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FINAL

SAMSUNG INTENSITY II is a sound art work that arranges dissonant drones and destroyed samples into a short-form musical narrative exploring ideas of time, memory, adolescence, and family legacy.

ANTI-ALGORITHM SLOW BURNERS by DEAD FRIEND

The night before my grandfather’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, I had a very vivid dream where I ripped apart the fabric of reality, ending up in a weightless, endless expanse of black. I realized that this was something like the innermost chamber of the mind—-a truly empty space upon which our thoughts are constructed. Before I could truly make sense of this, the space began to destabilize. A loud rumble rose from below. The sound of a train blaring its horn, fast approaching me from the right. My body compressing. I woke up in my unfamiliar hotel room feeling as though I was about to be crushed, compacted into a flat pulp. As I lay recovering in the darkness, I looked up at the ceiling and heard a woman’s voice say, “I beg your pardon?” I knew it wasn’t real.

When I initially proposed this project, the goal was to make something that combined two distinct sonic aesthetics in order to better explore some very personal concepts. I wanted to make a piece that sounded like it was from the Orange Milk catalog—a very synthetic, kaleidoscopic, synesthetic sound collage that sounds like throwing the internet into a blender and then steamrolling that blender with the Katamari Damacy guy. I have been thinking a lot about the way the internet and its various cultures evolve, change, and die recently, and wanted to make something that reflected this using that sort of sonic approach. I’ve also been revisiting my grandparents’ deaths and how they changed me as a person (I was pretty young when all of them died), plus how my interactions with/memories of the landscapes they died in have shaped me. I've always been interested in using samples & electronic music to reconstruct physical spaces that I clearly remember & have emotional ties to (i.e. my grandmother’s beach house in Bainbridge Island, WA, or the way Arlington National Cemetery looked when I walked through it during my grandfather’s funeral procession). So I wanted to make a droning, textural piece reminiscent of memory, place, time—something capable of speaking to that quiet, ephemeral mental world where we can remember a person, a place, an event, a landscape.

People die, people grow up, the internet changes, culture never stays in place, family trees expand and mutate, natural environments are altered, the world keeps spinning. Combining two seemingly-incompatible sonic aesthetics to construct a narrative devoted to tackling these concepts was the goal of the piece. I didn’t want to just do one sound palette or the other because that would have been pointless and unchallenging. If listening to Samsung Intensity II makes anyone remember—in detail—a hyper-specific memory involving their family, or a childhood location, or a sacred moment in their adolescence, then I’m satisfied with it.

I made Samsung Intensity II with Ableton Live and Reason. The first samples are from all the cutscenes of 2008 JRPG The World Ends With You thrown into a granular sampler and heavily processed. The main droning pad was created by chopping up a recording of The Look of Love and running it through a granular sampler as well, then resampling that and adding reverb, delay, EQ, etc. to make it spacious and intense. I converted that pad to MIDI to create a synth in Reason that plays quietly underneath the drone and adds space/character. I used a Michael Rucci Maximal Drone synthesizer to create the high pitched, wildly fluctuating oscillator sounds that eventually become a rising industrial hum and finish out the piece. I also used a Reason synth to play a simple series of notes that intentionally clash harmonically with the drone’s key center, creating a sense of instability that is furthered by the Maximal Drone sounds. I also sampled a Jon/Vangelis LP and played it back at a high pitch for a little added texture here and there. The creation process was short and simple. I just started throwing sounds at the wall until everything made sense, and carved out a structure from there. I didn’t want this to feel like a meditative drone piece so I intentionally added a lot of dissonance/sonic curveballs that prevented the sounds from ever settling into place.

Other ways this piece could be presented: 1. A live performance of a drawn out, extended version lasting 15-25 minutes. 2. A gallery installation with different stems playing in different areas of the room--walking around constantly changes the emphasis of sounds in the piece. 3. An element in the gallery installation I made a mock-up of in exercise #10. 4. A song acting as part of a larger series of movements in the context of an album.

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Hypnospace Outlaw

Loved the Paper Rad "Welcome to my Home Page” piece today. I’ve been playing a game called Hypnospace Outlaw recently and it’s basically like an interactive version of the same thing. http://www.hypnospace.net/

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Hilton Als - “When the Music is You”

Meant to link this a while ago but totally forgot. Really wonderful article on DJ culture and the evolution of NYC nightlife, plus an oldhead criticism of DJ Spooky at the end.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/08/26/spinning-tales

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FINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL

I plan to make another piece of sound art similar in scale to For Mark Hollis, but with a maximal sound palette and much less negative space. I want to use a soundscape to explore my mental environment but not through the lens of another artist’s legacy this time. I will use calm, pastoral textures to illustrate important natural locations in my life from the Pacific Northwest and juxtapose them with a manic collage of electronic, digital sounds sourced from all over the technology/pop culture/internet spectrum circa 2004-2013 (loose timeline). Usually in the process of sampling I come across moments in records that shine a light on the “psychic underbelly” (as you put it in the midterm critique) of my own experiences. (Burt Bacharach’s Lost Horizons is full of those moments, and the mockup sound installation I made for exercise #10 was a quick attempt to make sense of this phenomenon.) I want to start from this area of focus and then see where the piece goes, especially with the goal of juxtaposing these natural samples and soundscapes with the electronic, digital simulacrum-y collage. While I don’t want to decide the specifics of this piece’s message(s) before I make it, I will say that I’m interested in making it because I want to more thoroughly explore concepts of dualistic existence, the “shared adolescence” / coming of age that my generation went through on the internet, global warming, death, and family/hometown legacies.

Possible reference points:

DJWWWW - Arigato My Bloody Valentine - Tremolo EP Oneohtrix Point Never - Garden of Delete Ricky Eat Acid - Three Love Songs The Spirit of the Beehive - Pleasure Suck

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Looping State of Mind

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Floral Shoppe is 8 years old

A retrospective review of Floral Shoppe (the famous vaporwave album by Ramona Xavier AKA Vektroid) was published on Pitchfork today. It’s crazy to see how much recognition this album keeps getting as the years pile up. I remember that it was mostly seen as a subversive, ironic, mildy-creepy but ultimately funny and weird tape when it came out--the whole idea of “vaporwave” was just barely beginning, and now it’s heralded (rightfully so) as a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. I was in high school when vaporwave hit its peak as an active “scene” on the internet, and while it was often full of completely pointless appropriative bullshit that didn’t have any value, the gems of the genre/scene/ideology/whatever you wanna call it are very engaging and unique pieces of art that continue to hold value even as the internet strays further and further away from what it used to be. I don’t really know why I’m writing this, but it’s interesting to see that we’re so far gone from the whole “post-internet” school of thought that was so influential on me almost a decade ago as I was growing up and first experimenting with art/music. I remember walking through an H&M in 2014 or 15 and seeing how they’d co-opted the whole “Vaporwave Aesthetic™” so blatantly, selling T-shirts with imagery that looked like it was stolen directly from someone’s tumblr. It was surreal to see then, but what’s even more wild to me now is that all of the imagery associated with that era of internet art is sooooooooooooooooooo played out and uninteresting when it used to be funny, subversive, and thought-provoking (when it was executed well in the first place). I guess this happens to every scene at some point or another--it starts out, offering up something new and innovative and dangerous, it gains traction and an Official Label, it blows up, it gets incorporated into the mainstream, and then it’s not longer new or interesting. The whole vaporwave/post-internet/spf-420 era of internet music and art is a distant memory at this point. The L.A. Beats scene is basically dead after peaking in the 2010s, with the closure of the Low End Theory club night being a nail in the coffin. Indie rock died a painful death only to be reimagined (and rebranded) by people my age in the second half of the decade. Hip-Hop/Rap at large has gone through a million amazing transformations. I could go on and on. Years go by, art evolves, culture changes & adapts.

One last thing I think is interesting--Floral Shoppe came out in 2011, and so did Death Grips’ debut mixtape Exmilitary. I think Exmilitary is going to be looked back on as an unbelievably influential moment in music history (especially for this decade)--Death Grips’ output definitely inspired an entire generation of punks, noise makers, and scary/weird/avant electronic artists who are now doing their own thing almost a decade later. (Especially in New York: see Deli Girls, Show Me The Body, Dreamcrusher, Machine Girl, Channel 63, Bonnie Baxter & Kill Alters, the list goes on). It’s difficult to capture how expansive and important their influence has been on the collective conscious of experimental musicians in this day & age.

This felt kind of all over the place, but I’ve had these thoughts rattling around my brain and decided to just empty them all out into a post. Hopefully this was worth reading.

The Floral Shoppe review: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/macintosh-plus-floral-shoppe/

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More sample-based stuff

After doing exercise #9, I felt a big creative block leave me and started to make a lot of new stuff out of samples. I don’t really like what I made for exercise #9 and it feels insanely unfinished, but it was also definitely one of those times when making one thing led to the creation of new, better things. Here are two of those. The first is tentatively titled “Escapists Die Slow Painful Deaths” and the second is just a beats instrumental that still needs a lot of detailing but the basic structure is there. The "please don't kill me" sample in both tracks is from a 2008 video game called The World Ends With You that was rly influential to me as a kid. I decided to just throw it into everything I'm making for the next week or so just to see how it alters the mood.

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Arlington National Cemetery (exercise #10 creative)

This is a draft/rough idea for a sound installation involving video projection and sculpture. There are four ornate marble pillars in each corner of a big, white, square room with a replica of Arlington Nat’l Cemetery’s “The Price of Freedom” statue by Greg Wyatt in the center of the room. Each wall of the room will be covered in looping video projections. The first wall will display a rock beach on the Seattle-facing coast of Bainbridge Island, WA, at midday. The second wall will play this scene from Serial Experiments Lain on repeat (no sound) https://youtu.be/D9Crm8zbgfg. The third will show Locust Beach in Bellingham, WA, at sunset. The last is a close-up detail of a fuzzy, generic rug carpet that might be found in a hotel room or other neutral, transitory space.

Only one person is allowed in the room at a time. Each guest is allowed 10 minutes to walk around the room. There is some sort of motion tracking system that translates where the guest is standing into a corresponding drone that resonates throughout the room and changes in timbre/volume depending on where the guest walks. Touching different parts of each pillar will trigger audio clips of conversations, foley, and other carefully-curated snippets that contribute to the larger metaphysical context of the installation.

Burt Bacharach’s “Lost Horizon” plays quietly on infinite loop from an iPod Nano connected to a cheap portable speaker at the foot of the “The Price of Freedom” statue. (this version, specifically: https://youtu.be/_rVKR16JZpQ)

Here is a really simple diagram of the installation:

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Ryoji Ikeda (exercise #10 written)

I’ve been aware of Ikeda for a long time but never dove deep into his catalog or learned much about him. I love the very deep synergy between sound and image that is so characteristic of his installations. The result of such a combination goes far beyond the obvious characteristics of the whole microsound/lowercase aesthetic into something transcendent and powerful.

Aside from the obvious adjectives, his work also contains a heavy element of mystery. His pieces feel like fragmented transmissions from a forbidden location within the audience’s own minds. We’re given flashes of raw data, strobing lights, and stark, raw patterns of information, with absolutely no context other than their connection to the equally-raw sounds that play in sync. The sensory assault feels at first to not even have a purpose, which leads viewers (at least me, anyway) to instantly develop a connection to their own minds.

“test pattern” is a great example—on his website, the description says that “the project aims to examine the relationship between critical points of device performance and the threshold of human perception.” The lack of further explanation is awesome—it really just lets the audience contextualize such basic/raw/simple information into something more personal to them. The testing of the “threshold of human perception” is a wonderful starting point to delve deeper into the psyche, and it’s refreshing to see a piece that doesn’t push any more narratives further than that starting point. His pieces are very open-ended in this way, something I have a lot of respect for. Presenting “test pattern” in various iterations (even on displays in Times Square!!!!! https://youtu.be/JfcN9Qhfir4) opens up even more possibilities for site-specific thouhgts/ideas/internal dialogues.

As for the theoretical issues his projects bring up for me personally, I think a lot about privacy, information consumption/overload, large-scale societal patterns, how the brain is a computer, the internet, the worlds contained within code/underneath pretty displays on devices, how different pieces of technology in urban environments are connected to each other, espionage, globalization, the list goes on. It also strongly reminds me of Metal Gear Solid and the general aesthetic of many other spy/near-future/cyberpunk/Hideo Kojima-adjacent video games (especially this one: https://vimeo.com/290503749).

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Phonography (exercise #9 written)

Phonography is originality. Sampling is a complex method that is always going to vary in effectiveness/validity, but when merited and utilized effectively it is without a doubt a legitimate and worthwhile art form.

I had a very, very hard time trying to construct a coherent argument for this, especially after reading the assigned Paul D Miller/DJ Spooky text in all its eloquence. What else could I possibly add to the conversation? The effect of a good sample is so difficult to accurately describe—when we listen to a song and hear either a sound we recognize from somewhere else or something that has obviously been repurposed from its origin, there’s an entirely different reaction in our hearts and minds from when we hear music consisting of entirely original material. All recorded music carries its own emotions, creative conditions, cultural context, really an infinite amount of variables that aren’t always brought to mind when listening to it alone. Sampling lets an artist instantly tap into these facets and merge them with their own new creation. A really good sample might hone in on one or two little snippets of emotion or sound from the original work, or maybe it takes all the existing feeling wholesale in order to instantly build a foundation in the new piece. When done well, this results in that totally unique sensation—the sound of multiple emotions, cultures, legacies, and artists synergizing. (This is something I’ve been near-fanatically passionate about since I first heard The Avalanches’ legendary album Since I Left You—made up of approx. 3,500 samples—in middle school.)

The argument that phonography/sampling is akin to “theft” is often brought up when a huge, blatant chunk of an existing work is sampled. Ripping an untouched four-bar loop from a 12” is going to yield different results than completely reshaping a sample beyond recognition. Take “Robot Rock” by Daft Punk, for instance. The entire thing, aside from EQ’ing and complimentary drums/vocals, is a rather uninspired loop of Breakwater’s “Release The Beast.” However, it can still be argued that Robot Rock has its own musical/cultural value beyond the sample source because the overall effect of the song is so different from the original. It isn’t played in the same venues as the original, it’s marketed to a different audience, and it doesn’t feel like the same song. Which is crazy, because it’s built entirely on the songwriting and recording of “Release The Beast.” Oswald weighs in on dilemmas like this in his “Battered By the Borrower,” saying that music doesn’t have anything akin to English’s quotation marks. He writes that “without a quotation system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud.” There is a lot that I want to talk about here, and I know that one day I’ll end up diving in and writing a whole dissertation completely exhausting every facet of the art of sampling, but I decided to keep it light for this assignment so as not to completely lose my mind. The key concept that I believe is the most important concept behind sampling/IMO what gives it its most artistic value is this: utilizing pre-existing recorded material in one’s own work instantly forms a unique bond between the context, legacy, and artistic circumstances of the existing piece and the current artist using it as raw material. Sure, this is an obvious statement, but some of my all-time favorite music is a result of an artist taking that bond very seriously and opening up a dialogue with the sampled music in a way that you just don’t hear in any other kind of music. DJ Spooky really explained it the best: “Sampling is like sending a fax to yourself from the sonic debris of a possible future; the cultural permutations of tomorrow, heard today, beyond the corporeal limits of the imagination.”

When sampling, one doesn’t always have to engage with the cultural context of the record they’re lifting sounds from—Christian Marclay certainly didn’t when he made his turntable pieces, and it shows. They don’t sound like anything else, and aren’t rooted in any sort of musical tradition in the same way that a Kid Koala turntablism performance or a DMC finalist routine is. While plenty of incredible art can be made by sampling sources without a care for their origin, some really beautiful results emerge from the opposite approach. One obvious example of this is J Dilla’s magnum opus Donuts, released about a week before he died of a rare blood disease in his early 30’s. He never spoke a word in the entire album, instead opting to let the samples talk for him by re-contextualizing rap verses and old soul/RnB phrases to speak about his own mortality and rapidly-approaching death. The song “Don’t Cry” is a flip of The Escorts’ “I Can’t Stand To See You Cry,” where he aptly appropriates the song’s namesake lyrics to talk about his specific situation within the greater context of the album. This is just one example of many transcendent sample-based moments in Donuts, and throughout all of the LP’s 44-minute runtime Dilla uses the already existing legacy of dozens of old soul tracks to initiate closure between his listeners and loved ones. It feels like something beautiful stretching out into the past and the future at the same time (see the Spooky quote from earlier). The obvious compassion and reverence for the sample sources found in Donuts is what makes it such a beautiful final statement from an artist who made a name for himself by cutting up music—he very easily could have plundered without a care for the sources or their context, but the power is in his knowledge and love for the greater, multi-generational musical canon.

In the EMI review of The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, a reviewer wrote that the album’s “redeployment of old recordings into a cut-up, contemporary context never seems anything but caring. And, through this absence of exploitation, it's almost as if the Avalanches have managed to appropriate the original emotions from the sounds they've stolen. And precious few sample-based albums can boast that.” The “absence of exploitation” and the concept of “appropriating emotions” are key to what makes sampling/phonography legitimate and special.

SOME OF MY FAV SAMPLE-BASED WORKS

Kid Koala - Moon River https://youtu.be/fjFi4MHO_go I don’t even have words for this, really. I tear up every time.

Yves Tumor - Noid https://youtu.be/FU65VaNeLeM The harrowing use of Sylvia St. James’ “Grace” to build an initially neutral but gradually more unstable and paranoid backing track for this song is incredible!!

The XX - On Hold https://youtu.be/1_oA9UmRd4I Very well-done flip of Hall & Oates, awesome example of using a sample to establish an emotional/referential foundation for the listener. This is definitely Jamie XX’s special talent as a producer.

King Vision Ultra - Pain of Mind https://kingvultra.bandcamp.com/releases I feel like I’ve plugged this a million times already but it’s seriously one-of-a-kind. Taps into the same energy as Mobb Deep and early Wu-Tang Clan, painting a dark, grimy portrait of NYC without any of the glorification. Shines a much-needed light on the inhumanity of incarceration and our country’s failure to help those suffering from “pain of mind” of all kinds.

Burial - Shell of Light (the second half of the song) https://youtu.be/0mkLNYaCJns?t=209 Burial’s entire album “Untrue” is for real a modern masterpiece. Every song does something incredible with samples, but the ending of “Shell of Light” is a beautiful highlight.

Quasimoto - Real Eyes https://youtu.be/zZk_FEDozJI This track is so cool on so many levels. Madlib/Quas combines the most choice vocal snippets of educational records and statements from other rappers to take down wack fake rappers, doing it all over a classic DJ break. Should also mention that The Unseen as an entire album is an absolute masterclass in sampling.

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Sample song (exercise #9 creative)

I learned how to produce by sampling records and making beats/ripoffs of Flying Lotus all throughout middle school and a lot of high school. Listening to DJ Shadow, Panda Bear, The Avalanches, Public Enemy, etc. etc. etc. etc. at an early time in my creative endeavors was extremely formative and inspiring--I basically became convinced that anything can be done with samples. I am really partial to the special atmosphere that many layered samples can achieve, and it was fun to do this assignment because it brought me back to how I used to make music. Everything in this track is samples. It’s pretty messy and I’m definitely not done with it. It needs more melodic layers and a better mix and an actual structure/transition between the two sections...but it’s a good starting point and I definitely will post an update if I work on it more. It’s kind of two tracks, the first being a very unfinished sort of dreamy atmospheric thing (cliche descriptors but whatever), and the second being a flip of The Look of Love.

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March 2019

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Exercise #6 written response because I completely forgot to upload it a million years ago

The “transcendental,” “virtual” dimension of sound is something I will always possess a deep interest in and admiration for. As a kid I used to sit at the piano and listen to the sound of a note dying out long after I’d taken my finger off the key. My ear training professor does the same thing now—she’ll play a simple interval, like a perfect 5th or a sus2 chord, and let it ring out, filling the silence of the room. Then she’ll ask the class what colors we see, what kind of memories or associations the sound brings out. It isn’t the notes themselves evoking these mental snapshots, it’s the harmonics, the reverberation, the auditory mirages that emerge from the sustained pure tones of the piano (this can happen even with just two or three notes!). These properties are inherent in many styles of music: My Bloody Valentine became well-known for their massive, hallucinatory walls of guitar noise that gave way to endless, muddy harmonics, and there are those magical moments in Pharaoh Sanders records where all the instruments and players combine into some thing far greater than the sum of their parts, a grand image emerging out of the timbres of their individual instruments. With that being said, there really aren’t any genres more well-suited for such phenomenons to occur than process, psychoacoustic, drone, and other such specializations of music. The inherent nature of this music brings out tones in the mind, tones that, as Maryanne Amacher understood, “become perceptually more than an accident of acoustic tones in the room, [attaining] conscious interplay with them.” There are plenty of classic, extensively-studied examples of this—Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room, Steve Reich’s Come Out, et cetera—but an amazing contemporary example worth mentioning is Grouper’s performance of her piece Sleep inside an abandoned polar bear enclosure in Vancouver’s Stanley Park (https://youtu.be/hslxKaa7LhM & https://youtu.be/LTZSsn_ApZY). Sleep, a piece consisting of tape loops, low-fidelity, reverb-draped vocals, and incredibly murky droning sounds, is already very resonant and heady in nature, but performed in the space it achieves an entirely new, transcendental level.

When Christopher Cox talks about sound art turning an ear towards the 
“transcendental or virtual dimension of sound,” he is referencing experiences like the one presented by Grouper; tonal qualities, harmonics, and acoustics combining to create a whole new atmosphere of physical, sensory, hallucinatory sound. One simply starts to hear and see things that may not be present in the objective sense. This intuitive, longform, experiential form of sound is inherent in the intentions behind most process-based and psychoacoustic music. In Steve Reich’s “Music as a Gradual Process,” he favors process-based music over “the use of hidden structural devices in music.” Reich writes that “even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended process.” William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops are a glaring example of this. The loops are all incredibly captivating in their long runtimes because they’re literally disintegrating, and we can hear every click, rumble and thump of the tape as it falls apart. Reich’s own Music for 18 Musicians is captivating for the same reasons. As musicians play constantly repeating motifs, the phasing of instruments in and out of time, slight pitch changes, and other such sounds create a very stimulating and interesting listen.

Any engaging piece of process or psychoacoustic music will interact with what Cox refers to as “the auditory unconscious.” Using the analogy of someone listening to the waves of the ocean, he writes that “each individual wave is the result of a multitude of forces: the speed and direction of the wind, air pressure and temperature, the temperature and viscosity of the water, and so on. As a result, each conscious perception is the local registration of the entire state of the universe at any given moment.” Cox compares this idea of universal perception to memory: “The reservoir of memory contains not only particular memories or experiences…but everything to which those experiences and memories are connected…When we manifest a particular tendency or remember an event or experience, we draw it from this reservoir, actualizing it or contracting it. Hence…[citing Leibniz] each individual ‘knows the infinite,’ ‘knows all,’ albeit ‘confusedly’ — that is, virtually.” The most transcendent moments involving the auditory unconscious I have experienced so far in my life were at the 24-hour drone fest at Basilica Hudson. As the hours of drones went by, performers and audience members alike grew so mentally in sync that we were sort of forming a hivemind. I remember at one point looking around and realizing we were all more or less sitting in the exact same position, with the exact same expression, with these sounds reverberating all around the room, and I had absolutely no idea what was really happening objectively and what my mind was creating.

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Neuhaus/Schaffer comparison (exercise #8 written)

Schaffer and Neuhaus’ views are the same in that they both want us to listen carefully to our environment. Schaffer harbors a distaste for “noise pollution,” going so far as to say it has reached an “apex of vulgarity.” He frames the act of listening to the natural, “acoustic” world as a way of counter-acting this “pollution” by gaining a deeper insight into the characteristics of one’s environment. Neuhaus is perfectly content with the alleged “noise pollution,” seeing the term almost as an overhyped buzzword than anything else.

Careful, deep listening to the sounds around us leads to engagement with the spaces we inhabit—both of them can agree on this. However, Neuhaus believes that there is plenty of value in the sounds of a city or public space in general, arguing that “silencing our public environment is the acoustic equivalent of painting it black.” Schaffer definitely adopts a different view, although I think it’s interesting that Neuhaus is basically describing a Schaffer soundscape in his op-ed when talking about listening to the sounds of a neighborhood. Both of them are interested in the same things! Of course, Schaffer leans much more heavily toward “acoustic” sound and appreciation of the natural world, raising concerns about the rise of noise (which he describes as “sounds we’ve learned to ignore”) on the planet. But I think Neuhaus’ argument against the sensationalism of “noise pollution” is very accurate. If we are accustomed to an environment with lots of (loud) sounds, we can get very adept at tuning them out—that doesn’t mean that the sounds are devoid of value!

At the core of it, it seems as though Schaffer is  a traditionalist who sees the advancement of sound as a result of society evolving to be an entirely negative affair, while Neuhaus is more in line with the futurists we’ve covered previously, seeing the growing palette of sounds as a new opportunity for listening and engagement with the world around us as it evolves. In other words, Schaffer’s approach to acoustemology is one of preservation and concern, while Neuhaus’ is more geared toward innovation and exploration.

Relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/nyregion/gentrification-one-percent-manhattan.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

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WHAT IS SOUND ART?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? (exercise #7)

It is very difficult for me to distinguish “sound art” and “music” without feeling disingenuous because I truly believe they are the same thing. If you put any music in the right artistic setting/context/venue, it would be received as an art performance/exhibition. If you put sound art in a club it would be seen as a subversive set of music. It’s entirely a matter of context—and of course, this isn’t something we haven’t talked about already, but I wanted to say it anyway because I constantly find myself coming back to this idea. I also think that maybe “sound art” has become a term out of necessity, since some people aren’t as well-versed in avant-garde/experimental/“out-there” music, and if you present a performance as “art that uses sound as its main medium” as opposed to an “experimental music performance” (just two descriptive examples off the top of my head) the inexperienced audience is going to be immediately more receptive to it and possibly listen much deeper than they would otherwise. I also think that from the artists’ perspective, “music” can have a lot of rigid connotations (unfortunately) and referring to an auditory work as “sound art” can be more freeing and open up new avenues of musical/sonic exploration/experimentation.

Personally, I think we should just be more inclusive with the term “music.” There are literally countless amounts of records that could be presented as both art and music, depending on who you’re talking to and what the context is (as I mentioned earlier)—and there are tons of installations, multimedia performances, etc. that have incredible musical value. But since I have to define Sound Art: I would say it is the utilization of specific sounds, acoustics, instruments, and/or objects to create an sonic experience, usually with a specific thesis or intended effect. A sound artist can use anything—extended instrument techniques, amplified sounds, electronics, objects, the list goes on. Anything that makes sound, or contributes to the creation of sound, is subject to use in a sound art piece.

There’s a great independent label in NYC right now called PTP (Purple Tape Pedigree: named after the limited purple cassette release of Raekwon’s “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx”) that completely destroys the distinction between sound art and music. Run by Geng AKA King Vision Ultra, a total old-school hip-hop head who also makes doom/drone/ambient/terrifying beats instrumentals, the label puts out the craziest experimental, forward-thinking music that is often performed in a way that effortlessly combines performance art/live experimentation/punk attitudes and feels incredibly fresh. Just wanted to give them a shoutout since I was thinking about a lot of the releases on the label while writing about how (IMO) sound art and music should just be called the same thing.

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Ensemble performance recording

This Tuesday I performed in my friend/classmate Michael Larocca’s electroacoustic/free improvisation/avant-garde/jazz ensemble as part of the group’s “midterm” (the jazz school uses occasional performances throughout each semester as benchmarks for progress). He has been writing some amazing pieces that have really pushed each of us in new directions and heightened our interplay/instinct/listening skills. It's also been fun to have a group where I have double duty on electronics and drums. I'm really happy w/ how this recording came out and super proud of everyone in the ensemble.

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MIDTERM: “For Mark Hollis”

The recent news of Mark Hollis’ death was a huge shock to me. I’ve been listening to his group Talk Talk’s 1991 album Laughing Stock all semester, studying, enjoying, and losing myself in it almost every day. I’m a little obsessed with it at the moment. Musical works that come out of a completely authentic personal zone, utilizing studios and equipment in unorthodox ways, operating on their own schedule and in sync with their authors’ own philosophies are the ones that connect with me the most, and Laughing Stock is one of the best examples of such a work. As my own practice evolves, my sound has moved further and further into similar territory to what Hollis was exploring in Laughing Stock. For the midterm assignment I wanted to use only a few distinct samples to construct an auditory space that felt like a subconscious area deep within the mind, slowly processing the outside world with its own emotive language that we can only somewhat understand, yet still feel an innate connection to/familiarity towards. In the process of creating such a piece, I realized that I probably came to this idea via Laughing Stock, since that entire album is essentially what I just described, and it’s been occupying a large portion of my mind lately. I figured I might as well dedicate the piece to Mark Hollis and fully run with the idea of an abstract Talk Talk tribute/deconstruction of the metaphysical places Laughing Stock grants my mind access to. Aside from Hollis’ music, my main inspiration for this piece’s sound and structure was Tim Hecker’s album Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, which in my opinion totally blurs the lines between this course’s definitions of “music” and “art.” Like Laughing Stock, Hecker’s album has also been completely absorbed into my creative intuition after months of deep listening and as a result was used kind of like a template for organizing my ideas.

I used Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason to create For Mark Hollis. Live handled some basic sample manipulation and all of the arranging and sequencing, while Reason was used for polyphonic and granular synthesis. I sampled Myrrhman, the opener of Laughing Stock, and looped it for the duration of the piece. I used Reason’s Thor synth to create a deep bass drone with lots of ugly, artifacted, dirty tones modulating themselves in various ways. I ended up filtering most of these sounds out and just keeping the bass drone element, as the rest of the sounds began to detract from the integrity of the piece as it developed. I had recordings on my hard drive of an old Eddie Money record (Playing for Keeps) that I picked up at a Salvation Army when I was in high school. I ran these through Michael Norris’ spectral/granular audio units in Ableton to get the stuttering/accelerating effect heard in the first half of the piece. I didn’t want to be too literal with the Talk Talk tribute element, but the sharp cuts of the music reminded me a little bit of their earlier, poppier albums. I suppose one could interpret the cut-up Eddie Money samples as an abstract bridge between Talk Talk’s older and newer material, but that feels a little too on-the-nose and unimaginative to me. I picked the samples arbitrarily and didn’t consider this way of framing the sounds until later on.

The ending ambience was created by running Satoshi Ashikawa’s Still Park Ensemble through extensive granular processing in Reason. I loved the physicality and slight grittiness of the original song’s recording quality, so I tried to preserve that sound as much as possible while still dramatically altering the sample. I layered a few duplicate channels and then added separate effects and changed their octaves to really flesh out the sound. The goal was an expansive, airy, uncompressed atmosphere.

The shift in tone between the two sections of the piece was really just an arbitrary decision. You could easily make a connection to Laughing Stock’s ebbs and flows in tone and timbre, but I really just structured the piece in this way because I felt like it.

If you gave me this assignment at the start of the semester before I engaged with any of the class material, it would have come out quite differently. I’ve been exposed to many interesting articles and artists that I wasn’t totally aware of before, and they’ve definitely influenced me in the process of creating this piece. Learning about the Fluxus movement was especially enlightening, as I barely knew anything about it before this semester. In the process of making this piece, I used Fluxus as a reference point for what I didn’t want to do. I love a lot of the movement’s pieces (and think others are terrible—which is kind of the point, I guess), but I have no interest in channeling any of the energy or physicality present in such works. I’m much more invested in the worlds of minimalism and process music, and their influence should be pretty obvious to anyone who listens to For Mark Hollis.

Due to the 10 minute time limit for presentation, I don’t want to do anything too involved that would require a lot of setting up. However, I did consider ways of performing this piece live in a different, less-restricted setting. You can see the plans I wrote out below.