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Exercise #6

For my process based piece I wanted to toy with the idea of destructive loops. I was thinking about the serendipity of Basinski’s Disintegration Loops: some tapes sit for years collecting dust, only to reemerge as something that could not have been been created without tampering. Well, in this case I’m the tamperer. I wanted to try my hand at replicating what happened in Basinkski’s work. This is nothing other than a replication, but nonetheless I did try to honor the uninterrupted nature of process-based art. I created a loop of distortion that was roughly 25 feet long. A loop this long is prone to warping and stuttering do to the added strain put on the tape player’s motor, there is also a lack of support of the tape which exacerbates these tendencies. In an attempt to destroy this loop, I simultaneously needed to keep it in its death throws enough to keep moving along the tape path: ENTER MAKESHIFT CAPSTANS. I used some wooden cabinets and microphone stands to guide the tape. These capstans were equipped with sand paper. Also along the tape path were miscellaneous pocket knives that were angled at the tape so as to lightly graze the tape throughout its journey. Given the length and my inability to monitor the tape during this process (the Uher 4400′s output was acting up) Madison followed the splice points to gauge where we were at any given time..I feel like I could have completed this process without a big headache had I meddled with the tape and manually created cuts or abrasions but instead I took a step back and allowed the sound to determine its own fate within the confines placed upon it. 

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Final Project:

I decided to delete my previous project proposal from the page because I decided to go in a different direction. Having taken some of my professor’s notes into account I came to the realization that the project that I had had in mind would not be doable in the time allotted. Jumping ship was the right choice. As I sat down for some light television viewing in the evening I put on a show called Trailer Park Boys. I love Trailer Park Boys and have always loved it because it is a show that is ridiculous, but the ridiculous nature is often contrasted by very subtle pointed and empathetic movements, movements so subtle that I never really picked up on them and was only left with a vague feeling of empathy for the characters. Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles are three buddies who can never seem to stay out of jail, forever waiting to complete that “big job” so that they can quite crime and retire. Our protagonists are in direct opposition to Jim Lahey, the ex-cop trailer park supervisor, who throughout the show’s lifetime delves deeper and deeper progressively into alcoholism and depravity. Lahey is presented by the show’s creators as an unsympathetic, eternally vengeful drunk but is also at times treated with a careful hand when detailing the progression of his alcoholism.

It struck me that I would like to reconstruct the progression of this character in sound. In this project I focus heavily on sampling, the acousmatic, Chionian tape technique (Requiem-era), and noise (Merzbow and Wolf Eyes for inspiration). I suppose another influence would be the minimalism of Reich, however this minimalism acts only as the scaffolding for the rest of the piece; scaffolding which emerges to prop up the pice but is also stripped from beneath it. In this project every sound in sourced from episodes of Trailer Park Boys where Jim Lahey is either drunk or in the process of succumbing to external forces that apply pressure to the inevitable end of his brief stint of sobriety. The acousmatic ends up playing a very important role in the functioning of this project. How much information can be taken from simple words? How much inflection is ignored in discourse? Can anyone de-individualize Jim Lahey and see him as someone in desperate need of help and set aside the patterns of his personal history with the liquor? This project aims to pick up where discourse leaves off. Applying the acousmatic, and treating sound (specifically the human voice) acousmatically, provides the proper communicative technique and the necessary marriage of form and content (See  2. Particular Aspects of the Ideal Form in Sculpture from Volume II page 727 of Hegel’s Aesthetics). By manipulating the voice we may be able to reveal a new meaning, to peek beneath language or between the words uttered.

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Exercise #9

I don’t think that there is anything wrong with sampling ethically. Christoph Cox states that Marclay’s aim was “to extract unrealized potential and new performances from the embalmed content of the musical commodity.” My opinions is that there is much more to gain from sampling culturally than there are negative effects as a result of sampling — literally the worst thing that comes to mind as a result of sampling is major labels not getting the “money they are owed” from their artists being sampled. For the artists themselves I feel that being sampled may, if the listener enjoys the sample, go on ahead and check out the artist responsible for the source material. We have become too hung up on the idea of property when it comes to art and the individual behind the art has grown into a mythical figure distanced from the consumer. If we put an end to private property in the realm of the arts I think that we could be on the right track to cultivating a healthier relationship between the artist and the audience.

In this piece that for some reason I am calling “Of”...probably because it’s of something, I sampled a super awesome song called “Spirit of Love” by Tower Recordings...wait ahh that’s why it’s called “Of”. Anywho, I played a few snippets from my laptop and recorded them onto some tape loops (and then ran those through some effects) and then mixed the individual tracks (four to be exact) down to a Tascam Portastudio while simultaneously messing around with the mic/line inputs and the pitch control wheel on the deck I was recording to. All in all I think the result is neat.

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Exercise #10

In the realm of visual artists that work with sound, I found Jean Tinguely’s work (especially Tokyo Gal) very interesting. This is a work that required a bit of time to soak in for me. In watching the video it was difficult for me initially to focus any attention on the sound because the sculpture is just so darn interesting to look at. Had I not viewed this in the first time in a sound art class there is a possibility that my brain would have completely blocked out the sound and focused solely on the repetitive motions of the gizmo. Why I find this observation interesting is because on a second viewing it actually gave the work of art a lot more meaning to me, since Tinguely is dealing with mechanical motion it doesn’t seem unreasonable to tune out the sonic aspect — we are around mechanisms all the time that, through force of habit, we habitually tune out in order to navigate the day without sensory overload. Having a piece dedicated to placing the churn of the mechanical world front and center makes me reimagine the sounds heard in an urban environment...in fact, I think I hear something eerily similar to Tokyo Gal coming from seventh street right now!

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Exercise #8

I recorded this over spring break in Newland, North Carolina. 

“We can isolate an acoustic environment as a field of study just as we can study the characteristics of a given landscape.” - R. Murray Schafer

For this project I strove to accurately represent the acoustic environment I was residing in for the week, one atop a peak up a windy road with windy wind. Wind played a large part in the sonic representation of this area, not so much in the typically sense of me recording outside and the wind blowing and then me saying “goddammit wind stop ruining it,” rather in this recording the wind interacted with the recorded objects in quite a nice way — I heard their vibrations interacting with the surface. I used two contact microphones and an SM57 for these recordings, and the wind was blowing so darn hard that the wind would shake the stones, shake the bench, shake the branch, and in turn create neat little fluctuations in the connectivity between recording apparatus and environment.

I quite like R. Murray Schafer because he uses the term “Earwitness” which is the origin of a beautiful sentiment (especially the comparison to Thomas Mann) and is also just a completely ridiculous made up word. I imagine he would be a joy to trundle through the woods with.

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This is an album I made last year.

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Exercise #7

Sound art utilizes sound as its material of choice, not unlike a painter uses paint or a sculptor uses clay. The sound artist uses sound as its paint, structuring sound in a way independent from the necessity of a linear form. The issue that arises with sound art that does not seem to arise in a discipline like painting is its odd relationship with another art form: music and the tendency we have to to conflate the two. My guess is that they are conflated because the material used in both practices is intangible. We would not mistake marble for paint if we were trying to paint a picture. While some music may have qualities of sound art (aspects that, should they be extricated from the musicality of the work and placed on display in isolation could very well be considered sound art), it can’t be sound art qua sound art because of it’s identifiably musical quality. Sound art occupies the space not taken by the composer of music. What’s that quote about pornography again?

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Midterm

Six Guitars and Two Moons

Using your own hand, find the number of frets that can you reached without cramping up.

Burst onto the world wide web and find a random number generator.

Constrict the range of the number generator to match the number of frets that you can reach from one position near the headstock of the guitar.

Generated numbers correspond to the fret number of each string of the guitar—starting with the low E.

During each tracking of guitar, each string of the guitar must be played at least once.

Microphone placement is initially determined by measuring the distance of the space of performance. That measured number (in feet) is then recorded in pen or pencil and is loaded into the number generator. Before tracking  generate a number that corresponds to the number of feet the microphone will be from the guitar. Each guitar will have a specific distance from the microphone.

During the tracking process, guitar is tinkered with and explored nakedly

This is a bit like Christmas carolling.

This piece was influenced by the rudimentary guitar playing of my youth. When I was learning to play guitar, I would focus for hours on a single chord, tensing the muscles in my fingers, fearing that my fingers would slip out of position and leave me completely lost. More often than not, I would sit staring at a graph that contained diagrams representing the fingerings of simple chord structures. There was always a lag between my understanding of where my fingers were supposed to be and the exercise of actually getting my fingers situated properly. In hindsight, I now realize that having such a pointed focus on the structural stability of a chord created an imbalance between the attentiveness of the fretting hand and the strumming hand, which resulted in a freeness granted to the strumming hand that is (now) oftentimes not present. We untether the strings and with our hands allow unexpected tonalities to arise we separate from the burden of looking forward to change hand positions on the fretboard. In this piece I strive to recreate the freedom that was present when I did not have any other means of playing the instrument. Through the randomness of the generated chords, the player will more likely than not feel uncomfortable, forcing the player back into a mode sensuously engaging with the strings.

I chose to engage primarily with John Cage’s chance operations as they tend to have a very youthful charm to them, an enchanting dollop of the unknowable. My budding relationship with the guitar was similarly mystic in the beginning. The intuition that develops as we age with an instrument emerges from a primordial bumping and wading against the sonically unexpected. The chord structure like an iceberg in frigid waters upon which we wobble trying to keep our footing.

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Journal Entry #3

“That music is simple to make comes from one’s willingness to accept the limitations of structure.” 

“I am here. There is nothing to say.”

“This space of time is organized.”

In Cage’s piece “Five” these selected quotes are realized. The piece is composed for five “voices”, which can be either vocal voicing or instrumental. Relying heavily on passages of silence creates a looking forward in the listener, anticipating what the next bundle of textures will present themselves as. We witness in this piece an abdication of conventional form, rather contented with an tidal organization more fitting to itself.

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Exercise 4: Graphic Score

Measures 1-4 guide as chords to work within throughout the entirety of the duration.Measures 5-6 represent dynamic depth (to be determined by performer). Lines 3 and 4 Represent tools to be used in performance. Measure 14 ends the piece, however, sound can continue below.

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Exercise #2: Musique Concrete

I was digging through my cassettes today and found some neat stuff that I recorded at the 6th and B community garden a few months back. If I remember correctly, I spent the day: bowing hoses, testing the integrity of some branches, and staring at the turtles. It was was a nice day captured by my trusty Marantz PMD-430. I manufactured this rickety old musique concrete piece by passing on selected excerpts from the Marantz to an 8-track.

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Loren Chasse and Michael Northam - The Broken House

Opening the fence, 

Chasse and Northam lead us into a between-place

we look to nature but she turns

an evident dissonance within our placement here

there is turmoil

our disobedience, the null basis.

“The Broken House” is the fraught relationship between brutal, primordial nature and a creative, yet second-guessing spirit.

http://helenscarsdale.bandcamp.com/track/the-broken-house

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a warm glass of milk

At six I was ushered into the sewing room. My idleness needed to be addressed. Shortly after, seemingly twenty minutes later, I was taking piano lessons with Mrs. Hunt. Waiting. Waiting for the kitchen timer to zero-out so I could go home and play Red Dead Revolver on PS2. 

In hindsight I enjoy the piano lessons. Music is hindsight. These days I’ll clink on the keys, or perhaps a thing, without my dad standing over me. Sometimes I forget to keep track of the time.

Tools: instruments, cloth, spinning wheel.