Lateral Addition aspires to enrich dialogues among contemporary practices in sound — improvisation, computer music, “sound art,” etc. — and other areas of current media and visual art. In order to nurture the growth of these connections, it serves to further elucidate the often esoteric methodologies and thoughts of artists working with sound through original audio material.
Established in 2013, Lateral Addition releases sets of 4 audio and text contributions from an international roster of artists and writers on a bi-yearly schedule.
Lateral Addition on Library Stack
Remote Viewing (2019 - 2021)
Edited by Eric Laska / email
In Collapsing Ourselves from 2014, Hong-Kai Wang and Mattin presented a formal exploration of a dialogue in disorienting spatial contexts: four tracks layered over each other with varying levels of audibility, Chinese, English, sounds from different spaces, digital artifacts, snippets of self-reflexive conversation. This was done not as a way to innovate a new compositional framework or sound, but rather to problematize the social experience of playing the recording back, listening to it, and reflecting on it.
With this next iteration of the project, the process of superimposing four recorded conversations is repeated, though this time it was done with material recorded remotely over Skype and the addition of myself as the third conversant in the mix. A live remote performance took place between Taipei, Berlin, and Philadelphia on Saturday, December 16th, 2017 and the resulting audio contribution is a layered mix of all three sites (with Berlin represented for about a third of the recording due to technical issues). The playback experience is likewise affected, collapsing the boundaries between what is happening on the recording and the spaces it occupies.
Collapsing is the process of linking the inside text with the outside world. There is no outside-text. The tension between what we hear and how we talk about what we hear constructs a multi-layered dialogic space for the listener. Much like the use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in film, the audible questions posed by Hong-Kai, Mattin and myself for our own reflection are turned around and opened up for a speculative listening audience.
On the sleeve of Collapsing Ourselves, Mike Sperlinger writes, “When Hong-Kai and Mattin speak, they are talking over themselves. When they pose questions, it is not clear who they are for, even if we can discern them, or whether an answer is expected - perhaps they are rhetorical? A rhetorical question is a kind of mirror too: it assumes we know the answer, that we reflect the views of the questioner. But I am not sure if the questions in Collapsing Ourselves are rhetorical. I am not sure that there is an answer shared enough to remain unspoken, or that I know who ‘we’ are any more than I know who you are. The answers that are spoken, for the record, are uncertain. Thoughts out of harmony.”
Upon playback of the combined session I find myself swallowed in the sea of voices, straining to follow any particular snippet of conversation. At points, Hong-Kai tries to swim in the opposite direction, asserting herself against an indifferent wave of chatter: “I’m trying to have a conversation here!”
But conversation isn’t the locus point of activity. Rather it’s the trying, the effort to correspond or alternatively the lack thereof that opens up a disorienting space for corrupted reflection and shared social confusion. We speak into disparate spaces, and hear but can’t quite listen, as one Philadelphia audience member posits. The sea amplifies or obscures our voices and ultimately collapses us.
- EL
i composed two versions of one work earlier this year. one is "from audience" (documenta 14 radio program; http://www.documenta14.de/en/public-radio/14747/from-audiences). one is "for audience" (the ecology of place; a cinema listening event in melbourne; http://bogongsound.com.au/projects/the-ecology-of-place). for both i used only sound recordings of audiences and their environments before, during and after concerts.
recently i received "live" recordings of the latter event in which the audience in melbourne contributed their sounds into the other audience's sounds of my composition. it's about 27 minutes long.
the next day, september 13th 2017, i recorded this audio at my new studio in beijing. i was sitting in the space, listening to the environmental sounds and my own sounds. there's a stereo mic set above. i tried to record my listening for 27 minutes without looking at the time. i did two takes. this is take 1.
someone knocked on the door during the recording. i muted this part as the audience (me) was out of (then back to) the situation.
for some reason the signal through the right channel of the mic was missing. i enjoy the result. with the muted section and the missing right channel the recording exhibits some characteristics of electroacoustic music.
the idea of focusing on audience was partly initiated 4 years ago. once a friend of mine argued with what i wrote on social media about audience. i said, "it's not enough for supporting artists if you just buy a ticket and beer and stand there. not at all. the artists are supporting you." he thought it was offensive to the audience. i explained more in my book, "the only authentic work," that the audience should play an active role in using the artist as nutrition and energy but that book offended him even more. as a music lover with great taste he always rates what he hears and sees. he is a good critic. i started to wonder if this is the ideal audience i want to be because i always enjoy bad taste music.
the situation of the audience is very political in today's consumptive-totalitarian society. a perfect consumer with great taste is nice for the system. in the national opera in beijing, they repeat voice recordings again and again before a concert in order to discipline the audience for good manners. similarly, rock stars and singer-songwriters on stages of outdoor festivals discipline their audiences by preparing them with optional rhythms and liberal life styles. i'm wondering how one leaves his or her previous identity and becomes part of the abstract concept of the "audience"? are there other possibilities for joining or building collective identity?
over the last year i've read most of peter handke's works. the script for his play "publikumsbeschimpfung" was introduced to me as being as simple as offending the audience. i feel as though i am misrepresenting it because obviously it's not that simple. it focuses on the identity of "audience.” it's on the language of being and the possibility of being. but i'm also wondering why people would like to understand it in terms of the stupid relationship between artist and audience? do we not have other options besides slave and master?
i have a lot of recordings of audience, especially of the magical moment when everybody is getting quiet and the performance is about to begin. during concerts i enjoy listening to such sounds. sometimes i find the sounds of audience and environment to be more interesting than the music.
- yj
A conversation between Khyam Allami and Sharif Sehnaoui recorded at OneHertz Studios, Beirut, late 2017
Two musicians with very different backgrounds and itineraries in music discuss their visions and some of the ideas behind their distinct practices and methods. The conversation is set within the greater context of advancing contemporary ideas into the space of Arabic music. Here, Arabic music is not thought of as a fixed thing but rather as a historical and cultural background that lends various shades of meaning to each artist’s work.
Though there was not quite enough time to fully expand upon the ideas discussed, the conversation nonetheless provides a window into the ways that two figures of the current Arabic music scene position themselves in relation to their given field and society.
In the background at points there are relevant excerpts from sessions Allami and Sehnaoui recorded together in Beirut during the final days of 2014.
Reciprocal Scores is a light, body and sound performance piece that I have been working on with Lotus Edde Khouri since 2013. Sounding Reciprocal Scores is a sound perspective of the performance that I edit together after each performance. This iteration is very simple; it's an overview of what occurred sound-wise during the last performance. The recording is always far from any worries of objectivity but ends up sounding closer to the mood of the performance than a more straightforward document. Of course, it sometime fails, and ends up being far from anything interesting, objective, subjective... This particular take was recorded in May 2017 in Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, during the festival Musique Action.
During Reciprocal Scores, Lotus moves in space, moves lights, and plays the violin; Jean-Luc plays electric organs, alto sax, çiftelia, mixing board, uses a synthetic voice to read phrases he wrote and sometimes moves in space.
- JL
For this piece, I created a foundation – or “backing track” – that can be used for a variety of playback scenarios. It incorporates on-site recordings and excerpts of cassettes and audio files from my personal archive, including: crowd noise (date and time unknown), guitar and tape recordings (2006 or 2007), synthesizer and electronics (2008), percussion / loop cassettes (2007), and recordings of live noise shows (artists unknown, circa 2008).
Preference was given to sounds of an unknown or barely remembered origin.
These audio clips were mixed with recorded ambiences from a visit to Vox Populi Gallery in Philadelphia on the afternoon of April 14, 2017, in addition to the audio from a solo performance at Vox on the evening of April 15. The ambient material recorded on the 14th includes sounds from the art exhibit that was installed at the time, as well as my own footsteps, the sound of folding chairs, and the occasional interjection of my infant son. The performance on the 15th was recorded by a microphone placed by an open window in an adjacent gallery facing N. 11th Street.
Silence and artificial ambience were added where necessary.
It was my intention to create music out of things that already exist – to not generate more recordings – and to constantly change the perspective for the listener, whether they were listening to this as a stand-alone audio track (as presented here) or in a live performance. Having recently moved from Providence to Philadelphia, it also served as a practical exercise in the unpacking of physical possessions.
Presently, this piece has been performed twice. In addition to the gig at Vox Populi, this current version was used for a performance at the Silent Barn in Brooklyn, NY on April 29, 2017, as part of the Ende Tymes VII festival. Each version was quite different, and included additional materials dictated by the situation.
Timeline of Events:
00:00 – 00:10: crowd noise (date and time unknown)
00:10 – 00:15: silence
00:15 – 00:24: crowd noise
00:24 – 00:26: synthesizer and electronics (2008)
00:26 – 00:40: vox performance (4.15.17)
00:40 – 01:07: vox gallery (4.14.17)
01:07 – 01:10: guitar and tape (2006-2007)
01:10 – 01:21: silence
01:02 – 02:03: vox gallery
02:03 – 02:07: outside window of vox gallery
02:07 – 02:09: guitar and tape
02:09 – 02:10: silence
02:10 – 02:33: vox gallery
02:33 – 02:40: ambience
02:40 – 03:03: vox gallery
03:03 – 03:05: synthesizer and electronics
03:05 – 03:11: vox performance
03:11 – 03:30: guitar tape
03:30 – 03:52: vox performance
03:52 – 03:53: vox gallery (in the black box performance space)
03:53 – 04:05: noise tape (date and time unknown)
04:05 – 04:20: vox black box
04:20 – 04:22: ambience
04:22 – 04:23: silence
04:23 – 04:24: synthesizer and electronics
04:24 – 04:31: silence
04:31 – 04:57: vox gallery
04:57 – 05:01: silence
05:01 – 05:45: vox performance
05:45 – 05:53: vox gallery
05:53 – 06:09: vox performance
06:09 – 06:25: vox gallery
06:25 – 06:27: synthesizer and electronics
06:27 – 06:33: ambience
06:33 – 06:37: silence
06:37 – 07:38: vox gallery
07:38 – 07:40: silence
07:40 – 07:52: vox gallery
07:52 – 07:58: guitar tape
07:58 – 08:00: synthesizer and electronics
08:00 – 08:39: black box
08:39 – 09:13: guitar tape
09:13 – 09:22: vox performance
09:22 – 09:26: vox gallery
09:26 – 09:28: silence
09:28 – 09:32: ambience
09:32 – 09:40: silence
09:40 – 09:56: vox gallery
09:56 – 10:36: guitar tape
10:36 – 11:15: vox performance
11:15 – 11:22: vox gallery
11:22 – 11:28: percussion / loop tapes (2007)
11:28 – 11:32: synth and electronics
11:32 – 11:38: noise show (circa 2008)
11:38 – 11:47: silence
11:47 – 12:25: leaving vox populi, afternoon of April 14
– GM
The Pitch
“A framework of understanding.”
The pitch is a playing field. Four players
trying to pitch something, an idea, a sound.
A tone of definite frequency.
The Pitch is a co-sharing of musical space,
of certain parameters, limitations and an instrumental
awkwardness collectively carried into brightness.
Working out simple ideas to see how far
we can take them. How long we can play them.
How often we can handle them.
Modes of interaction, rules of engagement,
aesthetic agreements, instrumental limitations.
Reducing material until we’ve reached the core.
Initiative, shared intuition, collective composition, instrumentation.
Bass harmonics doubling the clarinet,
vibraphone rounding out the harmona,
sine tones combining instrumental forces.
The harmona is missing pitches. Playing such an archaic,
flawed instrument is a deliberate limitation.
We discovered how to sound together. What to play
and when to play it. Every small decision having
huge consequences for the outcome of the whole.
It seems like we’ve just gotten started. / “It’s actually getting quite good now.”
—- —- —- —-
The Pitch was founded in Berlin in the year 2009 by BB, KN, MJO and MT with the aim to create a common musical language to be used to play structured improvisations; together and with guests. The peculiar instrumentation was a deliberate attempt to create an ensemble which would rather focus on pitch constellations and the creation of a group sound and group strategies than on the development of individual improvisational languages or elaborate extended instrumental techniques played at the same time.
They have an upcoming concert with legendary Viennese ensemble Polwechsel, for which a new piece has been collectively composed by the two ensembles combining materials and strategies in real time.
www.ballhausost.de/produktionen/polwechsel-the-pitch/
More sounds and information about The Pitch:
—- —- —- —-
Subatomic Motion (i7 / sine tones / tape)
The Pitch
Boris Baltschun – pump organ, function generators
Koen Nutters – upright bass
Morten J Olsen – vibraphone
Michael Thieke – clarinet
Composed by The Pitch
Recorded and transferred by Morten J Olsen
Recorded in Berlin, April 2017
Text by Koen Nutters
*The first phrase of the writing was constructed late one night
with the assistance of Martijn Tellinga.
Last fall, I was touring and performing my piece “Falsetto” every night. It’s a strange, physically difficult, fumbling, deliberately incompetent (or maybe a different type of expert) performance played almost entirely with small bells found at thrift stores, purchased with the criteria that they must in some way sound unusual or broken or just “not nice,” and also that they cost less than $5 each.
The sound of the bells is great. When layered, it’s a complex, weird, and unpredictable sound made with exceedingly humble means – literally just jostling a bunch of crap around that I found at Goodwill. However, the content and performance of the piece may cause some feelings of uncertainty and confusion in the unassuming spectator. One unhappy concert reviewer went so far as to say, “I thought I didn’t understand percussive theory anymore. Hell, I thought I didn’t understand music anymore.”
Much to my delight, this is the exact feeling the piece aims to provoke and the reviewer had actually captured my performance perfectly. Why *am* I drawn to art that I expressly hope will cause me to think, “What the hell is happening?” It’s a feeling not unlike the experience of figuring out that you’re trans at the age of 34, having lived mostly cluelessly outside the worn-out, “ever since I was a little kid, I knew I was different” trope. In fact, even among my other trans and queer friends, I don’t know a single person whose experience resembles my own (which, as it turns out, is a common feeling among many trans people… that we can’t relate to anyone, including other trans people). We look for ourselves in other people’s art and it’s not too often that I find something I recognize in myself.
Martha – “St Paul’s (Westerberg Comprehensive)”
We are not worthy to receive you / We are the daughters and the sons / We are the second-hand trousers / Blazers and blouses / Irredeemable ones.
José Esteban Muñoz wrote eloquently about queer fascination with the mundane and the impulse to see expansive worlds within things that most people dismiss as commonplace. He cites Frank O’Hara’s famous poem “Having a Coke with You” as signifying, “a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality.” It’s a similar impulse to my own, having exposed conventional percussion instruments and their bizarre acoustic inner life – simply by playing them – to the point that I concluded that any object is potentially fascinating if you just play it the right way.
Certainly, the act of “saving” thrown out objects that nobody wants will likely resonate (no pun intended) with most queer people. The “thrown out little bell” and its Ugly Duckling-style “story” in my piece “Falsetto” as representation of discarded queer life is not exactly a brilliantly conceived or nuanced metaphor, but it’s one that stings and feels necessary nonetheless.
1 Corinthians 14:34
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.
Last year I took a class for trans women that aims to teach us how to speak in a way that sounds more like cisgender females than our “natural” voices. The purpose of the class is to find a new way of speaking for yourself that helps to decrease dysphoria and is less likely to unintentionally alert strangers that you’re a trans woman because, let’s face it, that doesn’t always turn out so great.
Most cis people don’t seem to know that when a transgender man takes testosterone, his vocal cords thicken and his voice lowers significantly. Trans women experience no such change. Our identities are quite literally betrayed by our own bodies and there is little we can do to change it, leaving us to grapple with a society that is actively trying to make us disappear.
When I’ve described “Falsetto” to friends and I say it involves, “small hand bells,” a common response is, “Oh, like in church?” Initially, I hadn’t thought about this at all and shrugged it off as an unintentional coincidence – “I just like the sound.” Then came the accidental discovery while researching singing styles that falsetto singing was invented with the express purpose of giving men the female voice parts in church choirs because women were not permitted. The place we most associate with the small hand bell – church – as it turns out, dictated the exclusion of women and now in the present day are dictating legislation that’s keeping trans women out of bathrooms with the unspoken ultimate goal that they’ll simply vanish from school, work, and society.
A six-year old girl asked Klaus Nomi, “Are you an alien?” and Nomi warmly replied, “Yes, little girl. I am.”
Klaus Nomi is one of the world’s most famous countertenors (or contralto, depending on gender) and his former vocal coach spoke at length about Klaus’s insistence on developing only his unusually high register capabilities. Klaus Nomi also created an elaborate persona for himself that involved him being an alien from another planet.
Was Klaus Nomi a closeted or repressed trans woman? Did he find it more plausible to exist in the world as “simply a gay man” who claimed to be an alien from another planet than to identify as a woman?
Even now, one of Klaus Nomi’s closest collaborators Joey Arias uses female pronouns and speaks openly having been drawn to dresses from a young age, but she can’t seem to say that she is transgender. Instead she has invented that she, “has the Z chromosome!” The repression and societal pressure against being transgender is so great, our policing of gender essentialist standards so aggressive, and sexism against women of all walks of life so intense and unmovable, that perhaps it subconsciously motivated Nomi and Arias to be unthinkable beings rather than just simply women.
This is, of course, all total speculation on my part but let’s call it an educated and familiar guess. Klaus Nomi’s most memorable performance of Henry Purcell’s “The Cold Song” when heard in a trans/queer context, coming from the mouth of a self-proclaimed extraterrestrial being, reads like a brutal tribute to chronic dysphoria (Nomi later died of complications from AIDS in 1983, one of the first prominent celebrities to do so). We do tend to recognize our own and the feeling is a familiar one as I set out again to bruise and blister my hands for another performance of “Falsetto.”
What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise, unwillingly and slow,
From beds of everlasting snow!
See’st thou not how stiff,
And wondrous old,
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold.
I can scarcely move,
Or draw my breath,
I can scarcely move,
Or draw my breath.
Let me, let me,
Let me, let me,
Freeze again…
Let me, let me,
Freeze again to death!
– SH
i’ve been obsessed with chris tucker’s early work recently
the lines sound so much different in the present moment than they did to me in the past
they now are more like prescient articulations of a horrifying future or a gonzo present
each message opens up its own rift in time and space
i get caught in these little eddies, the accumulation of which has become pessimist rush hour
– WWIV
Today I clapped a mosquito dead and there was blood between my fingers. Two drops. I washed them off. The book Ben gave me has blood at the bottom, two drops, although maybe it’s just marker. It’s probably just marker. But, you know, it’s nice when things are more poetic than they should be, when life suddenly inflates like an air bubble in a sausage casing, when time puddles out.
I like reading Judith Butler. It’s usually worth it. I read her at a rate of one book every two years. It’s too much, I guess, like eating a huge rich meal. You have to take a break. I have to take a break. I take breaks while eating more often than I used to. Not everything needs to be devoured.
Judith Butler has written some of my favorite sentences. Sentences like Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. Like One does not always stay intact. In Louisville I was teaching a masterclass, I had written QUEER SOUND QUEER TIME QUEER SPACE on a whiteboard with a brown marker and connected them all with squiggly lines I mean of course they weren’t straight duh and I was rambling, you know, like I am right now, not really explaining anything that I meant, and I hit a wall in my ramblesplation or ramblesploitation or whatever and started just going through a roll call of sounds I like that the trumpet makes. But every time I stopped one it felt like coming up from a kiss. I felt lost. And I thought, huh. Is it happening?
What I mean is that something about performing in the way that I did 25 or 26 times on this tour—always saying beforehand in the same goofy voice “hi my name is Jacob Wick, I live in Mexico City,” which is actually the sound my voice makes when I’m nervous and trying to calm myself down, fake it til you make it—made me feel very close to the surface. Is that a better metaphor? I mean I kept feeling like I was going to cry or fall in love or both. I still do, a lot of the time, even though I’m not on tour anymore. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I used to pride myself I think on maintaining a certain distance from the world, like seeing myself and other people from afar and all that, but my distance has closed. Why be dead when you can be alive. Whenever I think about this I think about this citation that I cannot locate for the life of me where some female character, maybe she’s writing a letter or maybe it’s somebody reading or quoting a female critic or hell, maybe it’s Maggie Nelson, anyway this writer or person or character or all of the above wrote something like, isn’t it funny how men always have to abstract things from the body, distance themselves away from feeling. I read that and I was like, huh. No wonder. Live free or die. The other night after the gig we were translating live free or die into Spanish, giving Brad shit for always saying he’s from New York when he’s actually from New Hampshire, vive libre o muere, ca’. Or maybe that’s too severe. Sometimes it’s impossible to be free and usually it’s hard to die.
What I mean is that the night before I flew to Baltimore to begin the tour I played a solo set here in Mexico City that was pretty dull and unpleasant for everybody including me with the exception of Katya, who seemed to have a really great time, and afterwards Isidore or maybe the German girl, what was her name, she who we waited for, anyway somebody asked me is that what you’re going to do all month and I was like yes with this fake smugness that I’ve never really felt but always kind of wanted to. But then I thought, god what am I doing I didn’t even like that. I was trying to stick with this sound that I had been using in Europe, one of my favorite sounds I’ve ever found on the trumpet. But it obviously wasn’t working. It lacked richness and depth. It had never had feeling.
Good thing two days later in Baltimore I was comfortable enough after spending the day with Bonnie and Marian that when I tried that sound, this sound I had made for 25 minutes in Mexico City that was kind of a drab boring version of a sound I had found in Europe that I guess I have lost forever, or maybe just until next time, anyway when I tried that sound and it didn’t work I was like, ok whatever. We had a nice fling, we were perfect for each other, now it’s done. I guess I’ll improvise. I did that for about a week, maybe ten days. I noticed I could hold this white noise texture for a long time and king of blanket the room and feel myself kind of, I don’t know, imploding? Coming undone. And I liked that. When Gabe said, one of the first days, that felt like a hug, I hugged him and thought, ok, this is what I actually want to be doing. Something that feels like something, not some distanced intellectual exercise. Something basic and bodily and not abstract, not ideal, something nasty not something crystalline. In the previous weeks or months I had been thinking and occasionally saying things, usually to myself, like I want to create a hole in the room or I want to make a web in the room but now I was like yeah I want to create a hole in the room that we can all melt into I want to make a web and bind us I want to create a pool in time so that we float away forever altogether, at least for a moment.
– JW
It has a season that has to have with a lot of setting up the one who likes to its feet or skeleton of a gun and ordered anyway the hello to have a little likelihood of home slow white lights that he only one child at home has to have it has totally into the case is the percent theater were aimed at setup a look at two outs. That’s a that’s the story to a record of as I’ve started with four of the sixth to its petition as the status of Jerusalem as its citizens that came down just generally only happens is that late 1980s that have the option of that it was fun to six delegates if ever heard is that the details that have been split some of it from a set of new products some nonsense and they are talking of 6 to 3 and a lot has both a diet rich in some Saudis is to sell any studies that have items that are various side yet that’s end of the shortcut activity was about to fall for a question for foreign investors act plays a role model open its inspiration postage stamps audits are reached its peak event head-to that she ended up staying home and freely in the right color, and can earn much that eventually have actively focused and Siebel in a loss of the world more heavy handed and Africa statement just on reports that a large debt funds out of analytical thinking is no large but forgetting about deficits and accepts juror five of them went in and what it has nothing to do is talk: it’s too heavy on Sundays I are a lot of everything that’s that’s the 1. that it not necessarily done as what is actually two record that has was the result of a over the court to several ideas are its location as a response only catalog and series of experiences the old one of its life of their holdings as this ability of a zone of old Soviet of the exhibits the law but still a little after a S6 isn’t something a bit of that lately they have the depth of them just to get anywhere let’s look up at the district’s its bits to its most severe cases, to avoid you that it’s a since its own rate of one who has text with all its listed and bright and it’s that it’s always 2000 La and its lowest batting averages 11 of its two parties in a bid for kids and parents waits
The reason (the estimates about a refund speak on a particular topic which was sold its impact on the cards available was a hotbed of the goal of the least bit of the party at her table I have ever been able to bear that is at record since it to the first time it was about as expected it’s the 11 one of its excesses exultant archived the working set by NATO and owns the family’s lawyer but was expected to be asked to see what it’s about bullet of turmoil ID and it has been the head of which would lessen the audience to talk about the things that bothered by a national leader with one of the skates on various forms of success recently with the great state of which comes their way through problems like what they just discussing issues that parents that all that is the same surrogate mother of a region that has played live during a set of some interest beyond its religious talk about what life was talking about a little bit on any nonsense of bacteria and western or British Airways and struck by a facility charges that the what have you buy a home just by started by talking about this discovery of an entertainer of the ordinance that the software for S probably to France and the judge concluded just before the start its own end of the old considered an earthquake of something about the settlement on the party’s question that’s the war in the school of mines that Congress and some secure them down syndrome for list of segmentation grown as much of its of sense the way it’s what’s your own life bible itself up and I have to really fun exercise investigation of a home since the gulf of Mexico said the ocean and has to have to have I have a 0.2 and a CB ideas Hartman said that the people behind her to the lights commitment respect of working just as good as your car, a white paper and it’s that I don’t even have seemed for believes that if the sum of their abuse that was well but actually gets sent it off the bat as you envision to the highway up a working copy of games beneath the root of sometimes finding his old hits and misses the freely in this region and is often are just realize it was published in four plays and now it’s one that will be excellent dancers are not even because of yardage nature what it is it just as tough to take time to take time to catch fish tank to look at the time to think of to have to change to
– RK
This recording is made from a selection of my collection of cassette loop tapes that were created between 2006 – 2016. Most of them have been used in previous recordings but never in this configuration or layering of sounds. I have been making recordings under the moniker Tether for the last 3 years, and previously recorded and performed as Pak. I was interested in the idea of a time capsule, where information is recontextualized at a later time. My suitcases full of loops became my personal time capsule to investigate and find sounds that would serve a new composition. The title Wildest Dreams comes from the ascending chimes heard in the recording, a device for dream sequences in film and TV, as well as the alternate state that is recreated by repurposing the loops.
– LP
This is a recording of a trio improvisation by Takahiro Kawaguchi (horns) Masahiko Okura (reeds) Masahide Tokunaga (alto sax) which was held at En-ban, a record store in Koenji, Tokyo, at 8pm on August 30th 2016.
Okura and Tokunaga are wind instrument players who work in both composition and improvisation. Rather than focusing on any one fundamental output, the handmade instrumentation and musical content of each of Kawaguchi’s performances are unique. On this recording, he performs as a “mechanical wind instrument player.”
Text translated from Japanese by Wonja Fairbrother. Audio mastered by Alan Jones.
We love too late!
“I hadn’t been asked,” Udo Kier shouts into a microphone. Kier, the German actor of Cologne origins recites from a pamphlet against the lack of transparency in local politics as part of a performance initiated by Rosemarie Trockel in 2002. The occasion for the art-performance was a huge hole in the city-center of Cologne that emerged as a result of the demolition of a public contemporary art space, the Josef-Haubrich Kunsthalle, which was built in 1967. The local politicians that planned the destruction of the modern concrete building only recognized that there was no budget for a new building on the property once the old structure was already gone. Since then, the remaining hole had for many become a symbol of failed cultural politics. It was a reminder to citizens that the original 1960s building was much better than nothing at all…
Since around the same time, a similar development has been taking place, although hardly noticeable (i.e. officially numerable), in a different domain and at a much slower pace. A shift is occurring, with possibly devastating consequences for music-lovers: The public broadcast network WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), along with other German public networks such as RB (Radio Bremen) and more recently SWR (Südwestrundfunk) have been slowly but surely rolling back their support for contemporary music genres, some of which they were responsible for conceiving themselves in the heyday of the avant-garde of the 1950s through 1980s.
But maybe there is nothing wrong with a change, since every era also has its own media. Who listens to radio these days anyways? Apparently public radio has completely failed to adjust to the digital world.
There are three problems with this shift as I see it. Beyond the lack of resources for production, it is the abandonment of a symbolic mandate for innovative music granted by a democratically installed institution like public radio. The politicians are giving up radio’s own competence, denying its expert role. Their key argument is thus: Considering the relatively small number of people actually listening to these experiments in sound and composition, it’s simply too expensive. Nowadays, people can do that kind of stuff on their laptops, there is no need for studio time and equipment, not to mention a need for research and shared knowledge. The argument is partly true but innovation and real artistically motivated tech-development always takes time. Unlike in France, there aren’t many non-academic institutions for sound-research in Germany. The other major problem is that there isn’t any transparency in the decision making – the public can, if at all, only react once it’s too late.
My own perspective is a bit biased since I’ve been working with the institution for a couple of commissions. Perhaps it’s worth reflecting on the consequences of this shift in Germany from a system with strong public institutions towards being solely market oriented, with the invisible hand and no direct programmatic influence. But in some ways it’s not really a shift since the non-institutional scene has always existed in parallel. There was and will always be an underground. There will also always be artists, individual entrepreneurs and curators working outside of institutional contexts. Of course we should welcome platforms if they are less reclusive, less middle-aged male dominated, but it may remain to be seen if, in comparison, those are free in the same sense of what’s possible. The hole will show when it’s too late. We love too late!
—
Gravity N2 outtake from a recording session for WDR3 Open Sounds, March 2016
– MS
Late last year, I visited Christopher Knowles in his studio on 20th street in New York City to discuss his contribution to this publication. Knowles shares the studio with his wife, the artist Sylvia Netzer, and the three of us sat down and listened to many of Knowles’s recordings before he decided on the one he wanted to include. As we played a selection of the sound works, most of which were created in the 1970s and early 1980s, Knowles spoke about the condition of each tape’s production. He readily called to mind where he made each tape, the day and year of each recording, and the references it made to contemporary popular culture. The noise of street traffic mingled with the sounds of the recordings and our conversation as we revisited Knowles’s memories of growing up and making art in New York.
Knowles’s artistic practice is wide-ranging, and includes painting, sculpture, dance, and poetry. He began making audiotape recordings in 1970, at the age of eleven, and maintains a keen interest in using cassette tape players to break apart and reconfigure the aural components of spoken language. Popular music figures prominently in his work, and in “Popular Songs A,” Knowles introduces a series of short excerpts from Billboard’s Top 20 songs of fourteen different years from 1957 to 1971. The songs are recorded from the Top 20 countdown series on WCBS-FM, an oldies radio station in New York City that offered a programmed countdown of classic hits in the early 1980s. He made this work on fourteen different days throughout the winter and spring of 1984, and each of the recordings is comprised of songs that were popular on the same day of the referenced year. This temporal layering, in which we hear Knowles in 1984 introducing songs from the previous decades, creates a folding effect that draws sonic connections across moments in mid-twentieth century popular music. Here, Knowles takes us on a tour of this formative period in music history, showing us the differences between the smooth soul lyricism of the late ‘50s, the funk-rock beats of the ‘60s, and the psychedelic poetry of the early ‘70s as we hear cropped excerpts of “Pretty Girls Everywhere” by Eugene Church & the Fellows from 1958, “Dance to the Music” by Sly & the Family Stone from 1968, and “Toast and Marmalade for Tea” by Tin Tin from 1971. As listeners, we are invited to tune in to the soundtrack of Knowles’s everyday world, and to shift effortlessly with him across these carefully measured distances.
– Lauren DiGiulio, February 14, 2016
The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Christopher Knowles and Lauren DiGiulio:
CK: It was 1984. February 4th, 1984.
LD: So you made this on Saturday, February 4th, 1984?
CK: Yes, that’s right. And I remember it was the Top 20 countdown from 5-7pm. WCBS-FM.
LD: And here you’re going through how many of the songs?
CK: Well, I don’t know how many there are… thirteen or fourteen of the Top 20 songs.
LD: So is there anything that you would like people to know about this tape?
CK: Yeah, I guess so. Just listen to it. It’s a tape that I made in 1984. I started making tapes in 1982 when they first did the Top 20 Countdown.
LD: And who was it that did the Top 20 Countdown?
CK: It was Mr. Music Norm at Night. And he lives in Cleveland, Ohio. I remember he was a disc jockey and he remembers everything. He was on WCBS-FM here in New York.
LD: So right now we’re listening to the Top 20 songs of 1959?
CK: I think it was February 5th, 1959. And that’s when I made the tape, 1984. It’s pretty complicated.
LD: So, these (songs) go on.
CK: Uh oh (laughing). Yes, they do.
A knife is cutting through air, relentlessly. However, it cuts very slowly, by degrees and in circles; it’s a wooden knife, not very sharp, like a butter knife but with teeth. The structure upon which this knife is attached has a light bulb resting on it, a light bulb with a rather complex metallic grid inside, vibrating softly with every degree of the knife’s turns.
Then there is a strip of paper or a piece of thin cardboard, suspended; three toothpicks are leaning on and pushing this cardboard but they are not strong enough, the cardboard barely undulates. Sometimes a toothpick will fall down and the cardboard keeps humming quietly, unperturbed.
Two motors, small, round, nervous, on a wood plank; a sandpaper cone on each of them, with minuscule weight but just enough to slightly destabilize their travel. The motors whistle while turning, they seem engineered to operate smoothly, seemlessly, indefinitely – and yet with this excrescence on their backs they limp, heave, and stumble over non existent obstacles.
A ship, that in fact is a bedside lamp, with a 15 watt light bulb inside the deck. A motor on the deck of the ship, leaning against the ropes; electricity scarce or insufficient, the motor barely turns, occasionally plucking a rope as if by mistake. Sound is coming from far away, from the other side of the room, emanating through the gyproc of the wall maybe, or through the potted plant.
– AFJ
Excerpts from Day Three at the Sydney Cricket Ground:
Starc bowling to Saha from the Paddington end – dot ball; off-drive: boundary; dot ball; dot ball; dot ball; back-foot defence: dot ball.
Watson bowling to Ashwin – edged: boundary; dot ball; dot ball; dot ball; forward defence: dot ball; forward defence: dot ball.
Hazelwood bowling to Saha from the Randwick Street end – front foot defence: dot ball; back foot defence: dot ball; back foot defence: dot ball; drive to mid-on: dot ball; dot ball; off-drive: three runs.
Watson bowling to Saha – forward defence: dot ball; back foot defence: dot ball; forward defence: dot ball; forward defence: dot ball; on drive: dot ball; leg glance: three runs.
Hazelwood bowling to Saha – back foot defence: dot ball; front foot defence: bowler misfields, dot ball; late glide: dot ball; on-drive: two runs; dot ball; off-drive: boundary.
Drinks break – Saha: 34 runs; Ashwin: 11 runs
That was a short excerpt from the 2015 Sydney Test Match between Australia and India. I used similar excerpts from the 2013-2014 Ashes Series in Australia as a framework to compose a piece for brass choir. The piece is basically a continuos repeated pitch, with slightly different shadings of tuning. There are no dynamic changes or shifts in density – a listener might take interest in each event of a player’s articulation of a note, and its ending. The piece has yet to be performed.
Richie Benaud (1930-2015), former Australian team captain, Leg-Spinner and lower-order batsmen,cricket commentator and all-round gentleman son of Western Sydney had what some would consider a peculiar voice, in particular the way in which he pronounced the number ‘two’. And so, the score 2/222 is called the ‘Benaud Score’. In some countries, cricket is scored by the number of fallen wickets followed by the number of runs – 2/222 ; in other countries it is the reverse – 222/2. Why this is, I don’t know.
My performance piece ‘Numbers Descending’ is inspired by the Polish painter Roman Opałka’s number paintings, in which he painted consecutive numbers on canvass starting from 1 and aiming for infinity. The final number he painted before his death in 2011, aged 79, was 5,607,249. Being more interested in zero than in infinity, I started ‘Numbers Descending’ at one million, and have been counting aloud, slowly, backwards from there. It’s more than likely that I will die before I reach the number zero. In performance, each number takes on a real character with relationships to other numbers – consonance and dissonance, internal rhyme and rhythm and my occasional mistakes (counting large numbers backwards is more difficult than it might seem) – and when I reach new decades or centuries, I (at least) hear real timbral shifts in the material. ‘Numbers Descending’ sounds like my attending to a field – a sonic field, a semiotic field – within a recording of a field: the space in which the piece is performed. Each time I count, the space in which I do it is cordoned-off in time and space, and accorded a discrete ‘eventliness’ for me, in my narrative, in my life. What that experience is for the audience I can’t say.
There exists new technology in televised cricket to aid the umpires in making decisions. The sport is a wide expanse of not-much-going-on in a large open field, and when action does happen, it occurs very quickly. These events are sometimes difficult for the umpires to observe with the naked eye. One of these pieces of technology is called a ‘Snickometer’ or the inevitably shortened and O’d in the British Empire, ‘Snicko’. It is a slow-motion video replay with a waveform visualiser on the screen. It is used in order to determine whether the ball has hit the bat, or any other part of the player’s body, should an appeal be made for ‘Out’ caught or LBW. Usually, if the ball has taken a faint edge from the bat or glove, the waveform will appear as a thin spike. Other shapes on the waveform visualiser, the commentators assure us, are other sorts of sounds: the dull thump of the ball hitting the pad, bat brushing the ground, or the dangerously similar to ball-and-bat-edge sound of the ball flicking the batter’s shirt on its way through to the wicketkeeper.
Rhythm is a huge part of cricket. There is the rhythm of a Test Match – five days, three sessions a day lasting six hours in total, breaks for drinks, lunch and tea; distinctive weather patterns at each ground and how they develop over the course of a day; the pattern of the pitch deterioration according to the type of bowlers running on it, as well as the changes in ground and air moisture; the rowdiness of the crowd as they get drunker as the day wears on (this particularly applies to the English travelling supporters ‘The Barmy Army’ on their tours to hotter climes); and the rhythm of each individual player. Commentators will analyse a particular player’s performance in regards to their rhythm. A bowler who is having trouble finding the right line and length or who’s pace is not what it should be, is said to be ‘out of rhythm’. Some commentators will tell you that they can tell just by the run-up of a bowler to the crease, before they have even let go of the ball, whether or not they are in good rhythm that day. A batter, likewise, can be in and out of rhythm, their footwork slow, or not seeing the ball fast enough, the remedy for which is always, inevitably, getting back into rhythm.
Glenn McGrath (born 1970) – legendary right-arm medium-fast bowler, Australian Test, One-Day and T20 team member, and batsman of comically ill repute – is rumoured to have had a song that he sang to himself every time he walked back to his mark before he ran in to bowl again. He played in 124 Test Matches, 250 One-Day Internationals, 21 T20s, and 189 first-class games. He has never publicly revealed the name of the song. This was supposed to keep him in rhythm. His fans composed a song about him and often sang it from the stands when he was bowling well. The lyrics of which are a testament to the affect on creativity of a lot of beer being drunk over a very long time in, usually, very hot weather: Ooh Aah Glenn McGrath / say Ooh Aah Glenn McGrath.
A ‘wristy’ batter, and one with ‘soft hands’ is one who plays with finesse rather than power. Instead of using arm and upper-body strength to smash the ball all over the place, this other type of batter uses the pace of the ball to their advantage, and guides and places it in between fielders when playing their shots. These are the batters who I delight in watching. Batters from the Indian Sub-Continent are more often than not ‘wristy’. This can be attributed to the slow and turning nature of the pitches in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, where the more successful batter is the one who can play more strategically – placing their scoring shots gracefully in un-fielded areas until the fielding captain makes changes to stop the flow of runs in one area, the ‘wristy’ batter uses their ‘soft hands’ to change the angle at which the ball ricochets off the bat, and so scores runs in the places from where the fielders were moved.
I have never heard or read a cricket pundit attribute ‘wristiness’ to anything besides growing up playing cricket in these sorts of conditions. It is odd, however, that two of my favourite contemporary batsmen who happen to be of Sub-Continental descent, yet grew up playing their cricket in very different conditions – Hashim Amla in South Africa, and Moeen Ali in England – are classic examples of the ‘soft-handed wristy bastsman’. Perhaps it is the fear of being accused of racism that prevents people from suggesting that ‘soft-handed wristiness’ is somehow a biological trait of the Sub-Continental human. I myself am ‘soft-handed’ and ‘wristy’ – though a rubbish cricketer, and the softness of my hands are probably an outcome of never really doing any manual labour – these attributes well suit the playing of the trombone. Requiring no nimbleness of finger, wrist control is vital to accurate tuning and intonation on the trombone, as is the ability to control the small muscles in the lips, as well as the tongue, and one’s air flow. As an aside, during a Choral Conducting class while I was studying at the Conservatorium, our lecturer stopped me mid-chorale to complain about the floppiness of my wrists. He asked me ‘Are you a descendant of French nobility?’, my blank face said ‘obviously I’m not! What the hell are you talking about?’ ‘The French nobility were known for having slender wrists’ he replied. Interestingly, there is such a game as ‘French Cricket’, but it has none of the laws or gravitas of actual cricket and is usually played at barbecues or at the beach. But, I digress… To play the trombone very quietly, requires not only very specific air pressure control, but also control over the pressure exerted from the mouthpiece onto one’s embouchure. The amounts of pressure in air, and from mouthpiece to embouchure changes, I find, depending on in which register I’m trying to play quietly. Counter-intuitively, in some registers, for almost inaudible playing a great deal of both types of pressure are required.
Before Konzert Minimal began the process of rehearsing and pre-recording parts for a performance of a piece by Phill Niblock, Johnny Chang and I were talking about other ensemble’s realisations of different works by the composer. Johnny was talking about a certain type of tension that players can play with when playing very loudly, which for Niblock’s work seems necessary, but can result in simply tense instrumental playing, rather than the desired monolithic sound-world. Our concert a couple of months later was quite a success (I think) musically as well as in terms of audience – it was very large, and made up almost entirely of people who had never heard us before. Unfortunately, of our sextet incarnation of Konzert Minimal, zero performers were women. But, two of us were Asian – ethnic minorities in Germany…
I heard recently through the grapevine, but not officially said, that a long-running experimental venue of international reputation here in Berlin made the decision to have at least an equal ratio of female to male performers at all of their concerts. While I acknowledge that it is entirely self-evident that female musicians of equal talent do not receive the same attention as their male counterparts and something should be done about this, I feel a bit wary of the gender-binary enforced by this quota system, as well as the prescriptive nature of it. But, and this is a big but, this venue is trying to do something to address the problem of discrimination against female musicians. It has pushed to the forefront of my mind, when curating concerts, the question ‘who am I unconsciously overlooking, and why?’ and maybe that’s the intention of the curators of said venue. This isn’t ‘identity politics’ they are dealing with, but structural discrimination. A recent personal example: I had the need to invite another instrumentalist to an ensemble I have recently been working with. Another member of the ensemble suggested a cis-female who would be great for the group. I considered it, but instead chose a cis-male performer because, and I quote my own internal conversation: ‘I had heard him and worked with him many times before, so I know definitely that he would suit the ensemble’. The question of why I had heard him and worked with him many times before compared to that of the cis-female performer didn’t even occur to me until later, when discussing the new quota system at the venue.
I recently completed a 365 day text-realisation of Manfred Werder’s 2007(1), the score of which is simply: ein tag/ein klang a day/a sound. It was an exercise in field recording using text rather than amicrophone. Over time I began to come across a problem of assigning gender to invisible agents creating sound. For example, if the sound I chose to record for a certain day was someone yelling from another apartment building, I would find myself writing ‘woman yelling’ or ‘man yelling’, but interrogate myself about how I knew whether it was a certain gender of a person yelling, and then whether or not it even mattered to ascribe a gender to the yelling. But, there is a lot of sonic information in the ‘gendered-person yelling’ compared to that of just ‘person yelling’. The deeper into Manfred’s piece I went, the more entangled I became in the problem of a field recordist describing the world compared to that of a field recordist creating the world. Even now, many months after completing the realisation, I’m unable to see the two as discrete practices. For one day’s recording I agonised over whether or not to write ‘crickets’, as I couldn’t be completely sure whether or not I had actually heard the sound of crickets, or whether I had heard something that sounded to me like crickets but was actually something else, or whether or not the two were even different experiences.
My installation series Words in Trees is an explicit attempt to deal with the issues Manfred’s score raised. A word, the letters of which are made of bread, are hung in a tree like a mobile. As they turn in the breeze and are disturbed by hungry birds and other small creatures, the letters constantly rearrange themselves, reconfiguring semiotic meaning and visual form.
Time and the elements eventually not so much destroy as reconstitute the work, dispersing the material further into space in the stomachs of animals which is later excreted elsewhere, and breaking down – degrading into the earth as parts of the letters fall to the ground. Singular actions dissolving into the world through the actions of other forces: other people, birds, the weather, etc, but nothing is ever destroyed, only mutated, changed, dissolved – language back to words, phonemes, pictograms, and sound combinations – undermining that paltry tool (to misquote or paraphrase I can’t remember who) with which we order a pizza, as well as beg for our lives.
your words in my mouth
my mouth in your words
my words in your mouth
your mouth in my words
(repeated many times)
– RS