“I leave you with this for what it’s worth. I am an antifascist artist. My music is functional. I play about the death of me by you. I give some of that life to you whenever you listen to me, which right now is never. My music is for the people. If you are bourgeois, then you must listen to it on my terms. I will not let you misconstrue me. That era is over. If my music doesn’t suffice, I will write you a poem, a play. I will say to you in every instance, “Strike the Ghetto. Let my people go.”
https://offscreen.com/view/brakhage3
“…there is a balance maintained in the films wherein hierarchical dominance between sight and sound is not an issue, and the mind is left to sort it out on its own. This approach to the experience of hearing without the ears is akin also to Brakhage’s desire to explore the concept of seeing without the eyes, often achieved through the exploration of film in the absence of the camera lens via direct treatment of the celluloid.”
Hearing without ears, seeing without eyes. The descriptions of painting directly onto film as bypassing the ‘eye’ to a moving mind, thinking about an audio equivalent to this technique is exciting. Movement as thought. There is also a quote in this particular film towards the end, “existence is song”. An interesting phrase to scrawl into the celluloid of a silent film. It shows that sound is still very much at play by it’s meaningful absence.
My favourite Brakhage interestingly has sound. But not in a normal capacity, this movie caught me perfectly in my teenage doldrums… and I was obsessed with the music and shot composition. The way the American Songbook was cut up is very inkeeping with Brakhage’s ‘moving mind’ idealogy, segments of the music are picked and chosen and cut up in a way that matches the disparate images, like a kind of sound-poem. Making movement out of movement.
This reminds me of Uncle Yanco’s description of painting as a dematerialisation and redemption of matter that I quoted when talking about the moving microphone.
Set up the a LOM Geofone from the kit room through my noisy Boss Loop (to use as phantom power mainly) and then through my effects pedals into Audio Interface. I used a Moog Ring Modulator, Boss Pitch shifter/harmonizer, Bass boost and reverb pedal.
I stuck the Geofone against a very out of tune Banjolele and Mandola that I inherited and have not been able to get serviced. My partner also got a steel drum type melodic percussion instrument that I used to create sustained tones. It was interesting taking these signals and giving them different contexts.
At the time, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the results. Listening back I like it more than I did then, but it felt a little easy to just layer the instruments up in REAPER and I think I wanted the process to be more achievable live than it was. It only really sounded good after I had processed the recordings and cleaned up a lot of the low end, scooped out a lot of the high end noise and boosted the mids. The effects felt slightly generic at the time, but again with distance, it’s less obvious to me now what effects felt overblown.
Paper Piece, was conceived before performance art and multi-sensory art were commonplace and for that reason, Ben Patterson spoke meaningfully when quizzed about the musicality in Paper Piece, labelling the audience ‘experiencers’ as opposed to listeners or viewers. I love the chaos of this particular video, the bad quality, the way they are staged, the reveal of the giant roller into the crowd and the sudden explosion of noise and movement across the room.
I find this one disconcerting, the way it’s almost played for laughs feels disrespectful. The use of microphones (which I believe negatively alters the sonics of the piece in a space), being sat at the desk. It’s been formalised and turned into a comic routine as opposed to something that has urgency, energy and frenzy to it. It’s become something quite sad.
It is likely that Paper Music, the first video, was a different score. But also it is interesting how much these performances differ in formality and tone. From my understanding of Kaprow’s Happenings and this idea Patterson put forward of the experiencer, Paper Piece was supposed to be more than just a formal performance with paper. But I might be wrong. I guess what’s disappointing is something that felt like a serious work about the nature of objects and sound, a great levelling of what we perceive to be an instrument be reduced to a sort of Chaplin-esque skit. What I find liberating about this piece, is it has very little expense to perform. Something I wish to be mindful of whilst developing a practise. It’s a privilege that I have a double bass, for example.
I watched Rysuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist at a Cinecity event in Lewes. Eiko Ishibashi is one of my favourite working composers and it was a great privilege to see an early cut of the movie with her soundtrack. Sadly, it won’t be available online until an official release.
The movie has been described as an eco-drama. Whilst the cinematography and story is concerned with the rural landscape, slow shots of the stillness of the woods. It is a movie about rural gentrification, and the failures of society. We see how a capitalist venture with a negative environmental impact can go ahead. A community outreach is not actually an act of discourse between the community, but a way to absolve responsibility by having evidence that consideration was in place. The consideration is not real, and it is also paid emotional labour for the workers of the capitalist venture, where the consequences and ethics of the company are forced onto the employee of the company. They are paid to carry the burden of the owner of the company. I thought this was a really great film about how the world is failing as long as people with power do not claim responsibility for actions but simply put in place meaningless gestures to absolve guilt or responsibility. Through this shelling of responsibility onto workers, evil does exist. Evil exists in the deliberate compartmentilsation of morals in pursuit of the capitalist dream. Evil exists in the hidden motives of the powerful, where they themselves are unable to see the damage they inflict because they pay people to hide them from it. Evil exists where nobody takes responsibility for it, it’s passed down, outsourced.
I read some reviews saying this movie was clumsy, but I think it perfectly encapsulated a nightmare bureaucracy. Ishibashi’s music whilst often used in moments of nature in the film, perfectly encapsulates this disconnect the film is concerned with and the slow, unstoppable hand of corporate greed…
Ishibashi has a great way of capturing a kind of uncomfortable, complicated state of being. This piece and album cover reminds me of 1st act of Drive My Car.
http://www.ciel-libre.nnx.com/music/
I attempted to make some windhooters… but they did not produce sound as clearly as these ones do… I did not make the gaps to the right specs as the tutorial I followed said it wasn’t hugely important, however mine are inaudibly quiet because I didn’t make the openings narrow enough and some of the bottles I had to spare weren’t the right shape to make loud chamber. So I am hoping to attempt this again.
I am thinking about the ocean. Over my DPS year, I was hoping to record a documentary about sewage pollution and southern water as I was swimming during Lockdowns when they first starting dumping sewage without informing people in the middle of summer… I started recording near water treatment plants, but I couldn’t get inside. I was then thinking about recording the Ocean, but I wasn’t interested in being a presenter in this documentary, and the subject would need explanation as when recording the Ocean you can’t hear pollution, just like you can’t see it. You can’t see the microbes from fecal matter and waste or the microplastics being eaten by aquatic life. I was thinking about windhooters as a way to encroach a plastic sound of human origin as a means to signify this pollution in some recordings of the ocean. Creating some kind of Aeolian instrument out of plastics felt like an interesting juxtaposition against the seascape. This was not entirely successful.
If the effect was slightly louder I’d be interested in exploring further. I’ve ordered bits for contact microphones and will maybe try later in the year to get some microphones built and potentially attach piezos to the inside of these wind-hooters to see if the sound is improved.
I found a tutorial from 8 years ago that showed a build for Lom electromagnetic microphone, Electroslusch. Apart from their small capsule microphones that seem quite similar to Micbooster with some high quality 3D printed casings. I appreciate how open source Lom are with their microphones. Showing a lot of data for their Geofone and now having building kits for those too. https://makezine.com/projects/weekend-project-sample-weird-sounds-electromagnetic-fields/
This seems like quite a useful project, it appears all I really need to make it is some quite cheap transistors so will look into added that to my arsenal of sound design tools.
Another open source researcher and teacher is Zach Poff who has quite a simple tutorial for making contact microphones from piezo discs. https://www.zachpoff.com/resources/building-contact-mics/
I missed out on microphone building in first year and figure it would be good to have the basis of microphone building done by the end of the year.
In this build, Poff heavily recommends using a pre-amp. I use my JrF Contact microphone with a XLR adaptor, as apparently the XLR input picks up more frequencies than a quarter inch jack – but I have never tried a contact microphone with a preamp. From what I could see from the Electrolusch build, certain resistors can boost low end. This might be a good way of achieving a more rounded signal pre-edit phase and might explain some more professional field recordist’s clean ‘unedited’ signals from contact microphone recordings which I often found hard to believe had not be at least EQ’d slightly.
Alex Rice Piezo Preamplifier
http://www.richardmudhar.com/blog/using-piezo-contact-mics-right/
http://www.richardmudhar.com/piezo-contact-microphone-hi-z-amplifier-using-a-fet/
I think it’s high time I start exploring these simple builds. If I am successful it could lead to more slightly ambitious territory with building kits, and also more satisfying trips field recording with things I had built myself. https://www.cigarboxguitar.com/knowledge-base/using-piezos-in-cigar-box-guitars-part-1-piezo-basics/
These experiments could lead to more ambitious microphone projects like the MicBooster clippy kits.
Whilst they sell their Clippy’s for around £120. They have Cardioid capsules amongst others which might be interesting to try. The electret primo omnidirectional capsule is the same used by Lom. Low-noise with lots of high frequency detail. I am interested in testing out other small capsules for their properties, but it’s more ambitious and I should start small with Electroslusch and Contact Microphone build guides
This kind of playful approach to field recording is compositional and gestural. One thing I absolutely love about these pieces by Ka Baird is how bizarre they must look to an onlooker with no headphone cable to plug into the sounds Ka Baird is hearing. For that reason, the visual aspect of this work is great. I realise the term ‘swooshing’ to a Deaf person might not make much sense, a visual comparison to the sounds we hear as Ka Baird rapidly orientates the hyper directional microphone creates sounds similar to 90s film credits speeding past the screen, the invocation of movement is not only present from the visual, but these extremely transient fragments of sound that the microphone switches rapidly between amongst the occasional brush of the microphone covering against the grass or the handling noise. The bane of a classic field recorders life turned into material (or the qualities of an instrument.)
We often in modern society witness people in a state of listening without being able to hear what they are listening to, or reacting to the visual but unable to see what they are looking at. This has become even more apparent in the last ten years with things like noise cancellation and mass availability of tablet style phones. In a way modern society is much more attuned to things like the sonic arts or a visual language cut off from sound (i.e someone like Stan Brakhage who’s films rarely had sound) because we are used to utilising these technologies and their affect on the other senses. I enjoy this kind of performance because of it’s disconnect from reality. It’s purely a performance for a virtual space and as a consequence has a very abstract meaning when recontextualised. Like stumbling on someone miming to a camera for a music video.
“For me, the goal of painting is to have light penetrate matter and dematerialize it. It’s truly the redemption of matter.” – Jean Yanco in Agnes Varda’s “Uncle Yanco”.
I watched Uncle Yanco the other day and this quote sprung to mind. I think that like Yanco describes painting, field recordings are like a kind of dematerialisation where space/time becomes a texture.
I saw Arto Lindsay last week at Cafe Oto. It was great to see such a pivotal figure of the No Wave scene in the flesh. I first heard of Arto Lindsay from the DNA performance in film, Downtown 81. They sound so raw and the guitar is cutting and percussive. I hadn’t heard anything like it at the time.
I’ve mostly listened to Arto Lindsay as a secondary but unmistakable presence on recordings by other musicians. Ryuichi Sakamoto, Seigen Ono, Lounge Lizards and probably more, It’s an unmistakeable signature. I hadn’t listened to his solo music that much before going, apart from Ambitious Lovers. He has also played on Laurie Anderson records and collaborated with lots of high profile brazilian artists, like Caetano Veloso, Tom Ze and Gal Costa along with more obvious no-wave-linked John Zorn and Marc Ribot.
The performance was mostly like the second half of ‘The Encyclopedia of Arto Lindsay’, I preferred the first half of the album which was produced in a very 2000s fashion and drew from his collaboration with Brazilian artists and contemporary R&B. I love Lindsay’s openness with who he collaborates with, his style cuts through most of the records he’s affiliated with, but there is no logic or expectation about how these records will sound outside of his playing. It seems like a very collaborative style of working where he is more a textural effect or rhythmic element, leaving space for others to fill in the gaps. The space that Arto leaves is to me one of his most impressive qualities. In his solo music, the melody can hang on by a thread around the improvisation, in his collaborative group work, he can take on more of a provocative instigator of a musical dialogue that is saturated and high in contrast – always concerned with the offset or counter balance.
To a lesser extreme, as primarily a musician I am concerned with speaking through my instrument, finding a way to play that is mine. I think I’ve lost track of some of what I used to have and seeing Lindsay was a great jolt that there is the direction of an untutored, expressive extended technique that I am still able to explore, and Arto Lindsay is an example that a singular, abstract instinct can still be used in a collaborative sense with people from different musical or sonic backgrounds. Something that maybe a classical mindset would consider exclusive and anti-social is focussed into diverse collaboration.
"I would like to think a picture is finished when it feels not new but old. As if its forms had lived a long time in you... It is the looker not the maker, who is hungry for the new. The new can take care of itself."
I visited the Phillip Guston exhibition at the Tate over the weekend. It was a very inspiring journey through an Artist’s process, with lots of profound quotes from the artist throughout the exhibition. I’m hoping to take some inspiration from these conversations about the process of an artist and apply them to some improvisations for my Portfolio.
"Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change"
I did not know a lot about the artist going in, it was recommended by a friend and I had some time to kill in London before going to see Arto Lindsay in the evening.
It was very interesting to see his development from Surrealistic works. Further into more abstract territory. A lot of these early works are very striking due to their political nature. He was painting a lot of scenes of War, painting scenes of Racism in America with the Klu Klux Klan, which obviously was a theme he came back to later. I did not know much going in, I might have been put off by his more famous later works, but through understanding his passionate involvement in anti-racism campaigns in his early life, it’s clear he was driven by anti-racism principles. He was interested in reflecting the uncomfortable cost of American society and it’s principles of freedom and liberty.
I particularly liked the self portraits. A black rounded rectangle resembles a head. The exhibition had a couple of these self portraits next to each other, increasingly more grey was introduced around these black, scribbled head silhouettes. To me it represented maybe a sort of, pessimism or sadness he felt – or maybe a type of nihilism. Using colour to express his thoughts, feelings or spirit. In this room a piece of music Morton Feldman composed for Guston. Guston also had contributed Artwork to a record sleeve for the composer.
This quote of Kierkegaard is evocative of the discomfort of the self.
"when the paint doesn't feel like paint... and you feel like you've just made a thing, like a living thing is there"
"I want my work to include more. And 'more' also comprises one's doubts about the object, plus the problem, the dilemma, of recognising it"
Thinking about Sound Art in painting when looking at this piece. I am not sure if these fists are holding onto or punching these circular objects, are they dust bin lids? A lot of Guston’s later works featured limbs. I can hear the sound of a fist hitting a metallic object in my mind when looking at these. Is memory triggering a sound, enough for something to be Sound Art?
"A painting feels lived-out to me, not painted... So the paintings aren't pictures, but evidences - maybe documents, along the road you have not chosen, but are on nevertheless."
This last quote really resonates with me as a recording artist. I often talk to visual artists about how jealous I am of their ability to listen to music whilst creating art, and how I wish I could do that, but I make music… I am also jealous of visual artists because of their ability to document their practice so easily. The act of drawing is documentation. Playing my guitar is not, it dissipates into the world. If I haven’t been recording, it’s gone. I believe that the shapes I subconsciously make on the guitar are based on all those times I had the feeling of missing something that should’ve been captured. So my playing style is a documentation of hundreds of songs that have been forgotten. I should also make an attempt to document more than I do though. But a recording is rarely an evidence of performance.
Basanta talks about sound installations being a linear piece that the viewer is in control of, based on their choice of where to stand, and the longevity of their stay in the room. I think this also extends to the eye in a gallery space, especially when viewing sculptural or larger scale installations. We are a camera navigating the space in control of the frame. This was in my mind from the display in the main hall of the tate by El Anatsui. Large meshes of liquor bottle caps were flattened and sewn together. Creating giant metallic drapes, with intricate pairings of bottle cap colours. These folded over themselves from the ceiling to the floor. Looking like the flow of a waterfall frozen in time. There was a tacit feeling of depth I couldn’t quite understand. I could only describe at the time as ‘visual asmr’. It was pleasing to look at. The mesh of materials and the folds within the mesh had this satisfying affect with flurried dynamics of light and colour.
