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
The kernel of ?M Fra* is a set of files that were generated by Marco Pasini’s musika software from a dataset of audio files by Ian M Fraser and myself. Like teratomas — rare tumors that can sprout fully formed teeth, hair, bone, or other somatic structures — the output of this system featured familiar musical figures jutting haphazardly out of a more primitive, inchoate sonic mass. They register less as hybridizations of Ian’s work and mine than as para-musical found objects: stylistic markers from the corpus of royalty-free techno music used to train musika are audible, distended and compressed by the opaque compositional logic of the generative adversarial network, while the timbral dimension was characterized by a fuzzy indefiniteness that gave the impression of distance, that the sound was partially inaccessible due to the interposition of some occluding medium, never fully present but merely overheard in its state of virtual elsewhereness. These files were subjected to various source separation tools, each of which imposed its own spectral gestalt. Although the term source separation implies a genealogical protocol, a retrograde movement toward earlier, antecedent elements, the encounter between the musika products — a sonic object generated holistically rather than by summing discrete instrumental tracks — and the source separation algorithms yields novel entities, false histories ontologically posterior to that of which they are the putative “source.” By recombining stems from different source separation methods, the pattern recognition function of the various machine listening paradigms is subverted: new patterns emerge as a result of the juxtaposition of non-complementary stems, while reciprocal regions are riddled with gaps and spectral remainders.
- RMF
musika by Marco Pasini
demucs by Alexandre Défossez
RAVE by Antoine Caillon
Mastered by A.F. Jones
No Please Stop Don’t
No please stop don’t
please stop no please
stop no don’t stop
please no stop please
no stop don’t no
please stop no stop
don’t please no
stop please no don’t
stop please stop no
please no stop
don’t stop no please
stop please stop
stop no stop don’t
no don’t no stop
don’t please don’t
no stop don’t no
please no stop no
don’t please no stop
stop please don’t
no please no
stop no don’t no
please stop no
please no don’t no
don’t no stop please
no don’t please no
stop please stop
don’t no please no
don’t stop please no
stop no please don’t
stop don’t please no
please stop don’t
please don’t no stop
stop don’t please
no stop please no
don’t please no
stop please don’t no
no don’t no stop
please don’t stop
no please don’t
no please stop
stop don’t please
stop no don’t
please don’t no
no stop don’t
no please don’t
please stop
don’t stop please
don’t no please
please no
don’t no stop please
stop no don’t stop
don’t please stop no.
Need Some Bright Turn
Need some bright turn
turn need some bright
turn need some
some bright need
need turn bright
turn bright some need
some bright some turn
need turn some
some need some bright
some turn need turn
bright need turn bright
bright turn need some
need bright
turn some bright
need bright turn some
turn some need
some turn some need
some need some
turn some turn
bright turn
need turn need
some bright turn
need some bright need
some need some
need turn bright some turn
need bright need
need turn bright
some bright some
need some turn
bright need some
some need
bright need
bright some need turn
turn need bright
turn need
turn bright some need
bright need turn some
bright some bright turn
turn need some turn
some bright
need turn
some bright need turn
some turn
need turn
need bright need turn
need some need turn
turn some
turn
bright some bright
bright turn need
need some need
some need turn bright.
Upon Looking At It
Upon looking at it
it at upon looking
at looking it upon
it looking at
it at looking
upon at looking it
it at
it upon it
looking at it
looking at
upon at it looking
at looking upon
upon it
upon it at looking
upon at looking
it looking at upon
upon looking
at it looking
at it upon
at upon at
at it
it looking
upon it upon
at upon looking
looking upon
upon it at upon it
looking it at upon at
it upon looking at
at it at upon
it looking at upon at
at upon it at
looking upon it at upon
upon looking at
it looking upon at it looking
looking upon at upon it
at looking
it looking it
it looking
it upon
looking at it upon
at it upon looking at
looking it looking
at looking it at
upon it looking
upon looking upon it
at upon it looking it
looking at upon at looking
looking upon at upon
at it upon it
upon it looking it
at it looking upon
at looking.
Yes You Have To
Yes you have to
have you to yes
to yes have you
you yes to
have yes to have
you yes to you
have you yes
have yes to
you yes have to
yes to you have
have yes you to
you yes to have
you to have yes
yes to you have
to you to yes
yes have yes
to you have you
yes you to you
have to you
to have to you
yes you yes to
have you yes
you have to yes
have you have yes
have yes to
you yes to have
you have yes
to you to
have you to have
have yes you
to have to yes
yes you to
have yes
to have yes
to you to
yes you have you
yes have
you yes to you
have yes have
yes you to you
have to yes you
have you have
yes have yes you
yes to you have you
yes have to you
to have yes
to have you
have to yes
you to you have
yes have to yes to
you have
have yes you to.
I’m So Very Mad
I’m so very mad
so mad I’m
mad so I’m very
very I’m so very so
mad I’m mad
I’m very so mad
very mad so I’m
mad very so
so mad I’m very I’m
mad I’m so very
very so
I’m so I’m
so I’m very I’m
mad so
so very mad
mad I’m so
so I’m mad very
I’m mad so I’m so
so very I’m very so
so I’m so very so
mad I’m mad so
I’m very
mad I’m so I’m
so mad I’m mad
very mad so
I’m very so
very so I’m
so mad very
very I’m so I’m
so mad so
so very mad
so very so I’m mad
I’m so mad so very
I’m very mad so mad
I’m mad
so I’m mad
I’m very so I’m
mad so
mad very
I’m very
so mad I’m very
so very I’m so very
mad I’m very so
so I’m
I’m
very so mad am very
very mad I’m very so
so very mad very I’m
mad I’m mad I’m very
mad I’m so mad so
very so very
mad so very I’m so.
Have Been Going Again
Have been going again
going again been have
been have going again
have been have going
been going have going
again going have been
been have going been
going been going have
have going have been
going have been have
going been again have
have again been going
been have going have
have been have been
been going been have
been going been going
going have going have
have going been
been have going again have
going have been going
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been again going have
again going have going
have been again.
What happens when the ear is presented with ten independent melodic lines? Or twenty? Or a hundred? In a series of sonic-perceptual experiments over the past few years, I’ve found that beyond about eight independent melodic lines, we lose the capacity for perceptual discrimination and begin to hear nothing but mush. But if we go further still (between about 20 to 50 lines) one of two things happens: either we hear more mush (I.e., noise), or something clicks and the ear begins to gestalt things into groups. Et voilà: melodic-like shapes begin to emerge from the morass.
Our auditory systems are constantly doing this kind of analytical work. They do it every time we hear a phoneme or a note, for example, by fusing the many spectra into a cognizable thing. We also do it when we listen to music, separating out the various layers (drums, bass, guitar, and voice in rock music, for example).
Even so, I am surprised every time it happens: when going beyond about 20 lines yields something new, something with a kind of cognizable shape. Usually in a way that’s quasi-improvised (and using some kind of pitch set or simple harmonic motion), the shift from ten incoherent lines to the uncanny popping Gestalts of 40 lines takes my breath away. When it happens. It often does not, and I end up with something ragged and ugly that I erase immediately. Part of what I’m working on now is understanding what works and what doesn’t. The little audio piece in this Lateral Addition issue was my first ever attempt with this compositional process. (I recorded it in my lockdown living room on the 2nd of April, 2020.) Since then, I’ve done many other pieces, and I have advanced the process quite a bit, but there’s something about the freshness of this first attempt that I still find perceptually thrilling.
In the version here, I’ve attempted to make something out of the little fragment of 20+ independent melodic lines. My friend and collaborator Jim Sykes plays wonderfully chaotic drums over the thing.
I see this attempt as part of an approach to music composition (and to music generally) that I call perceptualism. The claim of perceptualism (and I will elaborate on this soon in various places) is that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. This is so both in terms of making music (composition, performance, etc.) and theorizing music. But what do I mean when I say that music is divorced from questions of perception? Surely musicians care about nothing other than how the sound they produced is perceived? And surely academic types do nothing but try to explain how music is perceived and how it affects listeners? To some extent, yes, these assumptions are true. But we also know that historically Western music has had a deeply idealist or even mathematical thrust. Pythagoras’ hammers were merely abstractions rather than sounding bodies. The birth of “modern” instrumental music ca. 1800 also traded primarily in abstractions: of pure and organic form. The listener is often less than an afterthought.
I propose a perceptualist music: an approach to music making that engages questions of auditory perception directly.
I said that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. What I have in mind can be expressed if we split that history into several trajectories.
If we take these three trajectories as broadly paradigmatic of the main poles of Western music history, we see that perception is not an issue.
There was a moment in the 1960s and 70s when Western music took a near perceptualist turn. Buoyed by ethnographic analyses of non-Western music (especially East African and Indonesian music), the composer Steve Reich, the music ethnographer Gerhard Kubik, and the psychologist Albert Bregman simultaneously and independently developed Gestalt (or Gestalt-like) theories of perceptual grouping in music. Similar ideas, perhaps less ethnographically-oriented, are evident in work by Maryanne Amacher and James Tenney.
My compositional work takes stock of this moment in music history, trying to recuperate it and radicalize it. All I really want to do, at least at this stage, is to make music that sounds genuinely interesting. No theorization can produce interesting-sounding music, but at the same time I feel that we have tried too long to make interesting-sounding music without sufficient theorization. Beginning on a perceptualist footing is, I believe, a step in one possibly fruitful direction. We have many possible places to look in the past to help us, should we wish to. If not, we can continue making music that either offers itself nakedly, or is totally indifferent, to the listener. (The third option, which I believe is possibly the one taken by many interesting composers today, is to intuitively find some middle-ground. But intuition may have run its course.)
I don’t think I have succeeded in any very substantial way with this study, and I recognize the mismatch between the grandiose claims of this text and the slightness of the music. That said, perceptualism is not one thing, and I see this LA posting as an invitation to further creative exploration in this area.
- GS
The following audio-work is my first attempt of a sound (or tuning in) meditation, without using verbal language. I have been looking for ways to reduce discursive elements as much as possible for such a practice, as I am in an environment where most of the people around me have a different mother tongue.
I also think a sound meditation is both an empirical and intimate experience, and I often struggle to find the right terminology conveying my own auditive experiences.
This piece is called « Tuning In » as it is meant to be an introduction to a solo violin program I am releasing as an album next year. Before the music starts I wanted to propose a moment for the listeners at home to « clean their ears »* from daily life’s rumble (I am speaking from a city-life perspective), so they can be receptive to music again.
At first, I wanted to use sea sounds entangled with violin fragments. But two « technical » issues occurred to me : I don’t live close to the sea, and I am not a skillful field recorder.
I then tried to recreate a seascape with tools I felt comfortable with: a violin, a bow and a laptop.
*I recommend listening to this track with headphones, taking the time to adjust the volume as necessary.
- CL
In 2019 I began composing a series of pieces based on permutations of musical pitches. Starting with eight numbered pitches, I created a few simple rules and began sketching out “riffs” or — if you want to be fancy about it — “tone rows”. There are two voices and the music is primarily in octaves, although at certain points the “algorithm” flips and new pitch relationships are established. Eight pitches allow for 40,320 possible sequences. An alternate version of this piece might be to play through every possible permutation. It would take some time to get through them all, so it might be better to just imagine it. The present recordings were made with electronic oscillators, but this music could theoretically be performed on any two instruments.
- NH
Schema I-IV individual tracks in playlist
Schema III
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wood, water, stone, metal
some questions:
working with objects in states of transformation, something moving or being moved slowly toward becoming something else, how do we listen to industrial and elemental entanglements?
places understood as nature are often sites of intervention. when and where does an ethical aesthetics of intervention begin and end?
in a coastal forest after it burns, at an oxygenated lake being overgrown by algae,
outside a cement plant at the edge of a quarry, what sense of duration do we perceive?
what changes occur when we listen within and when we listen without?
a note:
a background in percussion and improvisation informs my approach to field recording and working with sounding objects. this work is both documentation and interaction.
kevin corcoran, 2022
In March 2021, after two silent years of pandemic, I began collecting chants from around the world for my new acousmatic work. Exhausted by the long period of isolation and lack of contact, my artistic goal with this project was to bring together the voices of people from different countries, cultures and religions and unite them in my musical composition. In the promotional video I posted on my social media channels, I asked for audio recordings with a smartphone and received 26 songs that I used as source material for the piece. The audio files ranged from intimate solo recordings made in a bedroom, to polyphonic folk songs and chants professionally recorded in a studio, to songs accompanied by various instruments. As I listened to the recordings, I realized that my task as a composer was to find ways to connect the voices that were recorded in different acoustic environments, with different keys, tempos, and languages, and to create a sound world in which they could all coexist. Considering the time in which the recordings were made and the work was composed, I consider this piece a collective prayer, hence the title ლოცვა (Lotsva).
The first version of the piece premiered in Oslo on September 9 and subsequently toured other Norwegian cities and international festivals. In the meantime, I kept receiving new recordings, so I added a new contribution from a different country at almost every performance. The final version of the piece was presented at Kulturkirken Jakob as an 8-channel sound installation as part of VoxLAB VårFEST.
- MG
Mastering: Balint Laczko
Format: 2D Ambisonics / Binaural
Duration: 16 minutes
Year of composition: 2021
Commissioned by Ny Musikks Komponistgruppe
Contributors:
Annie Björkman, Sweden
Aine Eva Nakamura, Japan
Heidi Skjerve, Norway
Line Souza, Brazil
Gyrid Nordal Kaldestad, Norway
Nigar Gahramanova, Azerbaijan
Åshild Hagen, Norway
Katy Pinke, Israel
Supriya Nagarajan, India
Zosha Warpeha, USA
Silva de Waard, Netherlands
Zoe Perret, France
Verena Merstallinger, Austria
Diego (surname anonymous), Argentina
Tamo Nasidze, Georgia
Falk Rößler, Germany
Ensemble IALONI, Nino Naneishvili, Georgia
Elvic Kongolo Birkebein, Congo
Małgorzata Olejniczak, Poland
David Zurabiani, Georgia
Sajidah Ahmed, Bangladesh
Andrea Silvia Giordano, Italy
Balint Laczko, Hungary
Marija Astromskaitė, Lithuania
Diana Serrao, Portugal
Christopher Manning, US
this computer generated sound is the simulation of something i don't know
- TU
During the month of November pantea and Leonie engaged in a daily conversation. The artists never met each other in person, but had gotten an impression of one another during a presentation and short conversation online.
A one-hour track traveled back and forth between Tehran and The Hague - the artists took turns adding audio fragments to fill this hour. Bits of conversations, field recordings of the surroundings, special moments and the mundane regularity of daily life, thoughts that cross their minds. pantea underlined these elements with the Tar, and Leonie with a Fender Stratocaster and an original 1950s National Slide Guitar. The track could be filled in chronologically or out of order, vertically or in layers horizontally, in order to produce a tapestry of daily life.
November
Act 1: Roggeveenstraat 180, The Hague, Kitchen
Act 2: Soundwalk, from Golshandoust to Fadak Park, Tehran
Act 3: Community Garden “Het Welpje”, The Hague
Act 4: Construction site in Narmak and home in 92nd Square, Narmak, Tehran
Act 5: Suezkade, The Hague
Act 6: Fadaiyane Eslam Park soundwalk with Sonic Tehran group, Tehran
Act 7: Tram 1 from the Peace Palace to Delft
Act 8: Delft Station
Act 9: Gardening in Lavasan, close to Latyan dam lake
Act 10: Apartment Roggeveenstraat 180, The Hague
Act 11: Driving from Pasdaran Street to Narmak, Tehran
Act 12: Corner Roggeveenstraat/Van Spijkstraat, The Hague
Each act represents a place or path in each city where the narrative was recorded. The locations are visualized in these maps: Tehran, The Hague
In 2017 I wrote a piece called Constructed Objects. The piece was the first in an ongoing project of imagining composing or making music as a sort of non-linear sculptural/conceptual project. I wanted to envision sounds as if they were material concepts (even found objects) in space that interrelate, resonate, and co-mingle in rooms. I have both ideas of assemblage or montage here as well as modular constructions.
I then revisited this idea in 2020 with Correspondences. In that project, I wrote a very simple text score based on the concepts I was thinking about in photographic assemblage sculptures I was creating. Each object type in my sculptures was imagined as a rough concept, and each concept would have a hypothetical/theoretical corresponding sound. I then sent the score out to some collaborators to create both sonic and visual realizations. Correspondences helped me realize that I needed all my visual works to have a corresponding sound world and vice versa.
This piece I’m now presenting is the continuation of that whole project. As this venue for sharing is a place for text and sound, I developed a simple text score similar to Correspondences and now have the opportunity to realize the concepts with words and sound rather than objects or images.
///////////////////
And so the stories here are the real objects. They are performative, a form of verbal art. Attention to their formal properties entails a kind of ethnopoetics—not in the usual sense of analyzing the poetics of a non-Western culture, but rather those of a strange mirror, reflecting and distorting the dominant discourses imploding inside an empire.
/////////////////
Once even a private memory circulates—as utterance, narrative, discourse—it becomes social. It escapes ownership and becomes a living, growing, changing thing. Then even those who didn’t have the original experience can still take in and “have” the memory, absorb it as a kind of inner speech—and can alter it, transform it, let it express new, latent meanings that outrun and distort the transparent sense of the original experience.
It is completely discouraging to hold a word in sight, and see it spin around, pair with others, join a constellation, like a string of beads; in fact it escapes you like a ball on a playground; others play with it cheerfully, but what are they playing at, what’s their game? It’s a mystery.
An implied space of permutation. To fashion a space out of lines of thread. Rotating the object time and again to reveal the same object in different orientation. Rolling the thread object like dice to see what results. If the cuboid is rendered via thread, it can even be folded to permit further permutations and renderings.
The Lushei, neighbors of the Mara, believe that earthquakes are caused by the people who live in the lower world shaking the ground to see if anyone is still alive up here. When an earthquake occurs, the Lushei run out of their houses and shout, “Alive! Alive!” so that those below will know, and stop the shaking.
Libraries.
Rivers of living water are to be poured out over the whole world, to ensure that people, like fishes caught in a net, can be restored to wholeness.
Noise has an inchoate shape like weather does – we may measure it but its movements extend beyond any identifiable cause. Noise exceeds its own identity. It is the extreme of difference. Noise is the non-knowledge of meaning, the by-product of economies.
a rock false mansion immediately evaporated in fog which imposed an edge to infinity IT WAS stemming from stellar IT WOULD BE the worst CHANCE Falls the feather rhythmically suspended from the accident to bury itself in original foams not long ago as far as his frenzy leapt to a top withered by the same neutrality of an abyss NOTHING of the memorable crisis or it was the event
There is a beach in Empire, Michigan; one of many. The sand of the beach has been eroded away in recent years by strange weather and different water levels. Now on the beach there is an exposed wall of pure gray clay. The erosion of these beach faces makes room for ‘wildly-out-of-place’ tree species like Mountain Ash or White Cedar.
Senga Nengudi’s Water Compositions.
In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.
In the plain weave, this intersecting of warp and weft takes place in the simplest possible manner. A weft thread moves alternately over and under each warp thread it meets on its horizontal course from one side of the warp to the other; returning, it reverses the order and crosses over those threads under which it moved before and under those over which it crossed. This is the quintessence of weaving.
Tarkovsky’s concept of time-pressure is like a meteorological time-front that propagates from shot-to-shot and throughout the film, or a cardiopulmonary time-pulse that thrust against the arterial walls of the scenes, bringing temporal oxygenation to the shots and overall meaning to the film-form.
For his book, The Americans, Robert Frank took over 20,000 photographs. 83 were published for the book.
The Robert Venturi designed house known as the Vanna Venturi house (built for his mother) was built between 1962-1964 in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. The house is an early example of what would come to be known as post-modern architecture. Within the architecture is housed a sort of ‘unity of duality’. Venturi writes: “I like elements which are hybrid rather than "pure," compromising rather than "clear," distorted rather than "straightforward."... I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim duality.”
The lithium mines in the Atacama desert in Chile provide a quarter of the world's lithium market. The stark mines provide an image of both grid and gradient amongst an arid landscape. The reason of so-called human ‘needs’ are juxtaposed upon an irregular pattern of pools of changing color. The extraction process uses immense amounts of water which lead to a shortage amongst indigenous communities as well as significant biodiversity loss.
Fernand Deligny created a commune for and spent a good deal of his life working with autistic children. He developed a practice of tracing their movements through their lived environments. These tracings were recorded by members of the commune and were eventually dubbed ‘wander lines’.
Due to our visual orientation toward the solid, we often forget, neglect, or dismiss the fact that the eye has a profound biological, historical, and cultural relationship with the liquid. The eye is, like the rest of the human body, made up primarily of water. The mechanics of sight depend on two liquid humors: the aqueous humor and the vitreous humor, which, respectively, nourish the eye and help it maintain its shape.
- MEW
for four gourd instruments and EBows
For over ten years I’ve been designing self-built devices to produce my own experimental soundworlds. These instruments often re-purposed found materials and used contact microphones or magnetic pick-ups as their primary form of amplification. The focus of these instruments was often on producing micro-sounds and sustained tones that were an acoustic equivalence of electronic oscillators.
A few years ago I was on a fellowship at Harvard University and had some limited access to a wood-shop – which happened to be run by Walter Stanul, who had a lifetime's knowledge of building and playing acoustic instruments. One of the things I was interested in developing was moving away from electronic amplification to see if I could make instruments which used the principles of analogue modular synthesis but were realised in the acoustic domain. Inspired by the work of composers Walter Smetak, Tony Conrad and Eliane Radigue – I imported a number of dried large gourds from California and experimented with different methods of converting them into sound objects by attaching different strings, membranes and cavities. What I ended up with was a family of nine instruments – some of them using traditional strings re-purposed from a cello or sitar and others using non-conventional “found” materials like tomato slicers, springs or metal tines. The instruments are then placed on custom stands and activated with ebows and “preparations”. A concert for these incredibly quiet instruments involves several of them, played with ebows; building up microtonal chords and modulations affected by the resonance of the space and preparations which I place on the surface of the instrument. In "Necropolis", I invited my long-time collaborator and friend Richard Youngs to play the gourds with me outdoors, in preparation for an upcoming solo concert I had been invited to play in Rome. I wanted to test out how these instruments would sound when played and recorded outdoors but was afraid that due to their low volume their audibility would be masked by the general hum of the city. We chose carefully then, a place and time, where we hoped for not too much external interference. In this recording you hear pretty much everything that took place that day. Recorded around ten am on a Sunday morning at Glasgow's famous necropolis, sitting on top of the city, we were pleasantly surprised by the balance we managed to achieve between the voicing of the instruments and their surroundings.
Richard did a very minimal "actuality" edit of the proceedings -intentionally revealing our discussion and the clunky sounds of us “searching” for chords (all by ear and experiment). Rather pleasingly the recording also features the sounds of “chance” interventions; sounds that would not ordinarily be present in a typical studio environment. One observes the jet engines of passing aircraft, the footsteps of dog walkers and the comments of passers-by; including one local who said to Richard- "not trying to listen out for the deid are you?"
July 2022
- LF
Program
Preludes, I-IV (0:00-2:56)
I. Prelude I
II. Prelude I
III. Prelude I
IV. Prelude I
Fantasia 1 & 2 (2:57-4:31)
Toccata, I-II (4:32-7:22)
I. “Standard-speed”
II. “Half-speed”
Fretless piano three hands (7:23-10:06)
Fretless piano eight hands (10:07-11:32)
Tuning break
Finale (selected variations) (12:32-14:13)
Performance and composition by Sam Sfirri.
Recorded Summer 2020 and Spring 2021, composed Fall 2021.
Mastered by Taku Unami.
Sam plays a Crown grand piano (150cm) with Capo D’Astro Bar and uses a Marantz PMD221.
Recent piano work by Sam Sfirri on the Madacy Jazz label:
I have been carrying pocket journal notebooks with me for a few years. Plain layout, never spiral, soft cardboard cover. Reading across them I revisit situations, occurrences and thoughts from specific moments back in time. Through what I had written down then, I can see where I was and when, who I was, what there was; and how it all resonates with my current being. But the value of the journals lies in what they enable directly: to experience time and space through a particular level of attention that unfolds certain aspects of reality. As in listening. I go to a cafe and write down whatever comes to my mind, whatever goes through my ears, whatever calls out my perception in a certain moment. I sit down, and I wait. Then something turns on, a detail. In my memory or in situ.
Attention highlights the continuity between the parts, and discreet elements appear together as a whole. Or is it rather that there’s only one single essence with infinite variations and infinite reappearances? Revisiting the journals, I noticed remarkable connections between something happening at a time in a specific place, and something else taking place a few months later, in a different town. In one of the notebooks there’s a list:
1/ Hotel in 2ème arrondissement, fire alarm. [4, 9, 10]
2/ 13 rue de la Lune. [3, 5, 6, 7, 8]
3/ Calle de la Luna, 14. [2, 5, 6, 7, 8]
4/ Hotel in Madrid, fire alarm. [1, 9, 10]
5/ Someone at the floor landing at the apartment building in Marseille. [2, 3, 6, 7, 8]
6/ Someone at the floor landing at the hotel. [2, 3, 5, 7, 8]
7/ A familiar face at rue des Rosiers in Paris. [3, 2, 8]
8/ The same face at Réformés square in Marseille. [3, 2, 7]
9/ Fire on the side of the road while driving towards Sainte-Victoire. [1, 4, 10]
10/ Fire around Marseille. Red sky. Smoke and ashes in the air for a week. [1, 4, 9]
11/ A musician’s house. [12, 13]
12/ Take away food on Ralph Av. [11, 13]
13/ A photo. [11, 12]
Same elements, different contexts.
As if, as we change, we keep our gaze directed towards the same thing.
There’s a level of experience that slips away from linguistic convention, and that belongs to the unnamed territory of intuition and acceptance. When encapsulated into words, the experienced material becomes something else. It gets reduced. Fades away.
Through the lines I can see something that I cannot name.
By a sequence of events, the last three numbers on the list resulted in a translucent spherical polyhedron ending up in my hands. If set at the right angle, when rays of light go through it, their colour spectrum is revealed and projected on walls and any other surfaces around. One can also look through it and see a multifaceted vision of the world. It came with a name: “present ball”.
My thoughts combined into an object.
There are also pitches and frequencies written down throughout the pages of the notebooks, as well as descriptions of sounds. I went through recordings and materials that I have collected mostly this year. Along with some of the frequencies from the notebooks, I assigned a sound to each element of the list. And then made combinations following the numbers from the list.
The piece that follows is a reading of the journals, where reading is listening, and not decoding. It’s also a method to avoid human agency in the compositional process, and instead, let the inscrutable logic of the facts be the organisational factor.
- CdA
Northampton, MA
One afternoon in May 2021, amidst rising temperatures and vaccination rates, I went to Child’s Park with my wav recorder. That week, I was feeling stuck and unsure of what to do with my free time and creative projects. I chose the park because it was a place where activity concentrated, which I had noticed during my frequent visits there that spring. Individual people and groups posted up on the grass at sufficient distances from each other to afford some sense of safety, comfort, and privacy, values which everyone’s body language and choice of grassy spot seemed to assert. However, the intention to perceive or even participate in an interaction was also an implication of our choice to visit a public park. Located inside a triangle created by two relatively busy streets and one somewhat busy one, there was plenty to hear. I went to the park feeling open to an encounter.
I am interested in the impulse to document a particular time and place, the special sausage casing that a recording creates around the events that fill it*, and the independence (but not complete separateness) of the recording from the intentions of any of the actors documented within it, including the recordist.
Field recordings are often situations in which multiple actors who don’t share the same goal co-create a work together. This encompasses a huge ethical range. Sometimes, these misalignments, conflicting goals, and power struggles are audible in the recording.
I am attracted to field recording because of its potential for openness, within very strict boundaries of time and space. Openness to coincidence; the result is not (cannot be?) predetermined. I want to treat turning on the wav recorder as a welcoming gesture.
There’s also a certain honesty that recording affords, which draws me to it. The recording is really what happened to the microphone. You’ll have to decide whether or not to trust me when I say I didn’t edit it at all. It feels vulnerable, and I’m honored to share that with you.
- SS
* Gabi Losoncy, Security Besides Love Part II (2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDDMqvGNN4A
These little piano pieces are a selection of 27 of a large catalog of similar fragments that I have been collecting over the past couple of years. In January of 2020, I started to go through hundreds of hours I had amassed of mostly useless recordings of myself playing piano since I was a teenager. I was looking for bits of interesting music in this mass of recordings, which mostly consisted of learning simple songs or some rudimentary and often pretty silly improvisations. I have never really considered myself a piano player and these recordings document the large part of my time spent at the keyboard. Around this time my computer also crashed, and when I recovered what I could, my pirated version of Ableton Live from 2008 no longer worked, so I begrudgingly started using Logic Pro (also pirated) to do music and audio stuff on my computer. I continued listening through these long recordings, cutting out little gestures that were mysterious or compelling for whatever reason. When the coronavirus lockdown began a couple months later, this became the only kind of musical attention I could sustain, and I spent a lot of long nights listening and collecting.
I guess in Ableton, when you drag the right side of a clipped segment of an audio file to the right, the segment extends with the original audio, so you’d hear what came after the clip in the original recording. But in Logic, or at least whatever setting I had it on, dragging the right side of a clip in the same way just loops the clip. This seems very unhelpful, except for that the first time I stumbled upon this, it so happened that the clip was one of these little 15-second piano segments, and the final chord or sonority transitioned to the first in a way that made me hear the entire passage as an interesting phrase or semi-full idea. The idea stayed interesting to listen to for about three or four repetitions, and then started to feel overly mechanical. For the first time in listening to these recordings, it felt like there was something with at least a vague sense of musicality. So this became my way of working through everything: over the past couple of years have listened back to (I think) all of the long recordings and have made a hundred or so of these little ideas that repeat a few times and usually last around one minute, identifying each of the fragments with the letter ‘e’ at the beginning of the file name, which doesn’t stand for anything.
But still, I don’t really know what these are or why I like them. One thing is that I like listening to these long recordings with an ear towards finding these repeatable semi-ideas from the sheer continuity of a mostly-unconscious improvisation. And then, having found something, figuring out how long the idea wants to be before it’s repeated, a natural cadence point, the relationship between that point and the “beginning” of the idea, and, secondarily, how many times it can be repeated before it starts to feel very loopy and mechanical. Some of the little fragments I am actually kind of impressed by, and it makes no sense that they actually came out of me, especially because I have no memory of playing any of these. Being much more “musical” than a lot of the “music” I’ve been interested in making over the past few years, this process has been a nice way to remember that I do really love “musical” music, making it and listening to it and thinking about it. This has also given me the chance to spend a bunch of time transcribing some of the fragments. Transcription was one of my earliest ways to love music, transcribing drum parts to Smashing Pumpkins songs when I was a kid or saxophone solos and choral music as I got older. It turns out that I still get a lot of joy out of listening to tiny slivers of music over and over and over again.
Through transcription, it’s also been interesting to notice what’s happening in these fragments musically that might have made them catch my ear. As you’ll see if you check out the transcriptions shared here, most of these are based in some kind of modal exploration of three scales that involve five black keys on the keyboard: Db major, B major, and F# major. This is pretty obvious, I guess, but because I’m not a pianist, playing around in these three modes allows me to think about the movement of voices, textures, and rhythmic interest between the hands while mostly constraining the modal possibilities because my hands sort of know where to be. So, because of the mostly frictionless feel of modal movement between, say a Gb Lydian space and a Db major space, the interest in a lot of these fragments might come from a single fortuitously placed chromatic tone. In a short idea where Db major is the center of gravity a single D-natural, maybe as part of a Bb major leading to an Eb minor, can provide what minimal harmonic density to make the idea feel like more than just twinkling, consonant gladness. Of course, all of these descriptions are coming much after the fact: none of these fragments appeared as themselves while I was playing through, and that hypothetical D-natural might as well have been a slip of the finger.
Listening to this stuff with a wide frame of hindsight also allows me to hear a kind of ghostly trace of all the piano music that I’ve been interested in learning to play over the past ten years. This is all quite amateurish hacking, but there are a few of these “e”s from I think around 2018, when I was plucking through some Bach two- and three-voice keyboard pieces. I can hear these somewhat baroque-sounding gestures (trills and certain kinds of arpeggios) in some of the fragments here, albeit filtered through hands that can only approximate them as gestures anyways. And there are a few from when I was checking out a bunch of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk transcriptions, although I don’t think that comes through in my playing. And there’s a bunch from a period of obsession with Brahms, which was sparked by reading something that described this one particular chord in a late piano intermezzo of his as some kind of “consolation” for having a basically unsatisfying life. After reading that, I spent a year or so learning that intermezzo, either because I thought that idea was bullshit or because I too wanted some consolation. Anyways, if that influence shows up at all, it’s in the more recent segments (not that they’re in order here) where the two hands are playing in a woozy 2:3 pattern and the right hand is doing these diatonic sixths in whatever key: for example, “ej 0621 10.” I guess the most obvious trace-influence is Satie, whose music was how I learned piano in the first place, starting at age seventeen. I’d want to say that the influence is from his later repetitive étude-like absurdist pieces rather than the saccharine earlier music that he’s more well-known for (maybe “e” stands for étude?). But then again I guess these “e”s are also a bit saccharine in their own way. That’s fine.
I’m happy to share these in this way, all laid out and kind of unmusically over-described, as is my preference. I still have vague ideas about ways for these specimens to come to life somehow: as a source for future collaborations, or arranged for some kind of brass and wind ensemble, or sampled, or used in some other way (feel free). For now though, just a long, neat row of these little shells of possible music in a display case.
- DB