enter these starved and broken pieces

I don't know I don't know I don't know. Managing to forge a "whole" work out of this mess, the operation keeps getting interrupted for long stretches of time. As always, the underlying intuition is that this is the whole, that there is nothing to wait for, here we are, etc. I withheld certain parts of the mix that I put together in May while at the Visual Studies Workshop, since I thought posting them would preempt any release of this "whole;" but now listening to what I had managed to put together, while taking account of what has been collected in the meantime, I know it will all change again. Or maybe I'm closer to the end than I'm letting myself admit. In any case, I've decided to post the significantly new parts of the bigger work here, given they will probably entirely change or be folded into a different continuum. Current misgivings annotated.
Possible Intro (1 min. 35 sec.)
well, even though it's intentionally clunky, for something that I've spent so much time on it's probably not an appropriate opening, especially since the pandering, sterile beat gives it the feel of a public radio PSA on monitoring your cholesterol.
It's the locality! (1 min. 33 sec.)
I love Williams' quote that art is not "putting sugar on cake." A crucial bit from the PennSound bytes. Exposition, exposition so . . . yawn? (one person has told me it's boring for those who already know Williams-- the core audience; evidence of constant my schizophrenia concerning who it's for and who will listen. But wait, it's not all sugar on cake, buddy!)
Have you ever been to Paterson? (2 min. 5 sec.)
Cloying? Also, when editing, I had a lot of trouble making the Carole Maso samples really sound like they fit; I still think they might be a little off, even though they provide some crucial connective material and diversity of voice (I found myself overusing Bob Perelman and Lytle Shaw throughout, so any chance I had to get other material in, I took it.)
Blocked (4 min. 31 sec.)
I think this section is the most successful at doing what I wanted the piece to be doing, a mix between informational and musique concrete elements. I do think that, as it goes on it succumbs to the banality of overused effects, which, while may have some place in a more live setting, I think falls a little flat here after a while. For some reason, I think the loops and delays and filter sweeps went on for so long because I wanted to get some particular sound bites in, but but by the time that they fade up into the mix, it already feels like they've been "said" on a subconscious level.

Acousmatic Ghosts

I’ve been wondering lately whether Williams’ Paterson might help me think through issues on another topic I’ve been writing on—Pierre Schaeffer’s acousmatic music and contemporary uses of the term acousmatic. Both Williams’ and Schaeffer’s work draw from the fragment, snapped out of the flow of life, and transformed in the work. The notion of the acousmatic implies that, with recorded sound you listen blindly—the lawn mower weaned of its backyard and whirled into multitimbral projections (something that the word cannot do as easily, unless all semantic and word-based elements are erased –cf. the poesie sonore of Henri Chopin, et al). Yet, with tape music, before these sounds become otherworldly, they are in the world, and the choice one makes to sample or process a sound is not an arbitrary or unmeaningful one (I once had a student who told me his abstract sound piece was composed of the recordings of holocaust survivors he found on the web; he didn’t seem to have any investment in either why he chose the samples or distorted them beyond recognition, other than that they were there and he could do it.) Contemporary, conservative acousmatic artists will claim that the referent does not matter in the pursuit of some purist idea of art. Francisco Lopez, perhaps the most anxious of these latter-day acousmatisticians, seems so put upon by the idea of significance that he goes as far as to say: “There can only be a documentary or communicative reason to keep the cause-object relationship in the work with soundscapes, never an artistic/musical one.” But it’s precisely the communicative and documentary urges that motivate both Williams and Schaeffer to create texts uniquely drawn from the world—not to reflect it, but to imagine new relations. In his essay “Hypermetrics” Sean Cubitt says, “Williams is prepared to open the foot to relativity, not only in the abstract, but in the weight of the relations between people that are concretised in words” (Writing Aloud 122). Compare Schaeffer, who old-school acousmatician Francois Bayle describes as wanting to “relate a musical object to its most general context, to the spiritual destiny of the period” by arraying “marks, blank spaces, questioning forms which, . . . designate what neither shows nor conceals, but beckons.” There is a sense that, far from lugging the reel to reels up high Parnassus, the acousmatic musician threaded his capstans to navigate the high seas of "unmusical" sound, as well as the oceanic substance of future time itself. As such, he needed to create a network of relays between the documentary source of the recordings, the present tense of composition, and the future relations such experimentations heralded. Perhaps what haunts both Schaeffer’s and Williams’ experiments is the intractability of the real, but what makes them still valid is their hypostatizing of democratic ideals in form and their openness to the potential of the future. Sean Cubitt goes on to say, “Capital’s social relations could not afford a resolution: the power of this poetry arises from its failure.” (123) Strange sentence, that. Does “its” refer to the social relations or to poetry? I guess, maybe to inaccurately quote a line I heard Charles Bernstein once deliver, red wheelbarrowing-it for the audience, “so much depends upon what you mean by failure.”

Music It For Yourself

Last weekend, the artist duo eteam "made a song out of it: concretely" with their Stadium Reverberator project. Their goal was to turn Paterson's abandoned Hinchliffe Stadium (interior pictures of which are in this Impossible Object entry) into an instrument: "Looking at the stadium from above, it reminds of a huge loudspeaker. Unfortunately this loudspeaker hasn't been used in a long time. On Saturday we will try to use this dormant possibility and trigger a composition, which will be created through knocking, jumping, scratching and clapping on the outside walls of the stadium. These sounds and movements will be captured on video and later on edited into a musical composition." I took some rough video and pictures (click on image or here) while taking a break from climbing walls, tossing chains and chunks of metal and concrete. Hopefully we'll get to see eteam's own video in the near future.

"No Ideas But In Things" Or "Under the Concrete, the Ocean"?

"No ideas but in things." The famous line, right? Nice too, but it seems to express a modernist constipation, as if the thing could not extend itself through an ideational airspace, to mingle with the airwaves as does that impossible and consummately modernist object, the radio. When you bang the poem Paterson and the city, each and against each other to hear the sound, to create radiations, to make radio . . . how do you shape this space beyond things and between things that emerges? Hopefully it's not just through the rationalized entries of the blog format, not just a my-space, that filters the resonances. The watch faces seen and sounded here (watch the video) were raw material for the sound study (listen to the other file below); they are played and processed in a way indebted to the history of musique-concrete, but they also act as a microcosm of this experiment with Paterson. The city is an instrument, while the poem acts as the score. It's kind of nice that Blogger doesn't have diacritics, because if you wanted to call this Jersey-concrete, you could French up the pronounciation, or, if not, think of the sidewalks, and the mixers that spun them during the drive up from Alpha. With Alexis Bhagat, Clark Lunberry, and Tony (all of whom we'll hear from again in later entries). Completed as part of a free103point9 Wave Farm AIRtime residency.

CLICK HERE FOR RADIOPHONIC PATERSON SOUND MIX #1