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.

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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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.

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.

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.