Genealogías sonoras
por Arnau Horta (English audio)
Data | Value |
---|---|
Publicación | Madrid: MNCARS, 2022 |
Descripción física | Archivos de audio en formato mp3 (ca 28 min.- ca 55:29 min.- ca 56:05 min.- ca 39:45 min.- ca 30:20 min.- ca 22:07 min.- ca 30:38 min.- ca 30:32 min.) |
Idioma | Inglés |
Realización | Arnau Horta |
Contiene | Audio 1: Stephen Vitiello on Pauline Oliveros Audio 2: Judith Hamann on Alvin Lucier Audio 3: Eleh (John Brien) on Eliane Radigue Audio 4: Peter Kutin on Christina Kubisch Audio 5: Thomas Ankersmit on Maryanne Amacher Audio 6: Olivia Block on Harry Bertoia Audio 7: Jim O´Rourke on Phill Niblock Audio 8: Steve Roden on Rolf Julius |
Nota Participantes | Intervienen Arnau Horta, Steve Roden, Jim O’Rourke, Olivia Block, Thomas Ankersmit, Peter Kutin, John Brien, Judith Hamann, Stephen Vitiello |
Evento: | Miércoles 30 de noviembre de 2022 |
Resumen | La serie Genealogías Sonoras se propone escuchar la obra de algunas de las figuras más destacadas de la música experimental y el arte sonoro del siglo XX. Pero quiere hacerlo de un modo un tanto particular: a través de los oídos y de la voz de aquellos artistas que han retomado algunos aspectos de su legado sonoro y los han incorporado, de un modo u otro, a sus propias creaciones. Se trata, pues, de poner en práctica esa bonita idea de “compartir la escucha” que La serie Genealogías Sonoras se propone escuchar la obra de algunas de las figuras más destacadas de la música experimental y el arte sonoro del siglo XX. Pero quiere hacerlo de un modo un tanto particular: a través de los oídos y de la voz de aquellos artistas que han retomado algunos aspectos de su legado sonoro y los han incorporado, de un modo u otro, a sus propias creaciones. Se trata, pues, de poner en práctica esa bonita idea de “compartir la escucha” que Peter Szendy plantea en las páginas de su libro Escucha: una historia del oído melómano.
En cada una de las entregas de la serie un artista distinto “prestará su escucha" al oyente y le hará partícipe de ella. Mezcladas con fragmentos extraídos del universo sonoro del creador o creadora protagonista de cada uno de los podcasts, las ideas y las reflexiones de los artistas entrevistados descubrirán de qué modo las ideas y los sonidos de sus antecesores “perviven” o “resuenan” en su trabajo. A través de esta “escucha prestada” se rastrean (al menos en parte) sus genealogías sonoras. Algunos de los músicos y compositores protagonistas de la serie Genealogías Sonoras siguen en activo; de otros, en cambio, sólo quedan sus obras: el eco, siempre vivo, de su trabajo y de su comprensión de lo sonoro. Por otro lado, muchos de los artistas que prestan sus oídos y sus voces colaboraron en algún momento con aquellas figuras sobre las que nos hablan. En estos casos, la genealogía no parece discurrir ya sobre una línea y en una única dirección, sino que ella misma parece estar sumida en una especie de resonancia entre dos generaciones. Tender el oído a esta resonancia es precisamente el objetivo de esta serie. Arnau Horta es comisario independiente e investigador especializado en el ámbito de la creación sonora contemporánea. Ha colaborado con el MACBA, el festival Loop, Sónar, Caixafòrum, el Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB), la Filmoteca de Catalunya o La Casa Encendida, entre otros centros e iniciativas culturales. Como docente y divulgador ha colaborado con la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, la Universidad de Barcelona, el Institut d'Humanitats de Barcelona y con las escuelas IED y ESDI. Es colaborador en Cultura/s (La Vanguardia), Babelia (El País) y Ahora Semanal. En la actualidad está cursando un doctorado en Filosofía. Menos |
Género | Debates y coloquios |
Formato | Cápsulas de radio |
Etiquetas | Historia, Música, Arte Sonoro |
Canal de radio | Contextos |
En contexto | Enlace a la web |
Colección digital | Archivo audiovisual > Las Actividades |
Copyright | Creative Commons by-nc-nd 4.0 |
Transcripción
Audio 1: Stephen Vitiello on Pauline Oliveros
Hello, this is Stephen Vitiello, I’m an artist and an electronic musician based in Richmond, Virginia. My work includes site specific sound installations, CDs, performances, soundtracks for films, video, and dance. Many of the recording projects that I do involve collaboration as well as performances. I’ve been fortunate enough to work with so many great artists, including Pauline Oliveros, Steve Roden, Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner), Taylor Deupree, Ryūichi Sakamoto, Nam June Paik and many more.
I first met Pauline when I flew to Cologne, Germany, at the invitation of Anthony Moore. I was invited to participate in Per->Son, this was a series of events mostly held in a church near the Academy for Media Arts in 1988. There were series of evenings that involved solo performances and collaborations, featuring Scanner, Frances-Marie Uitti, Pauline and myself. We were all utilizing a 64-channel sound system designed and performed by and with sound artist Andres Bosshard. I was by far the newest and least known of the feature participants. That experience set up a lifetime model of ways to move ahead, set a path of creativity, new friends, collaborators… Up until then I knew of Pauline, but if I’m honest, I hadn’t paid attention. I knew her name as someone I would hear on late night radio, on WNYC, but I’m not sure that I ever took her as seriously as I should have.
When I arrived at the church, there was a sound that was just making the whole building shake. I was kind of struck and I stood still, and I thought that it was one of the most interesting things I’d ever heard. I asked, I think it was Anthony, I asked: “What’s going on?” and he said: “Oh, that’s Pauline, she’s just testing the sound system and Andres is showing her what can be done”. Sounds were flying around the space, but they were also just… They were deep, they were resonant, they were beautiful and if I had just five, six life changing moments in my career as an artist, that was, definitely, one of the big ones. From there, we each had our own evening. We performed solo, but then we also were encouraged to collaborate. The 64-channel sound system meant an engagement with the architecture, with multichannel performance, so it became very site specific. I was the youngest, the newest… Well, actually, Robin and I were the same age, but I was the newest in terms of being well-known. I had the least experience in this kind of environment, but I was thrilled and honored and maybe a little bit afraid to be part of it. I did my own solo set and invited the others, including Anthony, to perform with me. Through that experience, and I’d say, probably, particularly the experience of getting to be in and around Pauline, I started to understand and take seriously the value and the exciting potential of improvising. I believe that when Pauline would speak about it, she would talk about both work set and work compose, but also have room for freedom of expression. So, I don’t know precisely where improvisation would be used or not used, but for me that was what I was feeling.
All of this gave me the confidence to move ahead and helped shape my interests. Prior they had probably been more within music, prior, you know, they were more often focused on creating soundtracks for other artists. This was on a moment of emergence when I started to think as my own artist, and I think that a lot of that came from the generosity of the others and getting to work with them and being treated as an equal. On the plane right home, I kind of meekly asked Pauline if I could study with her, and she said: “No, you’ll perform with me and John McPhee me next week at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation”. I said something about imposter syndrome, and I wasn’t sure I was really ready, whether I really belonged there, and she told me very simply: “Get over it”. One other maybe set of instructions or homework she offered me on the plane right was start going to the New York Public Library and looking at John Cage’s scores. And that was it. That set me forward. You know, from everything that I know, Pauline treated her students that way. She treated younger musicians that way all the time, so I’m not trying to suggest that I was special on my experience, but I still feel very fortunate and will be forever grateful for that performance with Pauline and John. I remember asking her, you know, how long it would be. And she said: “Well, as long as it needs to be”. And I said: “How long should I play?”. And she said: “Well, if you’re worried, you can play the first ten minutes”. And when I got on stage, she said: “You play until the end” and I asked her: “When do we stop? How do I know it’s the end?”. She smiled. Somewhere at 43 minutes and 51 seconds we all stopped, and it felt exactly right. It also felt like magic. I had never been part of a performance that way, but because I was with her and understanding and respecting the experience, I was listening, and we were all listening, and that moment felt right. We stopped, we sat still and then it was over.
To prepare for this talk, I rewatched the TEDx Talk that Pauline did fairly late in her life, and she spoke of working with musicians who became the deep listening and the unique opportunity of being in a cistern in Washington state. I love when she speaks about being in that space and how they had to listen and perform in a whole new way, but also how the space became a performer, that as they sent sound out into the space, it received their sounds, but it became a performer, I’m not sure if she said “a musician”, but it was giving their sounds back and it was manipulating their sounds through its architecture. And it was a gift, and it was a learning experience. When I do site specific installations, the site visit is essential, to fly wherever the site is. I still don’t think we can do it with Zoom or virtual reality. When you go to a space, and you take in the encounter… I listen, I feel, I try to modify my breathing and clear my brain. I try not to go there with a preconceived notion, but just to go and see what the space gives me. And part of that sound, part of that it’s the acoustics, maybe the interesting problematic acoustics… I’m thinking about the sounds that bleeds in, the vibration that might be picked up through the floor, the walls… I think about what can be amplified and would that be a contact microphone or accelerometer… Or maybe not a microphone, maybe it’s bringing in a sound that harmonizes with whatever is going on in that space. And it’s not just about sound, it’s also about the culture, what is that building or what is that bridge or what is the history around that space, what else happens there. Is there a way to play with it? To think about it, to consciously engage with it, hopefully, without illustrating anything, but some kind of poetic connection that you can bring through sound.
For me, field recording could happen in Grand Central. It happened in a different way in the World Trade Center in 1999, when I had a six-month residency. In that case I was recording with contact mics that were fixed to the wall, so it wasn’t the traditional kind of concept of field recording with a beautiful mono or stereo or multichannel microphone, but it was hearing vibration, and that was something that I later did also with much more high-end scientific devices working with biologists, listening to insects that can only be heard through the surface of branches, flowers, streams of winds… And I think, you know, part of what I love about field recording and part of what I love about the act of listening is something that Pauline spoke about many times, which is that AI gives you a focus. I believe that a turning point in her life was when she was a child and given a cassette recorder, an early tape recorder, and started to listen to technology before it just became full bodied with or without technology. But also, the listening in the dark with eyes closed, pair of headphones on, whether it’s in a field of frogs, whether it’s at the base of a mountain in West Virginia with the wind howling through the trees… It’s that listening in such a way connects one to the world and connects one to the environment, but it also allows for an internal kind of experience, an internal listening, a listening that allows for one’s own creativity to come forth and to tell our own stories through listening. I remember a co-curated series of events at the Whitney Annea Lockwood presented her recordings on the Hudson River, and everybody in the room was lying down or standing or sitting with a friend and there was no visuals, but it occurred to me that probably everybody was listening, but they were listening differently, because we weren’t looking everybody’s associations were now different. For somebody those recordings might have brought up a kind of calm and a memory of being by the water. For somebody else it might be a fear of drowning, it might be a focus on the intensity of the rapids that might be creating an edge. For somebody else it might be very carefully tuning in to the different kinds of patterns of rippling. People might be coming with field recording or phonography background, but quite likely, many people in the room just stumbled in because they were at the Whitney. They opened a door and there was a whole room full of people listening and they came in, sat down and very likely had an encounter that was very different than what they expected and that they came to look at paintings, photographs, sculptures…
I remember Pauline and I performed in Boston, and she dropped me off at the train station and I think she said she had something like a four-hour drive back to Kingston and I said: “Are you going to listen to an audiobook or do you have any CDs?”, and she said: “No, I’ll just listen”. And I smiled and laughed and thought: “What?”. And then I was: “No, she will listen, and she will take it in and, unlike anybody I know, she will give it concentration for whatever that time and appreciate it and make the time move by the way maybe for me I would need, you know, an electronic music soundtrack or whatever I’m going to listen to on that day.
Maybe one other shared memory… We performed at the Paradiso together, in Amsterdam, and we’re on stage, there’s a video that I prepared. I asked her if she wanted to look at it, she said no, that she would play to it, but she wasn’t going to look at it. So, she was in front of the screen, and she never did look at the image, but of course, she played beautifully to it. But there was so much noise coming from over in the bar area. They were… Particularly at one point in the show, they were clinging dishes and washing and moving thigs and I got tense and I probably stopped breathing properly. After the show, she said: “Did you notice what I was doing?”. And I said: “No, what do you mean?”. And she said: “Well, I heard all those sounds, so I started to play to them and that changed my rhythms, and I became attuned to the kind of soundscape and space”. And it impressed me so much, I still think about that, that I stopped breathing and I got angry, I probably started to perform badly. For her, she took it as a challenge, but also something interesting.
Almost every time I ever saw Pauline perform, she was playing accordion, that was her signature instrument. For many that would seem an unusual instrument and I don’t know if I ever heard why she gravitated to it, but it does seem that she had a unique career. She was a woman who came through a very male dominated field, particularly with technology in the 50s and 60s. It allowed her to stake her own claim. It’s also an instrument that breathe like a human body and to move it is to give breath and to play with a breath. The only time I remember her not playing accordion was for a show that I curated at Town Hall, it was a Kitchen benefit, and Laurie Anderson performed, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass… And I asked Pauline if she had sound checked, and she said no. And I said: “What are you going to do?” and she smiled. And when her part of the performance came up, they put out a chair and a microphone and she went up on the stage and she introduced the audience to the idea of The Tuning Meditation. She gave the word score to perform it, it was a piece to be performed by the audience. She asked that people listened, that they localize, they pay attention to others in the room. Again, she didn’t give a timeline, but invited the audience to perform The Tuning Meditation. And I swear that my heart was pounding, and I thought: “What?”, you know. This could so easily fail, but she sat there, and the audience started to vocalize. Sounds started to build, they rose, there was a peak, a spectacular peak. And I looked around, and some people had their eyes closed, some people were smiling… And at a certain point, I don’t know if it was at nine or ten minutes, just like that, there was a fade out and it was over. And there was such a beautiful harmonizing of the audience and the composer, harmonizing of voices and the space and being uniquely participants in a moment in time. I don’t know if others could pull that off, but she could pull it off, and gave the audience the power to do that.
The music you’ve been hearing at the background is Golden Offence Orchestra’s Recording of the Composition to Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation. Pauline wrote the score to Valerie Solanas in 1970. The work has a political background, a specifically feminist background. I was just reading an interview with Pauline in Pitchfork where she said, I quote: “The structure is based on her manifesto of equality and community, so everybody in the orchestra has the same part, but the way each part is differentiated is up to the individual. One principal instruction is that if anybody takes leadership in the piece for too long, then the rest of the community rises up and absorbs that. So, I was expressing how an individual can make a difference and at the same time be part of a community”. End quote. My understanding is that the Golden Offence Orchestra was formed to perform this composition and I often wondered whether someone as distinct as her… What would hold up in terms of… Is it just the memory, her texts or teaching, individual recordings…? For me those are the deep listening bounds recordings that I always go to first, but also, this is a piece which was scored for others to perform without her, and I think it’s a lovely example. I hope this piece would be inspiring to you as well.
Now that Pauline has passed away, there has been probably growing attention, as often happens, but I have to hope that her legacy will just continue, that more attention will always be brought… perhaps that the respect she didn’t earn in her lifetime to the level of some of her peers, you know, great peers such as Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick and others, but nevertheless, she was probably in the historical shadows in comparison… but I hope that younger generations will continue to learn about her, to appreciate her, to listen to her works, to listen to her ideas and to become better musicians than they might have been without her, to be better thinkers, to be betters poets. It’s a mistake I probably make, and others, to only talk about this narrowly within the idea of people who consciously appreciate sound, but I think to learn from Pauline and learn of Pauline should make the people just enjoy the world that much more. It should encourage writers to listen to the world around them to write, to describe a sound as they hear it. But more than anything, to give us moments where we take pauses in our own lives and listen and appreciate and feel fortunate that there are so many beautiful sounds all around us.
Audio 2: Judith Hamann on Alvin Lucier
My name’s Judith Hamann, I’m a performer composer from Narrm, Melbourne, in so-called Australia, currently based in Berlin. My work is mostly oriented around process-based performance practices, which focus a lot on teleperformance, as well as field recordings, more conceptual research, and mostly linked in some sense with physical phenomena in a relational practice, whether that’s in terms of vibration or recording as a performative surface, tuning systems and harmonic space, as well as more speculative sound surfaces. In this podcast I’m going to be talking about the featured artist Alvin Lucier and a little bit about how his thinking, composition, legacy and spirit connects to my own practice.
Alvin Lucier was an American composer who died on the first day of December last year at 90 years of age. His work explores in many enfolded, but also perhaps maybe unfolded ways the physicality of sound and phenomena. He’s most known more widely perhaps for his explorations and uncoverings of rooms, spaces and objects ranging from the domestic to the enormous, for working with brain waves, physics, phenomena, like “dyning”, acoustical beating, even sending his heartbeat to the moon and back, making that satellite some kind of possible resonator for his own pulse and for human kinds of electricity.
I, actually, first met Alvin Lucier at his 80t birthday party at Charles Curtis’ house in San Diego. That was sort of a bizarre, otherworldly thing for me. It was only my second time traveling overseas at all and to even get to be there was wild. Charles would a while on the track become my doctoral supervisor at UC San Diego and it is really through my relationship with Charles that I was lucky enough to work with Alvin as much as I did. I am really so grateful for being able to spend some time with him in the past few years and to get to experience so many performances both by Alvin himself and of his work by the broader community around him.
Reflecting on Alvin’s form of thinking or compositional philosophy and the question of what kind of relationship Alvin’s work has to sound… Certain language from James Tenney’s Forward to Chambers, which is a book about Alvin, came up where he describes Alvin’s work as dealing with manifestations and revelations letting, and I quote, “inarticulate nature speak”. I do find this phrasing around Alvin’s work compelling in some ways because there is definitely a sense of the revelatory, the sense of illumination or lifting a veil, of making compositional settings that allow a certain phenomena or activity to “speak” (in quotation marks) or perhaps rather to sound. But also, I suspect that in Alvin Lucier’s work there’s more entwining, more labor perhaps isn’t the right word, but something of the sort of entanglement of human nature, something more grounded. There’s an openness. It’s not a magician pulling back a curtain, it’s not like the wizard of Oz, you know? It’s something more like a holding of space and making spaces physically and temporarily where we might be out of shift modalities but might be able to move into other ways of hearing and feeling the world.
In the way I think about Alvin’s work, and this is also a major component of my own process, it’s more about setting a kind of proposition or frame which puts things in motion, into activity. And the score as a sort of proposition is not necessarily where the piece is really located, the piece is elsewhere, it’s in the navigation of and tending to phenomena. It is in the following of the sound and in all the artifacts created by undertaking that activity. For instance, in the cello quartet One Arm Bandits, which I recorded at Alvin’s Connecticut house in November 2019, which was also the last time I saw him, all four cellos are bowing the same open string for each movement, Sol, A, D, etc., with differences in bow pressure and speed, resounding in fluctuations in pitch, which in turn create acoustical beating and differences in depth of field as you listen. So here… The activity itself here is very simple and the notation or work object of the score is really just a frame for that activity, however, precise in terms of marking out speed and bow pressure, the phenomena that are the real focus of the piece aren’t marked out, if that makes sense. And there is something important for me in this approach of undertaking a certain kind of action, or activity, that sets all these other materials, phenomena, artifacts, unexpected things in motion, that one can then follow as you navigate them in performance, and for me this is one of the most important lessons of Alvin’s work.
I have an ongoing practice which draws on a lot of research and material working with broader ideas about shaking. So I take the shaking rate, or the rate of tremor from…the sort of shaking rhythm of the instrument itself by a bow and the end pin fully extended. And I think of this as a kind of act of sphygmology, or pulse taking, one where the cello then instructs my own physicality, communicates how it wants to move, in a sense. By working in this way and then transferring the tremor to my left hand, which is the one that subs the strings, this creates a frame of motion which is in some sense endemic to the cello. And it allows a kind of unfolding where the cello finds certain partials and resonances or tremors and textures, that sometimes surprise me, actually. And it's all emerging out of a sense of resonance with a particular space or another instrument. And it's my task then in the activity of performing to be a sort of shepherd, to follow the sounds themselves where the cello leads me to let phenomena and frequency emerge and disappear and transform.
I also have this practice which is focused on cello and humming. So, this is something that I started doing sort of intuitively, but which I now realize speaks pretty deeply to the impact of Alvin’s work, as well as my work with Charles Curtis, on hearing differently. So, this interested me initially because I realized that by humming very softly into a bowed cello pitch you can get all the phenomena, the beating to really come alive, with the actual material of the thing, which is setting that beating in motion is sort of hidden or buried in the cello sound. So, then it becomes really about the phenomena, it’s placing the focus really there. For me this was a way to play which sort of exemplifies the real shift that is taking place over many years in terms of what happens in the air, much more so than to things in discrete individual sound sources. I think of a lot of what I do in performance as having some relationship to shepherding or tending. I think working in sound this way is sort of a strand of a practice of care. To me it is something that is ministrative as well as instrumental, if that makes sense.
So working in the way that Alvin’s compositions ask us to has taught me a lot about this, in terms of taking care not only of sound, but that surface of relation that is created by playing a frequency, say, at a certain proximity to a pure wave oscillator. To place our attention on what is created by two or more actions in composite, that create a living, shimmering phenomena that is held in a shared space only by this meeting, by this shared motion. Alvin’s work is so much about that space. It's not about frequencies, or notes or instruments as points, as independent subjects, but about the relationship between them. So much of his work inhabits a space of in-betweenness for me. I sometimes talk about this as a form of collective hallucination that we might sustain in relationship to another musician, a space, a pure wave oscillator, etc. But I feel less and less these days like it's even that ephemeral, or rather that there is a real materiality in the ephemeral. And I’m really stretching something from a crazy utopia here into my own little thinking universe, but that the ephemeral is a kind of material.
You know, so I guess I'm trying to get more comfy with the performer-composer thing these days. Sometimes, I have some trouble seeing myself in that role as it is so often defined. Maybe the way Alvin inhabits that space is a little bit closer to how I see myself than your kind of composer with a capital “C” sorts of folks might see themselves. But really, I see myself very much as a performer who builds relationships with sounds. And the same kind of shepherding I do in performance, in my composition sort of world, it's just in a different frame and on a different time-space scale, but it's still the same kind of practice. I just sort of just follow the sounds and very, very slowly, carve out the space of the piece. For me the practice of it is the same. I'm just responding. I'm not like a “concept-execution-result” sort of person, I'm much more interested in the sticky space between things and what happens there, what debris of artifacts or unnotable things happen there. What does it feel like? Where does it want to go? The cello tells me a lot, and my body and the voice that is part of the instrument that is my body tells me a lot. And the space I am in, and rhythms, and feelings, and temperature, and environment, the other bodies and beings around me there, are all folded in, in some way.
And I don't actually think these practices of composition and performance actually separate things from me, which sometimes feels weird because there’s this disconnect in perception of that from outside. I guess that's because maybe aesthetically or materially different things that I do live in different kinds of listening spaces, right? But to me they are all part of the same thing. I'm asking similar questions, they are all talking to each other, the cello, playing notated music made by other people, making recordings, writing, making these sound surfaces, it's not separate. I think that a multi-modal, multi-dimensional sort of way of going about things, as a way of being, is also a little bit Alvin Lucier. He was that sort of personality, where he was a lot of “ands”, “ands” rather than “ors”. Football fan, experimental composer, so particular, and deep and meticulous and then simultaneously sometimes very party, and fuck it, and funny, and playful and uncertain, and also so certain and so, I think, there’s somehow here an active resistance to binary thinking, or oppositional thinking actually, at play. We can be material and immaterial at the same time, right? Science and poetry can be great friends. Sciences, not necessarily mechanistic, can be very poetic, and poetry can show us so much about the realities we inhabit.
So I think the idea that these things are fixed and then someone's music dissolves them… I think it's not a dissolving, but actually, a sort of refusal instead, right? I think Alvin, along with so many composers and thinkers and musicians that I admire, models that kind of refusal. And by refusal I think what I mean to say is like a committe dengagement, a commitment to the stickiest spaces that are difficult to silo, where it's difficult to mark out a role, or ownership, or authorship, or property, or correctness, or outcome, or the sense that things are finished or fixed.
So, in the background we are listening to a piece called Music on a long thin wire, which is a piece by Alvin Lucier that he started working on in 1977. And this piece takes the idea of the Pythagorean monochord, one string instrument as a launching point for creating an instrument that is sort of deceptive in its simplicity, but at the same time offers up a great deal of complexity and richness. It's somewhere between an installation and a sort of a live, resonating performance for the instrument in relation to the room, interference, and resonance. And this piece speaks to a lot of themes that seem to have come up so far in terms of sound as subject and agent, in terms of the compositional frame or setting, in terms of activity and aliveness.
What we are hearing is a long piano wire stretched across a room with the ends of the wires connected to a loudspeaker terminal, and then a sound wave oscillator is then sort of driving the wire while a magnet also straddles the wire. And the interaction that occurs is then sort of an exploration of the flux field of the magnet in relation to the frequency and volume of the oscillator, which causes these visible, and then, via contact mics, audible vibrations. One of the things I was thinking about when I chose this piece for the background is something Alvin said in the Line and Arts to the release of this record on Lovely Music, where he talks about how deliberately putting specific active pre-composed, or even improvised material through the wire, never activated in ways that he found interesting. And that it is when the instrument is like carefully tuned and then left to just be in a space, then it becomes this responsive, active, sounding. And it's in dialogue with air currents, and temperature, and air conditioning, and footsteps of visitors to the space. And they all shift, and resonate, and generate sometimes surprising material. In those notes, Alvin also talks about how during its installation in Japan, professor Shin Nakagawa, from Osaka City University, reportedly slept under the wire, and then told Alvin that even without even any movement in the space, the wire would sometimes suddenly erupt into complex harmony, like seemingly of its own agency.
The relationship to, or contrast with, John Cage was also raised in terms of asking questions about the phrase “letting sounds be themselves”, and how that might be different in Alvin Lucier’s work to John Cage’s. So, I am not sure that I necessarily agree that Alvin’s work is post-Cagean, although obviously, like, Cage’s cracking open of certain spaces, in terms of work composition is, and can be, of course, so important and it that sense it could be argued that a lot of United States, European-heritage music experimentalism can, in one way or another, be traced to Cage. But I guess I am always wary of the tendency to claim or posit lineage or inheritance in how we construct canon, or history generally. As I feel like, these sorts of frames often call upon colonial senses of proximity and even ownership. For me, the only comment I feel I can really make here is more personal, if that is okay, which is to say that there is a discernible difference in terms of what it might mean to “let sounds be themselves” between these two composer figures. There is a feeling, and I mean it is a feeling rather than any sort of provable nugget of academic wisdom, but my feeling is in some of the more well-known works of Cage that exemplify this segment, like 4’33 etc., letting sounds be themselves is somehow an active compositional framing, but at the same time a kind of passive listening space for those sounds. Whereas, I think in Alvin’s work, letting the sounds be themselves is more responsive, there’s a relationship here between the sound subjectivity, its activity, its movement, its inclination, its desires… The composer performing then is very much complicit, and is part of what happens, in what, in fact, sounds. In Alvin Lucier’s work there are bodies involved, responsiveness, resonance, relationships. And in the same sense that we can observe something without affecting it, in that sense when performing Alvin's work, one must give this kind of fullness of attention and presence to the sounds.
The other thing that comes up is the sort of curiosity, the sense of play in Alvin Lucier’s work. And, I think, when musicians and artists work in spaces that overlap with more clearly delineated fields of science, like with physics in this case, and that kind of thing, it often implies a particular kind of studious seriousness. And that's part of, maybe, of course, the longer arch in the history of siloed knowledges and how that plays out in the history of mechanistic perspectives in science, but it gives a sense of studiousness or maybe even rigidity. And I think it is important to know how much curiosity and wonder, and play forms part of Alvin’s process and experimentation, in the sense of that word, where you, like, set up an experiment and see what happens, and maybe it doesn't work, or maybe it doesn't work in the way you expect it to, but in trying and then seeing what that frame of experimentation gives to you, that's an incredibly valuable position in making work. And I think Alvin leaned into that uncertainty his whole life. Even when I first properly worked with him, he was I think 84, maybe 83, and was still asking questions like: Does it work? What are we hearing? What’s happening? Is this interesting? At the same time as bringing this kind of grounding, this certainty as well, like a real clarity in details like how bowchangers should sound and a sense of frame, and how much time it might take to find the listening space to hear what he’s looking for. And I think this combination, again the “andness”, of bringing play, and fun, and curiosity into his space of meticulousness and focus, that's very special. And I think it's important not to lose sight of that multiplicity in creating, and not to lose the sense of wonder and joy in what we are doing.
Alvin Lucier’s work has of course impacted in so many ways anyone who works with sound in space, with experimentation in putting sonic phenomena into performance practices. And his influence is, I think, simultaneously very visible, in so many peoples' work through clear, or more obvious, links and processes. But then I also think there are all these more subtle ways that he is present in terms of play, for instance. I think his way of thinking about sound and experimentation is now inextricably woven into the fabric of how we experience sound across multiple fields. I’m not sure that I would make in the way I make without Alvin having existed, without his particular resonance. Really, just to be invited to speak about Alvin Lucier on this podcast in relation to my work... There are so many incredible artists connected to Alvin… It's just really an honor that you hear something of what I do, that's a reflection of what Lucier gave to us as listeners, and as people. I think Alvin’s work, over and over again, offers the opportunity to experience the world differently, and that's an incredible gift. For anyone who might just be discovering Alvin Lucier’s work I encourage you to go into it with open ears and heart, and enjoy this very special world of sound and space.
Audio 3: Eleh (John Brien) on Eliane Radigue
Hello, my name is John Brien and I run a north-american label called Important Records. I’m also a lifelong musician and at some point, in the 99’s, I’ve became fascinated by analogue synthesis which served as my own introduction into the sound world that Eliane Radigue inhabits. I was introduced to Eliane’s work somewhere around 2002 when Table Of the Elements release the Adnos box set. I started working with her somewhere around 2007, and then in 2009 we released Triptych on CD which was followed by Transamoren - Transmortem. And in the consequent years we coproduced maybe different projects together. I think of Eliane’s work as singularly independent from anyone else who may be considered in the electronic drone minimalist realm. It’s said that she was inspired by jet engines in early 50’s, which is similar to the way that La Monte Young was inspired by the sound of electric transformers. And it’s easy to line everybody up behind La Monte Young but I prefer more an egalitarian perspective of that era. Radigue started working with feedback in tape prior to Young’s 1958 Trio for Strains. So, it’s important to me that she isn’t considered as following anyone’s footsteps necessarily.
Eliane and I have talked a little bit about my work in relation with her work and it’s clear that we are both pursuing similar goals. I don’t have an ARP 2500 and I was unfamiliar with her when I first started to work with analogue synthesis, but we both been working with the same tools, and I think those tools steer me towards the music I made, just giving the basic functionality of the instruments. Like, when I try to sync two oscillators by hand, and I heard the slow beating of closely toned frequencies. That completely drew me in and slowed time down, it slowed me down. I persuaded that sound because it felt good to hear it. Because of the work I was doing with synths I started listening more closely to the natural world around me and along sonic events like highway drones, passing airplanes, engines, stuff like that. I know that Eliane had a very intimate relationship with her ARP 2500. I’m not surprised that she found what she was looking for in that analogue circuitry and in this massive synthesizer since it would allow her to generate and mix sounds slowly, the way that she wanted to. It really gives her, as a composer and performer, a lot of the controls that she would appreciated in tape music and then, also, new things that she couldn’t have done as readily. Eliane acoustic work does remind me in a simple way of Alvin Lucier or Phill Niblock, but the essence of the compositions are still very much Eliane’s. And I appreciate the way they slowly change, much like her synthesizer work does. Lucier and Niblock, and other people, other composers like them, create music that is either unchanging or changing in a way that’s ultraslow. But Radigue’s work seems to always be changing in a way that’s difficult to notice but it doesn’t happen so slowly that you might not even noticed at all. There is still a very organic element within her work, possibly even more now that it is written in compositions for acoustic instruments. Also, the way her electronic work is all about the most subtle of changes, seems to be something that’s uniquely her own too. She and I are both performers and composers, but now she’s more of a composer collaborating on new work with performers. In a way I would be relieved if I could be taken out of the performance in that way, but I also had a lot of powerful experiences performing live and I’m not ready to give that up yet.
Time been of known importance is probably what makes time so important in this kind of work. It’s often said that our music slows time or interferes with one’s perception of time. Most importantly I’ve set up to have this experience while I’m working on the music, so if I lose track of time then I’m getting the results I want. I would imagine that Eliane has probably the same transcended, meditated experiences when she is slowly pushing a fader on a mixer or synthesizer. Stillness and nearly impossible slow changes are essential attributes in Radigue’s music, and much of my own work too. However, as you mentioned, it is always growing so the stillness seems immoveable, but it isn’t, it grows like a plant or a tree. If you try to see the growth happening in real time is not possible, but you get a sense of the growth by observing changes over time. I find that Eliane’s work is as pleasing as observing growth in nature. I think mixers and modular synths really lend themselves to this kind of work because you can impose slow changes, either faded by hand or by controllable digitalization. And by doing this kind of musical work it is a form of meditation. You can’t really focus on anything else other than trying to hear the change and the artifacts of change as it’s happening. And I know that this has been said a lot, but Eliane’s music reminds me of just the surface of water. On one hand you see this sort of solid unified whole, but it’s also changing and rippling with vibrations, and they appear both steady and ever-changing. So, for me as a listener, her work drew me in, pulled me in and I couldn’t stop listening to it. It’s really difficult to understand the parts of her work, but it’s easy to feel, in a sense, the organic wholeness of those compositions. There’s always a natural texture to Eliane’s sound even if they are extremely desperate tones that play. And that kind of natural cohesion could be attributable to her masterful ability to mix. Her mixes are just so nice and so dense that what you are hearing is the sum of all the parts and not really those individual parts, which you can focus on but what you really hear and what you really feel is just her incredible mixes.
The term drone reminds me of someone who said that notes in western music are over before you can really hear them. Drones have a way to opening up frequencies so you can hear what they are and how they interact over time. But I don’t necessarily feel that drone is inherently ominous or provoked by vast dread. I do think drone music connects you with the fundamental nature of sound and the fundamental nature of vibration, which does suggest that cosmic order in that way kind of connects you to the source of life. Listening to it can evoke a spiritual experience, especially because it can ease the listener into a state that is much different form their normal state or even the normal experience of listening to music. There is a relationship between creativity and death, and whether is conscious or not, an artist is preserving a moment of time when they are creating something, creating a work that could be beyond the artist life. And I think about that when I look at things like blankets knitted by relatives a long time ago, that each knot is a moment in their life and death is something that is present in every living moment. So, losing yourself in sound, something that I think can happen more readily when music is slow or droning can cause you to transcend feelings of death, dread, and be fully conscious in the moment and pulling auditory phenomenon in your work is an interesting way to interact with the fundamental elements of life, so it’s a way to connect with something much larger.
What you’re hearing in the background is “Kailasha” is the second part of Eliane Radigue’s Trilogie De La Mort. Of the trilogy, this might be the heaviest and the deepest of her work and had a really profound effect on me. Eliane had been working of the first piece of the trilogy for a few years and this, which was the second piece, was started two weeks after she lost her son in a car accident. She spent two years morning and working on this, and when the piece was done, her time of morning was also done. So, you can sense the pain and I also sense relief and release, not just from that pain but from life itself. A word that comes to mind in relation to her work is discipline. It requires an intense amount of solitary focus and discipline to realize this kind of music. So, I’m not surprised it took her so long to complete it. This trilogy is sacred work and it’s got one foot in the reality and another foot in the divine. I can’t really imagine music much more perfect than this. I find this music to be both disorienting and grounding, which seem at odds with one another, but they really are just two sides of the same coin. It’s also totally restorative, it is completely intense always shifting, moving, always changing. It is also very focused, specially by the horn like drones beneath it. I think that to listen to this work is a sublime experience available only for the living so in that way is a celebration of life, just to be able to listen to this music makes me feel alive. And it’s not necessarily minimal either, there’s a kind of sonic density into it. The same way that a gong has a lot of density. And to me that’s life affirming, it’s also somber and we know what this work is about. In the end, that density subsides in a very simple way of one persists, which is an incredible and quite profound sonic and philosophical experience.
Eliane’s work, for me, it is all about a uniquely personal zone that an artist can create for themselves. To me, she created a sound world that is uniquely to her own, in a way, similar to what James Turrell has done with light. She created sonic atmospheres, where you practically desensitized and completely disarmed. I think a young composer, or a young artist can learn the power of interacting with the basic elements of their creative practices through listening to Eliane’s work. Whether is color or sound, you really only need the basics and the right amount of control in order to create something very powerful. And it’s up to the individual to find something that works. If you slow down, if you focus and you work with what you have, and resist adding layer upon layer of extras, of superfluous sounds. I think Radigue really teaches us how to peel back layers, rather than continuing to add them. And then by removing layers, ultimately, you can get to the heart of the sound, which is all you really need.
Audio 4: Peter Kutin on Christina Kubisch
Hi there, I am Peter Kutin. I am a Vienna-based artist, I work with sound as my main material and if you know my work you can probably find influences of noise music and sound art in general or experimental film and conceptual art. I'm generally very interested in the psychology of listening as well as auditory Illusions and psychoacoustic effects and this might be the reason why I find myself often collaborating with other artists from different fields which could be a contemporary dance piece or more avant-garde film and audio visual piece or installations. I got invited here to talk to you about Christina Kubisch, the German composer and one of the well-known names in the field of sound Arts I would say. In the last maybe six Years Christina and I did several corporations to get her so I hope that I can give you some information and tell you some details about Christina Kubisch’ work that you cannot find in Wikipedia or somewhere else in the net.
I met Christina for the first time personally in 2011 or maybe in early 2012. At the time I’d just finished a project called “Decomposition”, therefore I recorded micro-structures of sonic gestures that the human ear cannot decipher, that lay beyond the boundary that is set by our limited senses. I believe a thing that Christina and I have in common is the interest to listen and look at other layers of this world that surrounds us by using extensions for our senses, and these extensions are often based on means of Technology. Christina later on invited me to give a talk about this project at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the theme of this panel or presentation or discussion later on was “Schwindel der Wirklichkeit”, which could be translated as “Reality is cheating on you”. We would meet later on a few times whenever we both happened to be in Berlin, so I went to her studio which is in the upper level of her house. This is the place where she composes or works in concepts, writes pieces and gets her work done and I remember that once when we were sitting in her living room and we were just talkin about what's going on basically we somehow pretty suddenly came up with the idea to do a collaboration which should be an audio-visual work as an experimental film that should be based only on sound and images of alternating currents that could be found alongside the Las Vegas Strip, the famous street that cuts through the desert of Nevada, the place where the American dream ends according to Hunter S. Thompson. And I think not much more that a year later we really found ourselves with a small team spending two weeks in Las Vegas, going out every night to record all sorts of light sources that the architecture of the city would offer to us And it was there when I really got to know and understood how Christina Kubisch works and how masterfully she handles her tools, and how much knowledge and experience she has gained all over the years doing this. It was pretty impressive for me to to see how she can read a city in terms of this hidden layer of reality. She knows pretty soon where the most interesting sounding electromagnetic fields can be found...
In the early 2000s Christina Kubisch created a piece called “Electrical walks”. In his name you can already find the reference to a sound-walk, a name or a concept that was I think created by the Canadian soundscape scene alongside of composers like Murray Schafer. But she transported this idea or concept into a completely different territory because she went to enter the electromagnetic fields that would be around us in our urban spaces. So these electrical walks could be considered as a coordinated sound-walk that will lead you through different areas and places where you could hear a wide variety of a city's electromagnetic emissions. I think by now Christina has realized more than 60 or even 70 of these electrical walks in different places all over our planet. This could actually be considered a simple concept but if you look deeper into it it's getting very complex because it touches so many different areas and fields, not only in terms of artistry but also in terms of our society in general. This is just beside the fact that these electrical-walks sound really fascinating and they are of a tremendous sound quality and richness. One of Christina's main recording tools basically looks like a pair of headphones; it’s also the device she hands out to the audience when she's doing her electromagnetic walks. These headphones would cover both of of your ears so they're more of the size like a pilot of a helicopter would wear. But Christina did some very clever manipulations on them. So she puts electrical coils inside each side of these headphones and then connect them to the loud speakers that are positioned right above your ears. Now, once these coils enter a magnetic field they will start to produce a current so they will produce voltage, and if voltage is sent to a loudspeaker, this loudspeaker will move according to or rather in a certain proportion to this voltage, meaning that it will create a sound. So if you would try to get some cash at an ATM it would sound like this.... Or if you were standing in Hong Kong beside to new plasma screens that are positioned close to a security gate of the shop you are in, it could sound like this.... Or if you were standing in Vegas below an always changing LED panel it would sound like this.... So these are just a few examples of what kind of sounds you could record with these headphones. What I find interesting in the device itself is that Christina turned its former purpose upside down. Usually if you use headphones their are supposed to disconnect you from your surroundings. If you listen to Bach or any sort of music you don't want to hear the traffic or anything else that's happening around you, especially in times of noise cancellation systems. But Christina's headphones they open a door to the reality that you cannot see but it always surrounds you 24/7. It's a reality that constantly changes and grows.
What I also find worth mentioning about this electrical walks is how much Freedom Christina gives to the listeners. Every participant will hear his or her very unique composition because you can pretty much decide on your own how you want to interpret or how you want to listen to this electrical walk. It all depends on how fast you go or how close you go to the sound sources or how loud you want to hear them and for what duration and so on. If you think of the usual or traditional concert situation, this is just not the case. In concerts we always need to have a central stage with an artist to be present or to be a adored or sometimes even worse. Christina's electrical walks don't need any of these factors to work out perfectly. It's pretty much free of hierarchies. She has set up a clear conceptual frame and the range of tools that can be moved within the frame and she accepts what sounds will be heard or will appear. I think her work especially with electromagnetic induction feels a lot with this balance between accepting and composing actively. This is an idea that you could find much more in America than in Europe. American composers like Cage or Feldman for example aimed to shift the focus from the active action of composing more towards the freedom of accepting and therefore being able to discover. Cage did this in a more performative way and Feldman who used this idea much more within the musical system that he composed with. What Christina also has in common with his composers is that she doesn't have any need to push the sounds she lets them be as they are and they are powerful enough anyway. By realizing electrical works as well as with many other of her compositions installations or works for rooms, she invites the audience to experience or to discover or to dissolve into the sound of a world that is provided by electricity. Often when people first hear this sound of reality that they didn’t know but maybe are familiar with because it's always around it leads to an opening of perception as Peter Ablinger describes it. It's the moment when something in your mind makes click.
What I also find worth mentioning about this electrical walks is how much Freedom Christina gives to the listeners. Every participant will hear his or her very unique composition because you can pretty much decide on your own how you want to interpret or how you want to listen to this electrical walk. It all depends on how fast you go or how close you go to the sound sources or how loud you want to hear them and for what duration and so on. If you think of the usual or traditional concert situation, this is just not the case. In concerts we always need to have a central stage with an artist to be present or to be a adored or sometimes even worse. Christina's electrical walks don't need any of these factors to work out perfectly. It's pretty much free of hierarchies. She has set up a clear conceptual frame and the range of tools that can be moved within the frame and she accepts what sounds will be heard or will appear. I think her work especially with electromagnetic induction feels a lot with this balance between accepting and composing actively. This is an idea that you could find much more in America than in Europe. American composers like Cage or Feldman for example aimed to shift the focus from the active action of composing more towards the freedom of accepting and therefore being able to discover. Cage did this in a more performative way and Feldman who used this idea much more within the musical system that he composed with. What Christina also has in common with his composers is that she doesn't have any need to push the sounds she lets them be as they are and they are powerful enough anyway. By realizing electrical works as well as with many other of her compositions installations or works for rooms, she invites the audience to experience or to discover or to dissolve into the sound of a world that is provided by electricity. Often when people first hear this sound of reality that they didn’t know but maybe are familiar with because it's always around it leads to an opening of perception as Peter Ablinger describes it. It's the moment when something in your mind makes click a huge impression on the audience. I totally admire the preciseness Christina works with but also the way how she can connect a room and the audience with this invisible element of electromagnetic induction which will mostly manifest itself in an object based on wires and she just recently told me that her “Emergency solos” I was talking before will nowadays be interpreted by a younger generation of female musicians. So the context Christina's pieces touch are pretty timeless I suppose.
I think many of Christina's works go really deep context wise or in terms of observing our society she has done so many recordings in various different cities and regions so besides realizing her art she had created quite an impressive archive for a documentation of these electromagnetic sounds. In some places or cities she could probably show you how the amount of electromagnetic waves or how does sound characteristics have changed over the years. The wireless technology has manifested itself in our urban environment with an exponential growth especially over the last decade. Before the twenty-first century there were almost no mobile phones around and there were way less wireless routers and 5G was still far away. Christina often talked to me about how to acoustic information has changed and transformed and that she always needs to adapt their recording devices in order to catch these new signals. The frequency ranges that lay beyond our human perception are precious for the industry it seems. Developers let information transfers happen while we could not hear or see or feel them. Don't get me wrong at this point Christina's is not claiming that technology is a bad thing, she's sort of a big fan of technology but she is aware of the situation. For her all these technological developments have turned out to be an endless and everincreasing pool of different sonic signals. She knows where to go and how to capture the sounds that have the quality she's looking for, whether this is a pattern of highpitched tunes or noisy structure, harmonic layer, techno like bass drum sound, more complex rhythmic patterns or a sine wave-like frequency with its harmonics. Yet it is still surprising to her as she discovers new sounds every time she goes out doing recordings. That was when I understood that Christina plays or interprets a city like an instrument, like people would play a modular synthesizer for example. The clever thing in Christina's case is that she doesn't need to buy any new modules to get more complex sounds because our society creates them anyway, It's the high-tech driven need for being more connected that lets Christina's repertoire grow constantly somehow. And she doesn't even need to pay for it.
I guess every musician who is really devoted to her or his instrument or instrumentation knows a bit of its history or some stories to tell about it. I believe for Christina, as I said before, her main instruments or material is probably electricity itself. She likes to go where electricity is produced like other people would go to concert Halls. I myself remember visiting quite a few power plants with her by now. So it seems also pretty natural that Nikola Tesla, besides other inventors and technicians of course, but he especially is in pretty important figure for her. And I remember that when she mentions his name she would often refer to him as a crazy guy. So if you know about Tesla’s life story or have seen the images of him sitting in his laboratory while flashes of alternating current which burst just right above his head while he's reading the newspaper as if nothing had happened I think this definition sort of hits the nail on the spot. Tesla was this incredible genius with a sort of punk attitude, or maybe that's the wrong definition. He was sort of not willing to connect to how the economic system is running at all. I mean lived he basically for getting his work on going and not for the monetary success. He was probably the anti-businessman, and primarily a visionary heading for his utopia, who would at the end die alone and completely broke even though he was one of the most important inventors early 20th century. So it's not a big surprise that Christina often refers to him, like just recently on a split LP that she did with Eleh, that's called “Tesla’s Dream”. In general Christina is pretty much aware of the fact that engineers can be very important for artists. The thing about the artist is that she or he can use the tools developed by engineers in a dysfunctional or wrong or manipulative way to maybe discover something beautiful or fascinating. Christina works with the same engineer for a really long time now I think it's more than maybe 25 years who helps her to realize her visions of sensors or instruments that would reach frequency ranges that lay far beyond our human auditory threshold.
What left a big impression on me when working with Christina and listening to her works or recordings is that all these sounds are out there as they are, they sound like that without any further tricks or sound design attitude anymore, they're not even the atuned. These sounds are raw material or “non-fictional music” as Jennie Gottschalk, the author of the book named “Experimental music since the 1970s” would define it. If you think of industrial music or techno music there is a very close relationship to the sounds. So at one point the question arose in me if I personally for example feel attracted to this sort of music because the sounds this music is built on were already familiar to me before, if maybe only on a subconscious level. Of course no one knows but it's maybe an idea I considered worth thinking about. I personally regard as a privilege to work with artists who have gained experience by doing her work over a long time continuously simply because he can still learn so much but not in a student / master relationship or any of that sort. It's just because experience is basically something that's like just in the air and if it's something that doesn't compare to telling and it's not something that you can learn somewhere. I guess you just have to continue doing your work as sincere and honest as possible. Christina Kubisch is probably one of the most experienced and most skilled people working in the field of sound art and even though her schedule is pretty tight she's never pushy or turns into a diva or gets stressed out and she's just this amazing force of energy who can keep going. While compiling this podcast I was thinking if she has something in common with Nikola Tesla it might be that she's also not much interested in the monetary success but rather in being focused in doing her art her work continuously. Still her eyes and ears are wide open enough to do cooperations with a younger generation of artists and I believe that Christina is a sort of character who would always look behind a thing before simply accepting it and the highly respect that.
Audio 5: Thomas Ankersmit on Maryanne Amacher
My name is Thomas Ankersmit, I am musician based in Berlin I make a kind of noise music, electroacoustic music, mostly using a Serge modular analog synthesizer. Most of my stuff is based on a kind of creative abuse of the instrument, making feedback and glitches in the signal and things like that. I'm also quite interested in acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena in sound and in music. So this podcast is about Maryanne Amacher. Maryanne was a was an American composer and artist who was born in 1948 and passed away in 2009. I meet her for the first time at a place called Bard College in upstate New York. I was there with Kevin Drum from Chicago and the Swiss duo Voice Crack. They had a show there and I'd come up with them from the city to to be there. Back then Maryanne and I only met briefly. Her CD “Sound Characters”, her first ever CD, had just been released the year before and it made a big impression on me. She’s spent a year in the 1980s in Berlin as a guest of the DAD artist residency program and then around 2003 to 2006 she was in Berlin a lot and during that time we would meet up sometimes and go for lunch or I would come to her shows. She had a number of shows in Berlin during those years that made a really big impression on me.
So Maryanne Amacher was one of the experts of sonic architecture I would say. She was very interested in the spatial arrangement of sounds. As I witness it her work took the form of a kind of concert-installations. What I think was was kind of extraordinary about her is that, in general, I guess, sound art prioritizes space you could say and music very heavily prioritizes time but her work really manifested itself equally in time as well as in space. So when I say installation-concerts I mean that the music would really spread out in the room sometimes in a very complex way, sometimes it's very complex place. There was a clear beginning and end in a kind of narrative structure to it unlike a lot of sound installation art. These performances she would prepare for them for weeks, literally spending weeks in advance before the presentation in the performance space, moving speakers around, changing angles slightly and really painstakingly molding and shaping the music, sculpting the music on-site, on location.
I guess you could say that there's a kind of European approach to sound in space and then the American approach broadly, in a sense that in Europe the focus was on hightech and high-expense speaker systems like those at the IRCAM or ZKM or the GRM for example... These large stockpiles of literally trucks full of loudspeakers. And then the Americans, like La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier or Phill Niblock... Their approach seems more about letting sounds unfold according to their own rules, according to physics, according to acoustics; sounds unfolding in space in a natural sort of architectural physically-guided way. And Maryanne was different from both these approaches because she was really dedicated to a very careful placement and specific choreography of sounds. She was very much interested not just in what happens and when it happens in music but especially where it happens and how it happens, where a sound exist and how a sound exist rather than simply what sound is it and when does it come. For her the sound-material she was using was really this raw material. The recordings, the sonic information that she had on tapes for example and came from synthesizes, it was just a starting point, the raw material. The real work was in the threedimensional arrangement thereof. She would refer to her sounds as they existed in space as “sound characters”, as a three-dimensional sonic entities, each with their own qualities and ways of behavior and these “sound characters” they would meet each other and would overlap, they would bump into each other and it would mask each other, etc.
Maryanne had a background and training in scored composition for traditional instruments, traditional acoustic instruments, but since the mid-sixties she decided to use electronics exclusively. Mostly it seems because she really wanted to work directly with the sound itself, she really wanted it to be experiential, she wanted to be able to set her instruments and then observe what was happening and change things and notice what she was hearing and then take detailed notes on that so she was very happy to be working directly with electronics, directly with sound itself, so she could experiment and really experience directly as opposed to scoring something and then later on being able to maybe hear it performed by other musicians. In terms of Maryanne's influences, in terms of who was important to her she studied with Stockhausen in the early 60s, while she was in her twenties for a while and later she became a collaborator and friend of John Cage. She really admired both Stockhausen and Cage I think. Cage put the focus on the active listening with pieces like “4’ 33’’” for example and I think Maryanne really developed this further. For a lot of people Cage’s work, especially “4’ 33’’”, is a kind of conceptual dead-end where people go to and they turn around back to more conventional practices. But for Maryanne, unusually, this seems to have been an opening to new meaningful artistic possibilities. So she was really interested in expanding the role of the listener and actually finding new ways of hearing, not just new sounds; new ways of sensing, new ways of experiencing.
One of the aspects of her music and research that she's most well-known for is her use of an acoustic phenomenon called otoacoustic emissions. Otoacoustic emissions are sounds that are produced by the ears of the listener when provoked with certain stimulus. They are real sounds that are made inside all of our ears, not hallucinations or illusions but actual sounds that are born and created inside our inner ears and they feel like that. All of a sudden sound is pouring out of your ears in the way which is very unusual feeling. Maryanne discovered this phenomenon on her own in the 1970s. She referred to them back then as “ear tones” and although she realized that the phenomenon wasn’t new and that our ears have always had the capability to do this and that this has always been happening when we listen to music to an extent, this has always been subconscious and we don't we don't notice this. What Maryanne wanted to do was to really bring the capability of our ears to emit sounds of their own. She wanted to make the listener aware, to create a special “counterpoint”, I think she said, where you would have a layer of music coming from the speakers for example that was clearly outside of us and then they would have another voice inside of your head. She wrote a really interesting article about this in the 1970s called “Psychoacoustic phenomena in musical composition. Some features of a perceptual geography”. And this concept of “perceptual geography” I think is a very useful term to think about her work. She thought about music as a kind of three-dimensional landscape with real perspective where some sounds might be far off at the distance and some sounds might be around us and some sounds would be inside of us. And rather than our ears simply receiving they would actively respond and also produce sounds. So she thought in terms of a kind of acoustic perspective; music as a geography in a sense of a three-dimensional landscape that the listener could explore, where some things were made by ourselves. She said something like “where the performers and the audience meet in the creation of the music”, so that the performers or the speakers generate sounds but then our ears respond and start to emit sounds of their own. And this is an extremely unusual and extremely fine special feeling that can be extremely defined. At twenty-six minutes into this podcast we’ll have a piece of Maryanne's that demonstrates this phenomenon, the “ear-tones” as she called them. You should play this fairly loud over the speakers, it doesn't work with headphones. And it might help if you're playing it back to move your head slowly, just a little bit from side to side. And the article is available online, it's quite interesting. If you look for Amacher and the words of “perceptual geography” you'll be able to find it on the internet.
Another aspect of sound that Maryanne was quite interested in was “structure-borne” sound. In acoustics “structure-born” sound means sound that's generated by physical forces and then transmitted through solid materials like footsteps on the floor above you, for example, or the physical vibration of a ship's engine that's transported throughout the shipping and heard everywhere. So she started working with the idea of using real space, physical space (rooms, etc) as extensions of loudspeakers, so she would take loudspeakers and hide them in other places, like in other rooms, behind closed doors, for example. Not just to hide them out of sight but to really alter the sound dramatically and to get rid of this kind of harsh, direct, “boxy” sound, as she referred to as such, out of the speakers and really channel sound through space where it would take on a another shape and another character. So she would spend a lot of time really aiming, very carefully aiming, original speaker-regenerated sound onto the building or into walls to reflect sound from the walls, reflect on from ceilings, etc. She was trying to basically transmit the speaker sound into solid structures, into the building, and then it would radiate from the building elsewhere back to the listener. It would radiate from physical structure, so that the sound was to that extent coming from the walls, seeping out from the doors or pouring down from the ceiling for example.
In terms of Maryanne’s influence on my artistic practice, on my stuff, there's a lot of things that I really admired about her and that were a big inspiration to me. She was just so radical and uncompromising, both as a person as an artist. She was extremely focused she and went very deep. You could really say she was on a kind of lifelongquest, as opposed to artist who always have a new project every season, new collaborations or that they always have new and always clever ideas one after the other. She went very deep and was very dedicated to maybe just a handful of issues and this is something I admire very much. Another thing that I found was interesting and inspiring I guess is that she was an outsider, she was an independent artist that had no regular access to places like IRCAM or ZKM, for example, and it's the same for me. She kind of worked on the periphery of a lot of fields in a way and she didn't have an academic tenure or a hi-tech studio lab that she worked in, so I tend to think of her stuff as a kind of “guerrilla” specialization in the sense that she was forced to work with relatively modest means, just a handful of good loudspeakers usually, as opposed to this high-tech systems. And it’s not that she wanted that to be the case but the fact is that that was the case. To me she was somebody who went far beyond stereo conventions or surround sound conventions, using a relatively low-tech stuff by really focusing on sound Itself by dedicating weeks on placing sound and just really focusing on what the sound do, how does it behave in the space, how does it behave when I change something I change something a tiny bit physically. So she build up this really deep body of knowledge. And the term “perceptual geography” that I mentioned before, which is part of the title of that article of hers, that notion of “perceptual geography” was important to me and still is. The idea of having sound coming out of speakers for example and I think sound that's beyond speakers and then sound that is literally born inside of our heads. The possibility of this very complex interconnected landscape of sonic phenomena being extremely close or far away or somewhere in between and the different relationships that can exist between them... I've been very interested in that. And the concept of the “ear-tones”, the reason that I use “ear-tones”, certainly that I use them consciously, I got that directly from Maryanne. I know that I had heard otoacoustic emissions sort of accidentally made by myself before I heard Maryanne's work maybe but she was definitely the one who introduced me consciously to the idea.
What is really noteworthy about her work I think it's this balance of this kind of ferociousness and wildness, this really visceral sound-mass but it's also very detailed perceptually. It’s very fine. Very subtle things are happening, very unique things are happening, very fine sonic phenomena are occurring, but then there's also just this really wild, uncompromising and really visceral sound-mass. And it’s that balance or that contrast that has always appealed to me a lot in Maryanne’s work and in the work of a handful of other people. Her stuff was really loud and people ran out in panic from the concert hall sometimes, but without being “macho” or relying on easy tricks to make things sound really big or cavernous or scary or something. It felt to me that thesense of scale or the sense of overwhelmingness in her music was really articulating the scale of a real place for example. Her stuff truly was very large-scale because she would physically fill the space in a very direct but also very smart and poetic way. Unlike a lot of electronic music, I think her music wasn't so much about conjuring up these virtual or fictional worlds, but much more about finding new possibilities for the present. Her work didn't seem to portray anything else, it just made the here and the now extraordinary. And that's something that I look for as well, this sort of directconcrete relationship to the current space rather than this sort of cinematic thing of considering the concert hall as this non-space and then sucking everybody into these other worlds. Her work seemed to overlap our physical bodies present in this physical space at the moment with these ephemeral sonic-shapes that she would conjure, that she would unleash upon the situation. But they were not sonic phenomena that belonged to a fictional world, they belonged to the here and now.
Audio 6: Olivia Block on Harry Bertoia
My name is Olivia Block, I am a media artist and sound and music composer based in Chicago. My work manifests itself in many different forms. I make scores for orchestra, I make electro-recorded music pieces that come out on different labels. I also do a lot of sound installation work, which is usually site-specific, meaning that I take speakers and place them in locations and I think about each location separately and create the work to fit that location. That includes thinking about architecture, material, shape, acoustics, historical context of the location and everything related to that site.
I first became familiar with Harry Bertoia’s work when I was much younger living in Austin and a friend of mine had one of his LPs of the recorded sculptures. I remember listening to it in this friend’s front porch and thinking that it was so beautiful. I was looking at the cover and just wondering whom this person was. I think that those forms and sounds just stacked in my mind for a long time so when I finally moved to Chicago a few years after that, in the late nineties, another friend have told me that there was a Harry Bertoia’s sculpture here in a public place that I could go and check out. And I did.
It was in this kind of office building in downtown Chicago. I visited the sculpture and I loved it so much; it brought me so much happiness, and sometimes in a dark time because I was new to the city. I would go there at night and just listen to the wind hitting the sculpture. And then when I started teaching at the School of the Art Institute I brought my students there because it was very close to the school and all the students really loved it. I remember thinking that they responded so much to the sculpture, more so than they did to really anything else that I played them or talked about in the class.
Bertoia came from a design background, he was very aware of the way the materials can be manipulated and shaped physically. The sound came out of the material and the form rather than “I want this sound, how do I get it?” I love the story of the way Bertoia discovered the sounds of the metal. When he was in his studio working on a piece he dropped a big rod of metal and reverberated in the room making this beautiful sonorous bell-like tone. Working with these materials, using his hands, brought the ideas of sound to his mind. Bertoia was an instrument maker, which is really great because I think the person who made the violin or the trumpet or the guitar is more in the background of the narrative music history. I think that the wonderful thing about Bertoia is that the craftsmanship is elevated in the process of the music making.
One of the most important things about Bertoia is that he thought a lot about timber. I don’t know if you would think of it that way but I definitely think of him as a timbral composer. When I think about timber I always think about something that John Cage said... something along the lines of the fact that percussion instruments are kind of the bridge between music and sound and noise. I think that Bertoia was kind of situated on that bridge. And because he had such a hands-on-knowledge on these metal materials that he used he knew how to manipulate the timber of that material to draw out the most beautiful sounds and certain elements of the tone.
Even if you asked a violinist or a trombone player, they too would have knowledge of how to manipulate the material that they are using to draw out certain kind of timbral qualities. Being in Chicago I have a lot of friends who are improvisers. I can think of brass players who subtlety can manipulate their mouth or even place things inside of the bell so that they can change the way that the metal and the air are interacting to make the sound. With these manipulations they don’t change the pitch necessarily but they do change the timber. Again, this reinforces this notion of timber and how important that was to Bertoia, and how that element of music is one of the most important ones to sound artists in general.
Bertoia was a composer in the same way that David Tudor was a composer when he created his sound producing objects. In that sense I think that the object itself that creates the sound is more of a composition. There’s an awareness that sound will result from that object doing something and the sounds that come out from that are going to be somewhat unpredictable. So if one is thinking about this idea of a sound object... the controversy around that term is about the fact that an object isn’t really time-based. Usually when you think about sound pieces or music you think about this events that take place in time. I am not necessarily thinking in terms of sound objects but more in terms of space, and I think Bertoia thought in terms of space as well because he was so involved in the community of architecture. So many of his works were commissioned by architects and I think that he had a real working knowledge of how architecture and sound work together.
So the way that I see this in his Sonambient sculptures is his focus on reverberation. So all of theses sounds that he brought out of this metal had this long long case, and the sounds would just last for long time and fill up the space in these interesting ways. Was Bertoia thinking in terms of time? Was he thinking in terms of a sound object? Maybe it wasn’t even that he was consciously thinking about these things... I think it was more that he had this innate knowledge of the way that sounds and materials, time and objects worked together, which is what makes those sculptures so amazing and beautiful.
Rosalind Krauss’ idea of the expanded sculptural field is a really good way of describing the sonic aspects of the Sonambient sculptures. So now it’s not just about a solid object and these materials, their weight, their shape... It’s about phenomena of sound that expands this field literally because sounds travel further. But the really interesting thing to me is that the original LP recordings of the Sonambient sculptures are yet another expansion of that field. And, if you think about it, the field becomes almost limitless because anyone can listen to these recordings with the proper equipment to do so.
Sonambient Pavilion was a large-scale sixteen-channel sound installation that I made in Chicago, in this downtown public park called Millennium Park, in the Pritzker Pavilion. The idea started when I kept visiting the Sonambient sculptures here and noticing they were in disrepair. I felt like I wanted more people to know about these sculptures. Plus, the sounds themselves that these sculptures generate are so beautiful that I thought “wouldn’t it be amazing if I could, again, expand the sculptural field of these objects further? To take these beautiful sounds and diffuse them out into this enormous football-field sized location?” The piece opened as part of the architecture biennial and it was installed for a month on weekends. It was a free installation that people could just come and go as they pleased. I was using Bertoia’s sounds to articulate a space that wasn’t actually real. I was making, kind of like, walls out of sound; making this architecture out of sound. In a sense it was like using his sounds to create an invisible architecture around people walking on this great lawn.
The way I did that was to use Bertoia’s sounds in a kind of a pointillistic way at times so that the peripheral area of the speakers was sounding with this kind of shimmering bell-like tones. At other times, I sort of called the attention to the top of the arch that goes over the heads of all the people walking on the lawn, by taking these large drones that moved from front to back. So over time all these Bertoia’s Sonambient sculpture’s sounds were making this larger shape or room that people were coming to and being a part of because the sound was there. When I was working on Sonambient Pavilion I really gained an understanding of just how rich Bertoia’s sound were because the frequency spectrum was so incredibly broad.
I think that he brought out this tension between the ephemeral phenomena of sound, that kind of radiated outward and had no boundaries, and the solidity and the stability of the visual object. I think that that extra layer of meaning just opened up all of these possibilities in thinking about art and sculpture. The fact that there are recordings of these sculptures and that those recordings were available to someone like me, when I was in a rock band, and not just sitting in a gallery... that too was revolutionary. Bertoia’s work has been very important to me personally as a sound-artist and I am so happy that more people are taking an interest in his work now.
Audio 7: Jim O´Rourke on Phill Niblock
Hello, this is Jim O’Rourke speaking you from Tokyo. I am a person involved with music, film and things like that since the late eighties in Chicago, where I was born to Irish immigrants. I have since not stop.
If I am remembering correctly, the first time I heard Phill Niblock’s music was in 1990 when I was in Berkley, California, at Henry Kaiser house (a guitarist and composer from the same generation of John Zorn, coming from that same second generation of American improv group of people). He had brought me out there to organize his record collection, which I did. I was very young, I was twenty-one, and he very kindly had seen something in me or whatever so he decided to bring me out there so I could have the opportunity to play with people, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to play with anyone in the States. At that time the only chance you had to play with people was in Europe. He was introducing me to various people’s music and he noticed I was already tending towards what people would call dronny music. I was still playing prepared guitar at that time, using bows and stuff. He would point out certain record in the collection and would say you might like this or you should listen to this... One of those records was the Phill Niblock record on India Navigation.
I was immediately drawn to it because it was... dronny. And because it was a name I didn’t necessarily know. And kind of soon after that Phill started hi XI CD label because around 1990 / 1991 CDs were still very expensive to produce and it was difficult for people to do an independent label. I believe the first few releases were his “For full flutes” and “The string quartets” and those really caught my attention, especially because in his records there were a lot of explanations about the techniques he was using. I felt he had approached a similar problem that I was interested in and that had been solved in certain ways by Tony Conrad and people like that. But he was taking a different approach that really appealed to the way I was thinking about music because I was very interested in modular synthesis and things like that. He was taking an approach that was both very easy and at the same time very technical. Very easy but very... dense... No, dense is not the right word... It’s kind of like this phrase that Arnold Dreyblatt would use a lot: “you use a little movement down here with your hands to make a lot to happen up there”. The way he had approached the same problem with an incredibly new and fresh solution really appealed to me.
His music was overwhelming when I finally heard it at his Experimental Intermedia Space. I think the first time I went there was in the early nineties. I didn’t really get to go to New York until the early nineties and I believe, if I remember correctly, I had already written to him. I was already somehow in touch with him because he let me stay there, which was very nice. He was one of my first friends in New York. The space is a giant two-story loft that he has had since the late sixties. He lives there but he also has this giant collection of speakers and equipment that he has amassed over the years. He has I don’t know how many speakers, but he has this very specific speaker and amp system that he has set up to reproduce his music. Now that he gets to perform more in rock clubs and these kind of festivals that exist now, and that didn’t really exist back then, he has much more opportunities to present his music in the way that he has always wanted it. But I think at that time, maybe outside of Europe, his loft was really the only place where you could hear it in the way he intended it because it has to be really loud. When you experience Phill’s music with the right volume... you can sense this moment where it clicks and it’s not coming out of the speakers anymore. It’s just like everywhere around you... it’s bouncing off the walls and then you move your head to the left, you move your head to the right and you change your phase relationship to the two speakers, changing what you are hearing. That’s the point where you actually become an integral part of the listening mechanism. I would say the three most mindbending audio phenomena I have ever heard were all people of that generation. The first time I heard Tony Conrad live, the first time I got to hear Phill’s music in his space with the system that it required and also Maryane Amacher when she did a piece in Switzerland. Actually she was a little older but those were the three situations where I though: “what I am hearing is not possible”. But of course it’s possible, we just needed them to show us it was...
For Phill advancements with digital technology made his music both easier and also made it possible for him to do things that he couldn’t do before. One important thing is that Phill’s music really is a music that only works on CD or digital reproduction because if you are cutting his music into vinyl you are physically cutting the waves into the grooves and because there is so much detuning in his music a lot happens in terms of the phase relationship between the channels. Cutting with vinyl, if the phase between the left and the right goes out of phase the cutting block can’t do that physically, you can’t cut that, the needle would pop out the groove. So if there is an extreme discrepancy in the phase in his music, which there is, it physically can’t be cut on vinyl. So in many ways he is one of the composer you can really say was made for the digital medium; strangely enough.
That kind of music... Let’s say... when people say minimalism, that is a word I know Tony didn’t like but they get put into that kind of box historically because they are a similar generation and it was in a way a similar break that they were making. People I am thinking are someone like, of course Phill, and Tony Conrad and a generation later there’s people like Arnold Dreyblatt. But concentrating more in people like Tony and Phill there is a political element to what they are doing of “not being composers”. It’s more an artistic life endeavor that a composerly endeavor. That way of working I don’t think it has a very long history in Japanese avant-garde music. It’s very much the composerly endeavor. I don’t think you could actually find anyone who does that in Japan. The first time Tony Conrad played his own music in Japan I remember the audience being absolutely shocked. People were just freaked out, they had never heard anything like that. And I notice it at times when Phill comes and performs... they have to get accustomed to it. There is of course a lot of loud music here but it’s not the same thing because it’s a very concentrated and very purposeful physical phenomena that happens. Its not a way of working or a lineage of music, I guess you could say, that has a long history here.
I would say Phill for me was not necessarily a direct influence but more a strengthening influence in a sense of time; in a sense of ignoring the idea that a piece of music is supposed to be eight minutes or twelve minutes and letting it be what it is. Especially when I was in college with all the bad influence of the professors telling me to learn my retrograde in inversions and this and that, it was about not being afraid to go and let something happen for thirty minutes. You could do that if you, say, were John Cage or something like that.... That’s a whole other talk... I don’t mean that disparaging, at all. The professors would be trying to do things like that. I sort of needed people on my side; people that I could look to give me courage to just do it. Phill was definitely one of those people, especially because it was my last year or so at college when I first heard his music. So he was someone coming up to play and hitting a home-run for me to have the courage to just say, ok, it is ok to do this; I can do this if I want to do this...
For most people when they think about music they think of it as something that is coming from the hands of somebody, coming out of instruments, coming out of technology. But there’s very few people who had made music, whether they are composers or sound artists or whatever, who actually... I guess you could say go beyond that into the realm of phenomena. And Phill is truly one of the greatest of those artists that have moved into that new realm of possibility. It’s an amazing opportunity to be able to hear his music, and the fact that his music has been released and supported and there’s still a chance to hear it live in the setting where Phill makes that magic thing happen. I think his life work, as opposed calling him a composer or a film-maker or anything, just his whole life work (and that includes his attitude towards supporting other people’s work through his label and his space that he has run for so many years relentlessly in New York and in Gent...) is also an inspiration to keep doing whatever you want to do, whether it has anything to do with music or not. He is a person who has never stopped and continues in his eighties fighting the good fight as I like to think of it. But also just the experience to hear his music... it will take you somewhere that you didn’t know existed and hopefully will then change the way you look at everything else or hear everything else afterwards.
Audio 8: Steve Roden on Rolf Julius
Hello. My name is Steve Roden. I am an artist born in Los Angeles, and living now in Pasadena, California. My artistic practice includes painting, drawing, sound, performance, sculpture, film / video, and writing.
I met Rolf Julius the first time in Berlin in 1999. I was invited to perform for a small festival called “Sampling Rage”, and it was the first time I met Rolf, and also Christina Kubisch, and several other sound artists at the time.
I remember my first meeting of Rolf. I had arrived from the airport and was taken directly to the venue, and as I was walking down a long corridor, I saw a man bent down looking at an open suitcase on the floor with a lot of small electronics. As I got closer, I could hear some small buzzing sounds and some kind of other low-volume electronics, but everything was quite quiet.
When I was upon the man and the suitcase, I could see that he was bent over, staring and listening to the sounds that were laid bare in that open suitcase. My initial thought was that the man’s suitcase had fallen open, since there were wires and all kinds of speakers, a kind of a mess. I asked him if he needed any help, and he looked at me kind of stunned, with also a bit of a smile, for I think he knew that I had mistaken his installation for an accident.
When I think of Rolf using the term “small music” more as a philosophy than anything in terms of the sound of his works, I think he chose that term “small music” in opposition to all the large, noisy things, spectacles and such like that. Most artists I know are always looking for large gestures, something that will grab attention. But Rolfs’ works were always discreet and I love that that the works have to be discovered, his works tended to have a presence of humility. And for myself, well maybe, something also outside of the term “small music” but the term I use for my own work was ”lowercase”.
I didn’t know that Cage used the term “small music”, but these terms are not really “fixed”, they're not genres of music, but more like philosophies. And I think myself and Julius have explored a landscape mostly of intimacy, using “poor materials” and, in many cases, using low fidelity.
I think you are right in the idea of silence as a kind of suspension. A pause per se where something seems not to be present, and then suddenly, the thing opens and everything changes. I’m sure this has happened with a lot of people the first time they heard cages 4’33”, expecting a joke or something that might be boring. But of course in 4’33” and many of Julius’ installations, the listener has to “discover” the work or the music or the sound. It’s beautiful in that way, when you are in a situation where initially you don’t think you see or hear anything, and then you realize that you have been looking or listening without paying attention. And so it is up to the audience to complete the work and the experience. And of course, what we are really talking about is attention. And Julius’ works, of course, need attention because they have to be discovered.
Here’s of course when Julius says: “I’m interested in nothing”. It appeals to me a great deal. It’s a cliché, perhaps, to call Julius’ work like a zen koan. But more it’s like a challenge, a challenge at your senses to see if you are hearing what you hear, if the sounds you are hearing are inside your head or coming from outside. You can’t always place where it’s coming from in terms of location in space.
Being interested in nothing is no better or worse than being interested in something. What is important is that these ideas don’t shut the door; they offer a situation or an idea or a moment. And over time the responses begin to change, because you can’t know the work in total. It’s like an open conversation. It has no end, you can continue rolling it around in your ears or your mouth; how it tastes, how it feels, and every time different.
I would say that everything we’ve been talking about so far, this really resonates in terms of a shared aesthetic. Maybe because both Julius and I spent time in Japan, but also making works that aren’t precious or about technique, and I think we both embrace mistakes and accidents, allowing them, sometimes even needing them, to be part of the process.
Many years ago, I was invited to Norway to make field recordings towards making a new work in various remote landscapes near Bergen. There were several of us and every day we would get dropped off in a remote location to make recordings. All of the other artists had very high-end recorders and microphones, like a traveling recording studio. But in my case, I knew that my way of recording would not capture the landscape as I heard it, as it was in real life. In fact I had no interest in replicating what I heard in life, so I chose to use micro-cassettes, contact microphones, pencils, paper, and a bunch of small acoustic things. In the evenings we all shared our recordings and everyone was consistently asking me how I was processing the sounds and the fact of how to do that was very simple I just happened to be using crappy materials, cheap recorders, and things that would simply sound different because the technology was so poor. Everything has a voice. And the electronics sound so much like landscapes. I think both Julius and myself made works that exist without narrative, towards more sort of landscape or a space without a beginning or an end.
Julius’ works were alive, they are still alive; with the use of pigments and buzzers, and teacups... These are not just things but a kind of alchemy in a way, using various materials, simple materials towards a greater whole.
In the early 1990’s, everything was really about spectacle and I felt that there would be no place for a young artist to find inspiration in the culture of the loud. My discovery of Rolf’s work, along with Terry Fox’s work, opened my ears and my eyes to the culture of sound art, and as such I found Rolf’s work in particular an antidote to the loudness of popular culture. For my own needs I needed something quieter. When I first saw that suitcase of Rolf’s full with wires and buzzers on the floor, messy, humble, quiet, it pretty much changed my life; and certainly changed my work.