Audial Interlude II

The Tate recently posted streaming audio for their collection of the cassette series Audio Arts. Originally started in 1973 by sculptor Bill Furlough, the series continued sporadically until around 2006. Each issue was a multi-volume set, featuring mostly interviews with artists of various disciplines, assorted sound works, lectures and readings of artists' texts, and the like.

Among the artists contributing or conversing: John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Dan Graham, Richard Hamilton, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, John Latham, Mario Merz, Dieter Roth, Vito Acconci, John Berger, Les Levine, Daniel Buren, and many many others. The primary editions of the series can be found here, will a separate archive for the numerous supplementary editions here.

The prevalence of interviews and blahblah might be of limited interest to many; but if its actual soundworks you want, Ubuweb has (in case you missed it) almost all of the Harvestworks's Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine series archived for listening and download purposes.

All That is Signal Dissolves into Noise

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Not Great Men (Modern Primitives vs. Killer Clowns Edition)

No sooner do I mention Thomas Houseago than NYT artcritic Ken Johnson publishes a review on an exhibition by/of same. The result is an all-too-common sight of watching American art-crit collapsing under the weight of all the extraneous baggage it’s saddled itself with these past 3 decades. Johnson’s "masculinity" framing narrative falling flat on its face, mainly because it comes across as a sneeringly disingenuous evocation of a '90s-style identity politics angle; which seems sneakily (and sarcastically) self-serving in this instance, what, given the public flogging that same critic recently received over some remarks he made about some other recent exhibitions. About the only thing he raises that might have much to do with anything significant is when he bemoans the retromantic nature of Houseago’s work and methods. But even that runs into trouble:

"Mr. Houseago’s eccentric enthusiasms are muffled by his reverence for traditions old and Modernist and by his Postmodernist play with generic formal and stylistic conventions. His art is too much about art and not enough about his inner life. It’s too impersonal."

But in a way, it’s kind of interesting to read, if only to watch the forces at play. A lot of points made, some of them arbitrary or poorly qualified, others contradictory, so in the end everything just sort of cancels each other out, leaving the reader with almost nothing to take away from having read it.

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Was curious to read the article in the latest New Yorker about the relationship between Alabama “outsider” artist Thornton Dial and his collector, patron and advocate Bill Arnett. Found it disappointing, can’t recommend it. Bears the common hallmarks of a lot of recent journalism (the type that’s become increasingly common in the NYer itself the past few years): Lopsided in its focus, raising questions that go insufficiently answered, with the writer (or editor) unable to figure out which story they’d like to tell, and in the end hedging it bets by defaulting to a baseline cynicism. The thing's also in need of some decent photos of Dial's work.

If there’s a story or central theme here, its about the disconnect between criterial narratives. Arnett’s passion and advocacy for “folk” art (particularly Dial’s), and the ceaseless frustrations he’s run into trying to get institutions take what he considers due attention. Of course, most of the institutions in question subscribe to a different, competing account of historical evolution – a telos in which artists like Dial don’t figure. (After all, why are they labeled “outsider” artists in the first place?)

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Objets sonore, II & III

"No-one else can hear the world like you can when you put those headphones on. With nearly all wildlife and natural history work it's a solitary process. You can't talk about it when you're recording, you've just got to move the microphones and do it. In that sense there's an easy analogy with photography. It's a solitary activity. I then like going through the process of selection, editing, composition, production, performance, whether it's a radio broadcast or a sound installation, which you then share with as many people as you can to engage with them. I really like that idea of going from the point source."

- Chris Watson, as interviewed by The Quietus

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5) PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC DRIFT, AMSTERDAM 1959, ASGER JORN AND NIEUWENHUYS ANTON CONSTANT VIA WALKIE-TALKIE

„Asger, over, the wind is now blowing really strong here in Stedlike plaza, out“.

„I know, Constant, we had expected a rising of the northern wind towards the Baltic in the night, right at the centre, moving to Dredike are, where we are adrift, out“.

„Over, we are proceeding at measured pace with eyes slightly tilted up, out“.

„The perception of space is actually more unitary, isn’t it? A significative growth in attention to detail, out“. [...]

„Over, we’re following the tinkling of what seemed to be a domestic animal collar. We’ve arrived here from Marionetten Theater at the Waag’s, right behind Neuw Markt, Oude Zijde quarters, out“.

„Constant, we’ve stopped in front of Centraal Station, muffled, waiting for the wind blow to strike on us. Let me hear that tinkling sound through walkie-talkie, out“.

„Over, DRING DRING DRING hey, the gust has resumed, we’re taking Zeedjk straight ahead. Rattled as it is now you should be able to hear the collar loud and clear DRING DRING DRING,. . ..„

- from a recent post on the soundscape of the city of Bologna, via Datacide

Incidentally, should you care to read it, the book Watson mentions in the interview -- the 1971 OUP publication Composing with Tape Recorders -- was recently made available in .pdf form via Monoskop. Link here.

Vinyl Reckonings, Redux (Geezer Edition)

This past week I've seen a number of posts from various U.K. music bloggers about the pending closure of the HMV record-shop chain. Out of which I found Neil Kulkarni's "Some thought about growing up and falling apart" to be the one that, for me, had the most personal resonance.

"But hold on. Nostalgia, as it’s phonetic adjacency to neuralgia suggests, is a more complex, nagging, painful thing than that. Nostalgia doesn’t have to be about yearning for what’s lost. None of us are dumb enough or depressed enough to think our school days were the best years of our lives, let alone wish ourselves back into the strange world of threat, confusion and hyper-sensitivity that childhood was. Nostalgia can, though, be about confrontation, can be about running against the brick wall of time’s ongoing moves of obsolescence on everything you once held dear. It can be a brutal realisation that in at its depths, what you’re really sad for is what the hell’s happened to you, how much you lost getting so much smarter."

Kulkarni's yarn has little to with any brand or particular store, but the experience of growing up with music in a particular physical form(at), and with the part the experience of frequenting brick-and-mortar premises, and is ultimately the larger and overarching role that the ritual of bin-browsing and the discovery of certain special recordings play in one shaping one's sense of self during one's youth. As well as a mediation on recorded music's evolution from material to immaterial (or its return to the latter state, as he points out), and about the history of recorded music in general.

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Of course I can identify, because I'm of that age/generation when music was only acquirable in said material form -- particularly that of LPs (and, to a slightly lesser extent, cassette tapes). But in recent years I've had any number of younger friend for whom that formative relationship was unknown, was an anachronism. Who maybe grew up with CDs, but who in adulthood mostly abhorred music in any "hardcopy" form.

Or the realization I had of this generational disconnect when I started doing radio over a decade ago, and was occasionally assigned a new and much younger DJ to train in the studio's booth. The first time I blithely and unthinkingly told one of these kids to cue up a record, and then watched in horror as they threw the stylus onto or across the LP (one of mine, actually) with a destructive, audible KWU-THUMP. And immediately realizing how much I had witlessly assumed -- figuring that any music lover would've at some point learned how to handle vinyl and a turntable.

Kulkarni's spiel taking a record home upon purchase and experiencing a revelation upon first listening reminds me of Lester Bangs's similar description of same in his "Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung" essay. But I also remember, like Kulkarni, of having my mind blown upon first hearing Public Enemy. Of buying Yo! Bum Rush the Show back in 1987 when I knew fuck-all about the record or the group, getting it home, dropping the needle in the groove, and within a matter of seconds have my sensibilities turned upside-down by the onslaught of noise that was "You're Gonna Get Yours." Of being immediately smacked upside my head by it, and immediately feeling like I would thereafter listening to music with a completely different set of ears. That sort of aesthetic-altering epiphany that happens with only so many songs or albums in a person's youth.

And in his post, Kulkarni also described the process of going out on a untested limb, of buying the unknown and unpreviewed item, "things that I HAD to learn to live with to make the money spent seem worth it." Which is a situation I knew very well in my teenage years, taking a chance and winding up with something that disappointed or confounded me when I first played it, that I simply didn't warm to at first because it threw me a curve. And how in some cases, after repeated spins -- with me determined to find something about the record that would justify the money spent -- some of these items became favorites, sometimes even nudging my own tastes and preferences in a different direction. So what Kulkarni's talking out was also (or often) a part of a process of personal development and discovery.

Without Erasing: The Missing Music of Richard Maxfield

Writing in his book Ocean of Sound some years ago, David Toop observed: "If Richard Maxfield had not committed suicide in 1969, and if his electronic music pieces were not so difficult to find or to hear, then our idea of how music has changed and opened out during the past thirty-five years might be very different." Toop penned those remarks back in 1994; and, even at this much later date, the thought still holds true. Before jumping to his death from a hotel window ledge in Los Angeles at the age of 42, Maxfield could be considered one the chief pioneers of electronic music on American shores.

Despite the archival cornucopia that it offers, Reissue Culture has had its share of oversights, and Maxfield has been one of them. Only a few of his compositions have seen digital reissue over the years, with works like the three-minute "Amazing Grace" or 1963's "Pastoral Symphony" turning up on a few scattered compilations. Depending on which account you go with, when he left New York for the West Coast, Maxfield entrusted his tapes to artists Walter De Maria; who passed them along to La Monte Young, who in turn reputedly entrusted them to the Dia Arts Foundation.

Terry Riley, being interviewed in the course of a game of "Invisible Jukebox" in The Wire back in 1999 shed some light on Maxfield's neglected legacy. Maxfield, he asserted, was one of the most brilliant yechnicians in American electronic music. Aside from reputedly having built much of his own equipment, Maxfield was also reputedly something of a wizard at tape-splicing -- stoically patient, exacting and precise when it came to the task of taking things apart and putting them together viz the yarns and reels of magnetic tape. La Monte Young similarly testified to the artist's skills:

"He was an incredible electronic music teacher and master engineer. I used to go up to his mixing studio when he worked at Westminster Records in 1960-61 and observe him editing those old reel-to-reel tapes. He was the most amazingly adept tape handler I have ever seen. He worked so fast his hands and the tape were a constant blur... He really understood electronics; he was very creative and experimental. He taught electronics and composition at the highest level."

Much of Maxfield's technical expertise came from his workaday duties for the classical music division of CBS Records. Aside from tightening up the performances of various symphonies and the like, this also routinely meant cutting out whatever intrusive noises might've issued from the audience that night, such as the interludinal coughs and throat-clearings from season ticket holders. One piece Riley spoke of in the interview was "Cough Music," in which Maxfield took these extracts (from the performance of a Christian Wolff piece) from the cutting-room floor and spliced them together in the order his choosing, subjecting the sounds to varying degrees of processing and manipulation. I'd long been curious about this piece, and was only recently finally able to hear it...




In the same Wire piece, Terry Riley also said of Maxfield:

"He had a fantastic ear for different kinds of sounds, just using sine wave generators he did great work. Later he did a lot more concrète stuff; one year he brought this piece out to play called 'Dishes.' He was washing dishes one night and turned his tape recorder on, so he was making found object pieces, too."

Which I suppose makes his a precursor to concrète-variety "microhouse" in a way, anticipating Matthew Herbert's Around the House by some thirty-plus years. But Richard Maxfield released only a handful of recordings during his lifetime, and only a few have been reissued over the intervening years.

A few years after having read about Maxfield's work, I acquired this item, done as a one-off, sampling-based collaborative project by a trio of East Coast electronic doodlers, released in 2002 via the Pittsburgh-based Kracfive label. It went largely unnoticed at the time, by I liked the album very much. One track in particular grabbed my interest, making me wonder if it wasn't conceived as a tribute to Maxfield's "Cough Music" by way of Kraftwerk's "Tour de France"...


Original Instrument - 'Coughio'

Occasionally mid-grade mp3 bootleg collections of Richard Maxfield's known recorded works have appeared on the internet in recent years. Just how what and how many works Maxfield composed and committed to tape is mainly a matter of conjecture. Some compositions exist only in the form of rumor and anecdote, the recollections of his colleagues. This webpage offers what's thought to be a comprehensive inventory; but as the frequent appearance of blanks and question marks indicate, the accounting involves a fair amount of guesswork. Of these, one wonders how many have survived -- considering the shelf-life of magnetic tape and its rate of disintegration. At some point, one figures, a multi-disc anthology of the composer's work -- complete with an accompanying book on his life, work, influence on and contributions to the formative years of electronic music in the United States -- might've already seen the light of day.

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And on a related note: Continuo bids farewell. But last time I checked, there was no similar cross-post on Continuo's Documents tumblr as of this morning.

A Measured Existence

One weird experience of the the past year has been watching an artist that I followed closely, and always been fascinated with, for almost three decades sort of majorly blow up in the artworld. And by the artworld, I mean the visual artworld, whereas the artist in question previously was a huge figure in the experimental music/sound art end of things, and something of a peripheral figure as far as the rest of all such art realms were concerned.

I'm talking about Christian Marclay, and the surprising unanimous accolades that he's received for his 24-hour video installation piece "The Clock," which was a huge award-winning success at the Venice Biennale back last June. The project having been a laborious effort for Marclay -- "ambitious" as they say, involving about 3 full years of intricate effort, with Marclay sinking deeply into a medium that he'd previously only dabbled with on and off over the years. I mention it, because the New Yorker had a long article about Marclay and "The Clock" some months ago, which went into a great deal of detail about the making of the piece, and (to my surprise) they made the whole thing available online. So, for the interested...there you have it.

While we're at it, here's his "Stop Talk" piece that he did back in 1990 for New American Radio. It's still available for download, though I should warn that the file's in Real Audio format, which might pose a problem if you don't have an Real player or a means to open/convert the file. But if that isn't a issue, while you're at it poke around at some of the other contributions in the NAR archives. An item of interest for some might be the entries from Don Joyce and Negativland; one of which is what amounts to an epic extended director's cut of "Guns!".

Toccata & Fugue in Alizarin Crimson Minor, Op. 5

A form of comprehensive color blindness called achromatopsia, as treated by a device that operates like an optical equivalent of a cochlear implant, resulting in its wearer experiencing something akin to "inverse synesthesia."

But the interviewer drops the ball by not asking the obvious question, "And what color is Scriabin?"

Needle to the Groove

I did my Record Store Day shopping a day early to beat the crowds.

Actually, that's a lie. I'd lost track, didn't realize that RSD was today, and just happened to hit a local spot yesterday. I have hadn't much reason to keep track of such stuff, lately. It ain't in the budget like it used to be. Which is neither here nor there, because I was majorly spoiled what what Chicago had to offer in that category, and the ones in my current locale simply do not stack up to what I'm used to. The Delmark-affiliated Jazz Record Mart, Dusty Groove, plus innumerable second-hand spots scattered about the city...it all made RSD a bit pointless because almost every Saturday (or Sunday) was a record-store day. What little shopping I've done for music since I moved here has mostly involved buying gifts for other people. It isn't uncommon for me to spend an hour or more in a place and leave empty-handed because I didn't encounter the temptation to make a purchase.

But yeah, it all comes down to my being irredeemably "pre-digital" when it comes to be attached to music as embodied by a physical object -- especially wax. There've been plenty of testimonials written on the topic already, so I see little reason to go into it at length. Chalk it up to my suffering from some unshakable case of old-school geezer commodity fetishism. But yes, kids -- vinyl does sound better when played on a half-way decent system. Warmer, richer, more "organic," whatever, etcetera, blahblahblah. But mainly I find the physical aspect results in a different relationship with the music itself -- from the large-format packaging (including liner notes with some genres), down to extra manual effort involved in de-sleeving, cueing, lifting and flipping. It leads to a more intimate relationship with the music, if only because the format involves a more linear and durational experience with the act of listening.

The well-calibrated microphone

Thanks to the Root Strata blog for the heads-up.

Holiday for Skins

Short bit of video re-edited, via Echo Nest Remix API apps, to match Keith Moon's drum solo from "Who Are You?" Similar to the Steve Reich/Point Blank re-edit thing I posted a while back, but this time around with Rita Moreno and Animal standing in for Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin.

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Drawn Down from the Aether

          "I know about the phones. While our dad was upstairs broadcasting something to the world, and we were listening in, trying to find his frequency for his voice, his name, his call sign across our receiver, we would give up and go out into the snow around the neighborhood with a phone rigged with alligator clips so we could listen in on others' conversations. There's something nearly sexual about this, hearing what other people are saying to their lovers, children, cousins, psychics, pastors, debtors. I would hold the phone for my brother while he listened. He'd whistle when something good was going on, or something nasty.
          The Radio Amateur, However, Is Not A Voyeur. However It Might Seem.
          ...Some stations just broadcast numbers. The key to some code. Something of national importance. They beam streams of digits into the night. No other programing. No anger. No malice. No bereavement. Curiosity. Politics. Love.
          The Radio Amateur Is Sometimes Nosy.
          We would take down messages and numbers. We would write down frequencies and tones we found on the Internet. We would go through trash out back of the Michigan Bell facility for manuals and pages of codes and notes. Diagrams. Schematics. We accumulated quite a stash of operating instructions for phone equipment. We stacked them in the shed with the rotting paper on the floor, with the words hidden below the floor in bags. We surrounded ourselves in them. They were warm when left alone, like compost. They were warm when touched or burned."

-- Ander Monson, Other Electricities

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Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, talking to The Quietus about his former artistic em-oh back in the 1990s...

"I immediately saw the potential and intrigue of being able to access these private spaces and incorporate them into these exploratory soundscapes I was producing at the time. I was especially drawn to the fact that the recordings were so intimate, so clear, yet abstract in nature. One had to imagine who these people were you over overhearing, where they were, what kinds of lives they led, although the nature of their conversations often clearly explained this. [...]

Also at this time the chill out rooms in clubs were growing in capacity and my work was being played out there. This offered a very human aspect to digital techno music by incorporating the voice into the electronic atmosphere. It was partly about humanising something that was very difficult or 'other' to listeners at the time, so to use often difficult abstraction sound experiments alongside more recognisable human voices seem to make perfect sense, and could easily seduce the listener into sonic worlds they might not otherwise have experienced."

All of which proves newly relevant, as Rimbaud is interviewed about eavesdropping and surveillance in relation to the recent phone-hacking scandal in the U.K., and about the time News of the World approached him looking to buy some of his source material from him. Quite amusing and intriguing in parts. Full interview here.

Figure-Ground Relationship

A few peripheral thoughts to crossed my mind while writing that prior post...

Inasmuch as the work of Philip Jeck and Christian Marclay involves specific technology and the products of a particular era, in the end it continues an aesthetic that dates back to the earlier part of the previous century. It can be traced back through a series of artworks made from junk and discarded material -- from Rauschenberg's "combines" to the décollages of Jacques Villeglé -- to a certain aestehetic sensibility that many would peg as distinctly Dadaist in origin.

I'm thinking specifically of Kurt Schwitters' series of Merz collages and assemblages, his paste-ups of detritus gathered from the streets of Hanover in the years after WWI. Tram tickets, old invoices, scraps of newspapers and advert posters, miscellaneous rubbish and bits of smashed or broken furniture -- each element a signifier of the structure and material workings of quotidian modern urban life. Yes, these works connect with Cubist notions of collage as a merging of art (the picture plane, the plasticity of paint, etc.) with items from everyday life, as well as with the Dadaist use of chance, randomness and the arbitrary in the creative process. That they were composed from waste and residuum additionally connotes the exchanges and the political economy that shape that modernity. It's of no small ironic significance that Schwitters' title for this series of work was derived from a random fragment of printed material that he used in an early collage -- Merz, truncated from kommerz (or from Commerzbank, depending on which account you trust).¹

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Dadaist ideas have reemerged repeatedly throughout the past sixty years of art history, most notably making a grand re-emergence with the "Neo-Dada" work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in the years immediately following the Second World War. Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" of 1953 is widely regarded as a consumate Oedipal coup de grâce, the palimpsest for a new generation of emerging artists turning their backs on Abstract Expression -- saying "no thanks" to its romanticism and subjectivity, its agonistic interiority, its swaggering masculinity, etc.

All of which would make a perfect sense if Rauschenberg had bought the de Kooning drawing at auction before trying to destroy it.² But instead he approached Willem de Kooning directly, told of him what he was aiming to do, and more or less asked him to collaborate on or contribute to the project. De Kooning agreed, selecting for the young artist a drawing that he guaranteed would require a lot of work to un-do. Several weeks and dozens of erasers later, Rauschenberg emerged with the finished product -- a sheet of paper on which a few smudges and markings from the original artwork remain faintly visible. But perhaps better to let Bob explain his actions for himself...





Some might describe the concept behind the work as being very "zen," but it was also one that firmly hinged on romantic faith in the nature of the creative act and artistic intent.³

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On the American Breakbeat compilation from back around the turn of this century, the short-lived, laptops-are-the-instruments-for-the-new-folk-music duo of Alejandra & Underwood turned up to supply the outing's most incongruous (and rewarding) track, "Erased Aphex Twin, After Rauschenberg." The track was an as-promised affair -- four minutes and fifty-one seconds of silence, occasionally interrupted by murky, fleeting peek-a-boo granules of melodic IDM. (The source material may've been "Xtal," if memory serves). The random, sporadic fragments of sound become more teasingly frequent as the track progresses, coalescing into something graspable or recognizable in the final few seconds -- just in time for the the original tune's denouement, with the fade-out/wind-down remaining more- or less intact.

In some ways, the track is the opposite of the Rauschenberg's from which it takes it premise. Whether it meant as a pugnacious defacement of a widely-hailed (or perhaps overrated, depending on your point of view) artist of the day, I have my doubts. If anything, it was more of an agnostic response to all the inflated talk in the 1990s about "future music" and the supposed fidelity and permanence of digital media. Files get corrupted, data gets lost, and art -- often fueled by the desire to surprise and intrigue -- can't be so easily prescribed.



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1. This is merely one way to read the work. By some accounts, Schwitters was an aesthete to the core. So much so that his efforts to network with the Berlin Dadaists were spurned early on, with (reputedly) Richard Huelsenbeck later commenting that he couldn't stand the sight of Schwitters' "bourgeois face." For Schwitters, the Merz work was as much about liberating the varied fragments from their original context, thus permitting them to transcend their intended purpose/use-value and operate as purely visual elements.

2. In this respect, I'd argue that the work is one of the most commonly misread works of 20th century art, perhaps only second to Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q..

3. Somewhat similar to Rauschenberg's comments about his own ideas behind "Erased de Kooning": During my undergrad days, I had a painting instructor who -- when discussing the presence of "graffiti"-like elements in work I was doing -- said that he'd sometimes entertained the hypothetical question about whether it was possible for an artists to "vandalize his/her own work." I didn't have the heart to point out to him that such a thing begs all sorts of brambly aesthetic questions about the nature of "authorial intention," but that it was theoretically impossible due to the way that it ultimately involves the issue of property.

The Pop Universe, in the Shape of a Doughnut

On a somewhat lighter note of what I was going on about previously...

Simon Reynolds, offered a temporary venue at Bruce Sterling's Wired blog, tangentially riffing on some on Retromania's content, with some comments on the topic of mash-ups, plunderphonics, and pop eating itself. A bit delighted to see that he, as I did some time back, fit The Residents' Third Reich'n'Roll into this continuum; but when he ups the ante by stacking another of my old-skool favorites atop that by citing Bernard Parmegiani's Pop'eclectic, fuck me if I'm not about ready to start doling out hugs.

But seriously. The No. 1 Astronaut/WNCL "Instant Digest" mix (via modyfier) he mentions had previously escaped my notice. The Nick Edwards testimonial sums the thing it very precisely...

"In this age of the super information highway, the problem is no longer how to access information, it is how to absorb it. The Instant Digest offers the perfect solution: sonic information compressed into short, sharp efficient byte-size chunks. After all, download culture has already removed 75% of extraneous audio information from our musical experience, so why not go the whole hog and reduce the actual duration too? Cut out all the boring bits, just give us the salient points, please. Instant Digest reduces the musical experience to the condition of Blipvert."

Simon also nods to Osymyso's "Intro Inspection" in the course of the piece. aBut while reading it, I had a couple of other related items leap to mind. Firstly, DJ Food/Strictly Kev's "Raiding the 20th Century" mix of about 7 years ago. The expanded two-point-oh version of the thing is a somewhat different beast from the usual mash-up mix, thanks to Kev's bring in Paul Morley for a bit of spoken-word narration. Apparently Kev was amazed by Morley's book Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City and how it paralleled a lot the ideas he had in doing the mix the first time around, and asked Morley to help him with the remix. And Morley's book is a very playful and unorthodox outing, hardly your standard work of music criticism/writing/historicism.

But the Astronaut No. 1 mix brought something else to memory, a similar exercise from years ago that turned up via the site for the plunderphonics outfit Evolution Control Committee. Their site hosted a pair of MP3s taken from a mysterious tape entitled "Chart Sweep," a mix that featured every Billboard pop-chart #1 hit from between the years of 1954 and 1992, all of 'em stacked end-to-end in short snippets and presented in chronological order. As I double back to relocate the post, it appears that the ECC guys and their associates eventually tracked down the tape's creator.


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In Words and Music, Morley goes on a riff on the Now That's What I Call Music! compilation series. Which reminds me...

Before the days of "oldies" stations and the digitally-enabled culture of endless reissues, we got by however they could. Options were limited, but people did have options.

File under: Wedding DJ's "crate savers."


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ECC, some might recall, first came to attention back in 1994 with their Whipped Cream Mixes 7", in which the guys cheekily matched the vocals from a pair of Public Enemy tracks to songs by the Tijuana Brass. Which reminds reminds of this item that I bumped into while writing the previous post, in which The Wire mag gets Christian Marclay to contribute to their regular "Inner Sleeve" feature, so Marclay weighs in on the era-defining libidinal icon that was Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream & Other Delights.

Funny how a number of things fall together sometimes.

Vinyl Reckonings

Some months back, Mark "K-Punk" Fisher curated a guest podcast over at Pontone. Beginning, ending, and threaded by the leitmotif of crackling vinyl surface noise and featuring tracks by the likes of Philip Jeck, William Basinski, and The Caretaker, the mix played out like a musical séance for moribund audio media. By way of accompanying liner notes, Fisher wrote about the spectral (there/not-there, presence versus absence) nature of phonography in relation to Derrida's ideas about the "metaphysics of presence," adding:

"With vinyl records, the more that you often hear is crackle, the sound of the material surface of the playback medium. When vinyl was ostensibly superseded by digital playback systems – which seem to be sonically ’invisible’ – many producers were drawn towards crackle, the material signature of that supposedly obsolete technology. Crackle disrupts presence in multiple ways: first by reminding us of the material processes of recording and playback, second by connoting a broken sense of time, and third by veiling the official ‘signal’ of the record in noise. For crackle is of course a noise in its right, a ground becomes a figure."

The concept of spectrality and haunting was a central theme in The Caretaker's project from the very start, with the artist having derived both his moniker and his creative premise from Kubrick's The Shining. Basinski emerged on the scene some years ago with his acclaimed requiem cycle The Disintegration Loops, which deals with mortality and entropy by way of the material and sonic degradation of timeworn magnetic tape. And Jeck's work owes it melancholy creakiness to the notions of obsolescence and abandonment it invokes...








Many of these tropes harken back to the work of noisician and artist Christian Marclay, who himself began working with LPs and record players back in the late 1970s. From the beginning, Marclay was fascinated the materiality of recorded media, especially with the record LP as a physical object – as document of a performance, an ephemeral and intangible moment in time, arrested and affixed in material form, commodified and mass manufactured in serial units, circulating in the cultural domain of commercial society.

Plasticity aside, there was also Marclay's affinity for "the unwanted sound." Primarily this was the sound of technology being intentionally misused and abused, but it was also the sound – or the combination of sounds – of all the bygone and discarded musical products of previous years and decades, now amounting to only so much landfill fodder or cents-on-the-dollar clutter in the bins of second-hand music shops. All of it – the exemplars of former zeitgeists, even – rendered equal by its outmodedness, its use-value amounting to little more than the part it plays in a layered cacophony. Same too with Marclay's later works involving album sleeves or other formats such as audio tape – in the end it comes down to the utility or stylishness of last year's model seeming so remotely quaint or clunkily alien when seen from just a little further down the evolutionary chain.




Sure, LPs and turntables were the dominant technology for home listening at the time that Marclay first started working with them. And he wasn't the only one messing about with gathering and manipulating these items for the sake of making noise in the late 1970s.

Some quotes...

GRANDMASTER FLASH: At the time, the radio was playing songs like Donna Summer, the Tramps, the Bee Gees – disco stuff, you know? I call it kind of sterile music. Herc was playing this particular type of music that I found to be pretty warm; it has soul to it. You wouldn't hear these songs on the radio. You wouldn't hear, like, 'Give It Up or Turn It Loose' by James Brown on the radio. You wouldn't hear 'Rock Steady' by Aretha Franklin. You wouldn't hear these songs, and these are the songs that he would play.

TONY TONE: I was working in the record shop, so I used to know all the records....but I didn't know the records Herc was playing. So now it's grabbing me, now I'm trying harder to order them for my record shop, but I can't find them 'cause they're not records that are selling right now – they're older records, jazz records, whatever.

So "digging" always involved hunting and unending quests to excavate the rare and the funky, but it also – once upon a time – meant sifting through the unwanted and the forgotten. Used bins, "cut-out" bins, thrift stores, or even – in the case of Grandmaster Flash – running the risk of catching an ass-whooping from your pops after being told, "Don't ever touch my records."

By now it's a little trite to make a case for framing the creation of cutting and scratching (and eventually sampling) as a street-level, mother-of-invention version of musique concrète. But one may as well make one for the first-gen practitioners of hip-hop DJing – Herc, Bam, Flash, and many others – as being early pioneers of some musical equivalent of salvagecore, if only for the sake of "keeping the funk alive" in the face of the monocultural sweep of disco.

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But: Surface noise as sonic patina – as signifier of the music's physical format and vintage, as a deliberately skewed figure/ground relationship. That's a later and different development. Initially, it was something to be avoided at all costs – only so much noise contaminating the signal, or undesirable syntagmatic slippage.

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If the nature of the "hauntology" rubric has been difficult to nail down with any sense of certainty, it might be due to the facts that (a) it was never that firmly formulated of a concept to begin with, and (b) the term and corresponding concept suffered a denotational shift as soon as it began to circulate more broadly. At first it referred to something slightly intangible and impressionistic; something not too different, in certain ways, from Freud's notion of the Uncanny (especially in that both involves varieties of cognitive dissonance and a sense of dislocation or "dyschronia"), and how it plays out aesthetically.¹ But soon enough discussion of the hauntological began to focus less on the nature of the sensation or condition, and rather on the mere things that might bring the notion to mind. And by things I mean just that – books, toys, films and TV programs, photographs, and various other ephemera from one's childhood, from prior eras. In the end – objects and the associations projected onto them. Which, in many ways, borders on mere, mundane nostalgia of a sort. Not that nostalgia doesn't factor into this in the first place, but that's a whole other line of theoretical speculative – a line that could draw from a rich backlog of philosophic ink that's been spilled on the topic over the past century and a half.

And I'm fairly certain that aspects of all of this overlap – however tangentially – with the topic that Simon addresses in his new book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its own Past. I haven't read or even gotten a copy yet, so I can't say for sure. But Alex Niven recently posted some thoughts on the book's focus that struck an intriguing note...

"Moving quickly into the realms of massive theologico-cultural conjecture, the whole retromanic thing seems to me to have something to with the occlusion of death in a modern technocratic society. Death has replaced sex as the great taboo. We just don't know what to do with death – the one thing a culture of pluralism and excess cannot find a space for: the absoluteness of an ending. Hence, things that are obsolete become weirdly fetishized. The sobering fact that the past is absolutely no more is replaced with a sort of adolescent inability to let go of childhood toys and move on."

An "occlusion of death" perhaps, a way of stacking some barricades against the door in an effort to hold off a particular type of existential dread. Or what happens when a schizophrenic economy of scarcity and surplus flatlines into one of equally-available "pluralism and excess," and – sensing it may have hit some teleological impasse – suffers an extended spasm of insecurity in regards to where it was all supposed to lead in the first place, and compulsively doubles back on itself in a frenzy of archiving, retrofitting, taking inventory and what-have-you.

Static, surface noise and signal interference, however, is more bluntly about the big D. It ultimately points to the corporeal fragility and impermanence of it all, a nagging momento mori that nothing will ever ever be as it was despite whatever effort or technology is employed to stave death and degeneration away. If, as K-Punk once phrased it, the history of recording constitutes a "science of ghosts," then the metaphysics of crackle (or of the sputtering, atomizing digital glitch) serves as a reminder that it's an imperfect science. Or as he stated early in the discussion, the figure and ground are inextricably linked by the sheer materiality of the medium...

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. We're now so accustomed to this violation of ontological hierarchy that it goes unnoticed.

The rest, as they say, is just noise.


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1. Or I suppose another way that this could be discussed, given the excretal economy of consumption and waste that all of this points involves, might be by way of Kristeva's notion of the Abject.

No Frogs Were Harmed in the Writing of This Post

Some two years after the publication of his book Sonic Warfare, National Public Radio talks to Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) about acoustic weaponry, in conjunction with the current Dead Record Office exhibition at Art In General gallery in NYC.

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Which brings us to the item above. Until recently, I wasn't aware that the industrial music scene of the early 1980s had its own equivalent of Smithereens or Wild Style, but it appears that the 1984 German film Decoders was exactly that. Set in a dystopic, semi-authoritarian Germany of the near future, the film follows the story of a young musician who seeks to use his own musique-concrète recordings to combat the Skinnerian effects of Muzak and to wage sonic warfare on a string of burger joints, if not against German society in general. If this sounds somewhat ludicrous, then you find that there's a few overreaching sequences in the thing that are guaranteed to incite some chuckles. Still, it's got visual style in spades and coasts along very nicely on its own sparse economy. It features F.M. Einheit (of Abwärts and Einstürzende Neubauten) in the lead, with both William S. Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge putting in appearances, as well. Of note is the supporting lead, played by old-school East Village boho actor and artist Bill Rice.

Apparently the script of the film was developed from a piece by Burroughs, who helped with the adaptation. I'm guessing the idea germinated from an incident in the Burrough's life, which I recall some item about him that I read many years ago. Apparently, while Burroughs was residing in Tangier, the owner of some business had slighted Burroughs in some way. So Bill supposedly slipped into the guy's establishment with a tape recorder some time weeks later, and a long stretch of the business's daily ambience. He returned to the location some time later, playing the tape back, letting the prerecorded noise mix with the real-time sounds of the place. Burroughs claimed that the establishment closed some weeks later, theorizing that his actions had effectively put a curse on the place, causing it to become "unstuck in time." (Right...that's the sort of thing you can expect from William Burroughs. Ever hear the one about his short-lived obsession with the Church of Scientology's e-meter therapy?)

Another Music in a Different Kitchen, II

A recent posting by a friend brings this site to my attention. The site features real-time police radio from a handful of major cities, intermixed with a selection of selection of tunes randomly drawn from a database of ambient music. My former locale of Chicago is among the cities included thus far. The last residence I had there, situated on the southside, had more than its share of ambience -- what, between the buses and 18-wheelers and police cars that made up the constant traffic on the main avenue outside my window, plus the incessant sirens due to the fact that I lived directly around the corner from both a fire station and a hospital ER. And in the occasional lulls between all that, in the warmer months there'd be humorous shrieks and trills from the flocks of monk parakeets that nested in the park across the street.

The first thing that the site brings to mind is that it's clearly modeled after the work of the artist Scanner (aka Robin Rimbaud). With his early releases under the Scanner moniker -- via the Ash International label in the early-mid 1990s -- Rimbaud briefly became a sensation in the experimental music community with his amorphous, open-ended electronic compositions, with various voices and conversations randomly pulled from all the airwaves, drifting into in and out of the mix....




Diffuse narratives and the incidental details of a myriad lives, all indeterminately overlapping and intermingling in the ether.* Of course, it also had its more sinister subtheme, with the implications of audio voyeurism, eavesdropping and surveillance lurking on the project's periphery.

It all links up with the profusion of a certain sonic sub-subtrend I've noticed these past few years. Case in point, the proliferation of websites devoted to "sonic mapping" that have cropped up in recent years -- interactive sites trafficking in contributed field recordings and audio landmarks from localations from across the globe, especially those drawn from urban settings. It's as if a couple of things have happened within the past 5-8 years, those being that (a) R. Murray Schafer's notions concerning soundscaping and acoustic ecology have gained increased traction some _ decades after the fact, combined with (b) Lefebvrian theories about the social production of space and place have recently filtered into the sound-art community.

Speaking of such stuff, back in September the London-based website Sound and Music invited Chicago sound artist Olivia Block to contribute to their "Places" series, with Block offering up her own sonic guide to the city. Many of the landmarks she cited (Lampo, Enemy, Empty Bottle, ESS, etc.) would be obvious to anyone who knows the city's leftfield music scene. I was, however, pleased to see that she included the Harry Bertoia sounding sculpture which is located off of Randolph and Michigan, across from Millennium Park...

About a decade ago, I worked in an office building next door to this thing. When weather permitted, I often go out and have my lunch under the thing; afterwards stretching out on the marble slabs, listening to the water in the nearby fountain, hearing the metallic sounds of the sculpture's rods pinging and ringing against each other in the breeze, the reverberating vibrations from the iron traveling out from the foundations of the piece, into and up through the marble beneath me. Very pleasant, very cool. Seemed that not too many people I met knew about the piece, or ever noticed it.

Block has a new recording out on the 12k label, one in which she's part of what amounts to a sort of experimental sonic supergroup -- a quartet that involves her, Steve Roden, Stephen Vitiello, and Molly Berg, all of them operating under the collective moniker of Moss. Essentially it amounts to an EP release, featuring a single 24-minute live track in which the ensemble summons up an improvised drone-folk driftwork of the Jewelled Antler/Charalambides/Lichens variety. And very nice as such things go.

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* Admittedly, I always wondered if this phase of Rimbaud's work wasn't (perhaps?) inspired by some of the sequences in Wenders's Der Himmel über Berlin.

Sounding Off

Sez woebot about this year's Turner:

"Just a bit of restraint required here because The Turner Prize Winner is always, unfortunately, the object of unbridled hatred. However one’s got to say that, in the main, the art world’s grasp of Sound as Art is light-years behind the sophistication of its manifestation at the cutting-edge of music. I mean, this lady’s ideas are OK, but truthfully they’re kind of old hat, and what’s more implicit in a huge swathe of music. One precedent that immediately springs to mind is Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening Band, which actually did this very same thing AND made it sound beautiful rather than pedestrian. Her voice, yikes. If I was being unkind I would suggest that the Turner Prize should stick to what they do best and leave this kind of thing to the pros to judge."

From the first sentence, I find myself in agreement. Yes, the winner of the Turner on any given year is going to be the object of incredulity and animus, regarded as nothing more than an example for the committee's esoteric and mandarin sensibilities. But this one strikes me as a belated, tokenistic bone-toss to sound art (or "ephemeral art" is general) by/for people who little knowledge of or experience with the same. Someone's a bit out of their league. As one of the YouTube commenters remarked: "'Justin Bieber played 800% slower'is miles better than this."

So does this make Philipsz's piece the Turner's equiv of Mark Zuckerberg? Dunno. But as far as such stuff goes, this seems to have been the hands-down favorite of this past year...









Of course, the artist here isn't British; so it's neither here nor there as far as the Turner's concerned. But at the very least, I think it demonstrates it proves that it's possible for something can have a lot of traction in the sound art community yet still have popular appeal.