festival (Toronto), Send+Receive (Winnipeg), Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee), Victoriaville Festival, Oboro, Casa del Popolo, Théâtre La Chapelle, etc. His installations have been exhibited at the Banff Center, Rotterdam Film Festival, Gallery 101, Art Lab, eyelevelgallery, Forest City Gallery, Studio 5 Beekman, Mercer Union, CCS Bard, Optica. He has collaborated with Lynda Gaudreau, Martin Tétreault, Tammy Forsythe, Alexandre St-Onge, Michel F. Côté, Gregory Whitehead, Set Fire To Flames, and Fly Pan Am. A monograph on his work, Christof Migone – Sound Voice Perform, was published in 2005. In 2006, the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal presented a mid-career survey of his work accompanied by a catalog and a DVD entitled Christof Migone – Trou. He currently lives in Toronto and is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga and the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery.
More on the artist at christofmigone.com.
August 22, 2012
Depeche Mode, Circa 1993
In early 1993 I traveled to London from Sacramento, California, to interview three quarters of the band Depeche Mode about their forthcoming album, Songs of Faith and Devotion.
A week later I flew to Los Angeles to meet with the final fourth.
I’ve long meant to post that interview here, but am only just now getting around to it, almost 20 years after the fact, and some 16 years since I launched this site. I was at the time of the interview midway through the seven years I would spend as an editor at Pulse!, the magazine formerly published by Tower Records (magazines, really — there were also Classical Pulse! and epulse). My Depeche Mode article, “Fashion Victims,” was the cover story for the May 1993 issue, which, for context’s sake, also featured interviews with Basehead (on the subject of its sophomore effort), the Kinks (for their final studio album, Phobia), and Michael Nyman (for an Argo Records collection). Adrian Tomine, who was drawing monthly comics for the magazine at the time, published the final section of his three-part “Sleepwalk.” Justin Green’s monthly comic was about disc jockey Alan Freed. Art critic Glen Helfand wrote a survey of rave-flyer art. (I had one other piece in the issue, a little summary of two very different tributes to Louis Armstrong.) It was, in retrospect, a particularly solid edition of the monthly publication.
My recollections of the trip to London to interview Depeche Mode are somewhat hazy. According to the brief bio that appears at the end of the article, my arrival in London occurred a week or so after the Tom Phillips retrospective had closed at the Royal Academy, much to my dismay. I stayed at a youth hostel to keep costs down. I remember having a beer at a pub and learning about the emotional toll of the dole by overhearing a father tell his son what “work” was like, based on recollections of what his father had told him before he’d lost his job. Margaret Thatcher had been out of office for barely two years.
I was, at that stage, something of a latecomer to Depeche Mode. I’d bobbed my head to “Just Can’t Get Enough” as a club wallflower, but was already in my listening habits phasing out of songs and toward sound — and to some extent that was the case for the band, too. I came to them via some then-recent Brian Eno remixes, associations to varying degrees of separation with Einstürzende Neubauten, U2, and photographer Anton Corbijn, and a handful of beloved tracks (“Personal Jesus,” “Death’s Door”).
The four members, by my estimation, couldn’t have been more different from each other or from how they appeared on stage. Martin Gore, Depeche Mode’s songwriter, was the most “normal” of the four, by which I mean he was the one with whom having a straightforward, broad-topic conversation came effortlessly. At one point his wife called to consult with him about a bed she was purchasing.
Alan Wilder, essentially the in-house producer, was focused entirely on the production process, which I very much enjoyed discussing at length. Despite the intensity of the record, he was fairly soft-spoken. He talked at length about how sampling and processing were changing the nature of pop-music production.
Andy Fletcher didn’t make a particularly positive impression at first. Despite an agreed-upon schedule, he made me sit and wait while he finished supper at a pub across the street from the Olympic Studios, where the interviews took place. But once the conversation began, he was quite open about how little he contributed musically. That’s not a slight; as the article shows, Fletcher’s role as the band’s in-house manager was essential to its existence and, in retrospect, a model for how bands today, in the post-Internet era, might consider configuring themselves. (Says Fletcher in the piece: “I suppose if we’d just said, ‘Ask the manager’ all along, we wouldn’t have learned as much as we have.”)
Dave Gahan, the band’s lead singer, was living in Los Angeles at the time. I interviewed him a week later at a hotel near the Capitol Records building in Hollywood. He was sweet, cordial, and reflective, yet exuded an absolutely intense focus. He made constant eye contact to an almost disconcerting degree. I’ve interviewed a lot of people, and I don’t think anyone else comes in a close second to how charismatic he was.
If my conversation with Fletcher was somewhat strained, it may have in part been because I was a tad upset that his dinner delay and some closed-down tube lines (there may have been an IRA threat at the time) were keeping me from getting to a Billy Childish concert across town. I eventually did get there, though. The concert I recall as clearly as I do Gahan’s captivating gaze. I entered the hall through the bar, and as I walked down a long corridor, I heard Childish’s band playing loudly, the Headcoatees singing along in tight nasally bad-girl harmony. Just as I entered the room, the song came to a close and Childish said, “Thank you — and good night,” to much applause. Exhausted from the day, I just stood there and heard myself screaming: “Nooooo!” The entire room quieted and turned toward me and then just as quickly turned back to the stage — and the band proceeded to play another song.
Down the road I may transcribe the full interviews with the four members of Depeche Mode, but for the time being, here’s a time capsule of the group from 1993: “Fashion Victims.”
This post is to announce the appearance of the interview on this site, but for archival purposes the interview itself appears in a separate post backdated to the time when it was first published: May 1993.
One final fun fact: The logo for Disquiet.com is based on a font derived from Depeche Mode’s Violator album cover.
August 21, 2012
A Sip of the Disquiet Junto Denver Concert
We should have the complete concert up for listening in the near future, but in the meanwhile, here is one of the seven performers from this past Sunday’s Disquiet Junto concert in Denver, Colorado: Dave Seidel, aka Mysterybear, performing what he’s titled “Resonance Cascade.” The format for the show had each musician doing two pieces: one for expanded glass harp (drawing from the third Disquiet Junto project, back in January of this year), and the other a recent piece they wanted to share with the audience. (This is the same format as the Chicago Disquiet Junto show earlier this year.) Seidel, like several others that evening, segued from the first to the second. His work was among the most drone-intensive of the concert, the sounds of the glass harp subsumed in deep processing; the second half is rich with sawtones that slowly take on a thick yet mellifluous sensibility. Like the majority of the performers (four out of the seven), Seidel didn’t employ a laptop; his equipment, which included various distortion pedals, is listed at the SoundCloud link below. He was the one performer at the show who wasn’t from the Denver area; he’d flown in from New Hampshire, where he lives, for the concert.
Performance originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/mysterybear. More on Seidel/Mysterybear at mysterybear.net.
The above photo, which I posted to my @dsqt account on Instagram during sound check the night of the performance, shows the glass that Seidel used during his piece.
August 20, 2012
Late Night Ukelele Drone
Inlet’s “Late Night Ukelele Drone” is just the sort of shared work-in-progress that SoundCloud.com specializes in providing a platform for. It’s less a draft of a song than it is a rough sketch: a proposed element at most, not a self-contained riff let along a proper song. In total it is less than a minute of tonal exploration, but it’s also eminently loopable. And the fragility of the sound is in many ways suited to brevity. The drone bears little if any trace of its reputed originating instrument, and repeated listens will no doubt have the ear focusing on any possible vestiges.
Inlet hails from Yellowknife, Canada. Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/inlet.
