‘First and foremost, ambient poetics is a rendering. I mean this in the sense developed by the concrete music composer Michel Chion. Rendering is technically what visual- and sonic-effects artists do to a film to generate a more or less consistent sense of atmosphere or world… This rendering, like Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the simulacrum, pertains to a copy without an original.’ pp. 35
‘In Thoreau’s Walden the distant sound of bells brings to mind the atmosphere in which they resonate:
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph. (Thoreau, Walden, 168-169)
In this remarkable passage, Thoreau theorizes the medial qualities of ambient poetics. Notice how “strained”, “air” and “melody” are all synonyms for music. Thoreau is describing how sound is “filtered”-a common idea since the advent of the synthesizer, which electronically filters sound waves.’ pp. 39
Morton, T. (2007) Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press
‘Nevertheless, the stereotype contains some truth. Blue-collar jobs are seen as physically taxing, often dangerous, tedious, and, for the most part, mindlessly repetitive. A popular song of the mid-1950s, “Sixteen Tons,” by Tennessee Ernie Ford, neatly captures the spirit ‘ pp.32
Gini, Al. (2000) My Job, My Self: Work and the Creation of the Modern Individual. New York, London: Routledge.
From our lectures, the majority of examples and previous student work shown to us were inherently musical. From breakbeats used to demonstrate the various software’s routing capabilities, to a work that seemingly sampled vinyl crackle, music has been core to this specialism so far, at least as I see it.
A reference point that resurfaced for me was Sonic Youth and their self-titled debut EP. I went back to check what I thought I remembered reading in Byron Coley’s (2005) liner notes; ‘Edson’s pulsing drums and Kim’s huge bass sound hold things together while Lee runs a contact mic’d electric drill through a wah-wah pedal’. A band known for invention, this weird choice on this weird song always stuck with me. It may be an obvious contradiction, but I am interested in bringing the everyday abrasion of power tools into music, abandoning categorical purity. The uneasy balance of work’s noise and noise’s music.
Reflecting on conversations and experiences I’ve had at work, sonic touchstones. As a builder, a lot of work consists of being held inside the ribcage of building until it’s finished. An odd sonic event I remember distinctly was Metallica’s ‘Seek & Destroy’ looping in a reflective tiled hallway. The suspended, surreal sense of entrapment by Hetfield’s voice and the recurrent riffing marked me. The rising irritation among the crew. Demystifying it, a coworker’s Amazon Music playlist simply got stuck on repeat, but being forced to coexist within the song’s world, its beginnings and ends and shape rendered interminable through the way it harshly shimmered off the tiles and plaster, was undeniably affecting. This is a tonal palette I am interested in exploring and representing in my piece.
Informing this thought too, is Chat Pile, a recent discovery. Their deranged and highly postmodern aesthetic aligning the group’s work as a disarming representation of an industrial midwest horror. Drawing on the noise rock lineage of Steve Albini’s Big Black and The Jesus Lizard, as well as Nirvana’s more offbeat B-sides, much of their work concerns itself with the darkest skew of the seemingly mundane; American urban planning, homelessness, the Bible thumper.
A notable song title is ‘grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg’, referring to the infamous purple McDonalds mascot. This demonstrates their highly modern, unique brand of American Midwest malaise, and seeing the pulpy (and genuine) horror within. I love the tonal contrast this subject matter creates with the violent madness of the sound, it’s a dark, dark meld of ironic humour and deadly severity. I am not seeking to create something so brutalist or abrasively expressive, but the rawness of the group’s subject matter is inspirational to me. Also relating the specificity of a geographic region’s characteristics is something I am deeply interested in.
And so, again, I have returned to guitar. I am nagged by a voice that’s telling me this is not the project for it, but these inspirations are still formative. The larger interest I am focussing on, is an interplay between dynamic aural phenomena and the perceived real world of sound. Making music with the mundane. Most crucially, an intrinsic associative link with construction is the intrusion of its noise. How to harness that, rather than prod the listener in a way that may come off as juvenile antagonism?
I experimented with making recordings of my dad’s old belt sander, gritty and nasty sounding, and accompanying it with guitar via the two input channels on the Marshall AS50D guitar amplifier. I liked the sonic palette, but also I am concerned about colouring the working experience with a particular emotion; leading the listener too transparently, or perhaps even unintentionally. I think that darker, isolated tones are my first creative instinct, regardless of material inspiration. I think this is a quality I will have to monitor and carefully examine as I further work on this project.
guitars and belt sander (extract)
References:
Coley, B. (2005) ‘In Memory’. In Sonic Youth [CD liner notes]. EU: Geffen Records
Metallica (1983) ‘Seek & Destroy’, Kill ‘Em All [CD]. New York: Megaforce.
Chat Pile (2024) ‘I Am Dog Now’, Cool World [CD]. San Francisco: The Flenser.
In selecting our specialisms for the second year, I chose Option A: Spatialisation for Installation & Performance. At present, I would consider myself somewhat agnostic with regards to multichannel installations. I have always held a shameful, discreditably unshakeable scepticism of the gallery space. Especially in London; a city that feels oddly dislocated from the outside world, yet grossly boastful of its own significance, a narrow shim of reality. The uncomfortable intermix that’s created when the individual stimulation of each artwork meets a spatial sterility.
Taking space within a gallery is like terraforming; creating an opening to a new world inside another altogether vacuous one. I am curious to explore the possibilities of an interaction between the distal space and the enacted space, blurring the boundary between performed sound and organically documented sound.
At home in Sussex, I made ‘blank slate’ field recordings of a bank of trees in the wind, and then sheep eating cut branches with my Zoom H1n. To illustrate the difference with more movement across the stereo field, I have also included a field recording of delivery motorcycles in the rain, that I made in the summer in South Korea. Making mono and stereo versions of each recording, I found that they have wildly different effects and potential uses. With stereo information, we can parse out environments and the actions occurring within them with greater clarity as the listener. Mono recordings squash the sound, rendering less spatially distinct, and more as an artefact that could be placed in a wider work.
This is what caused me to think of the acousmatic, wondering how rigid or elastic that definition could be. Sheep eating in mono is arguably unidentifiable, it could be mistaken for wind in the leaves. Yet in stereo, the sonic event becomes more apparent, however slightly. Psychoacoustically, aural space helps the listener map what is occurring. Moreover, I don’t believe anyone could identify the source of this field recording without some guidance. Such is the elusive nature of recorded sound, and the murkiness of intention.
I worry it can be very easy to stray into an unwanted between-space when exclusively dealing with the acousmatic, where a total absence of signifying footholds brings an apathetic response. In numerous prior lectures on the topic, I have found myself listening to complex effects processing at length, wondering what more I am supposed to feel or comprehend. I am interested in the earthen, the human, the mystery gleam from within the obvious. Significantly, I feel keenly drawn to ‘less is more’, a dawning awareness. What can that mean?
Already, I find myself interested in the various nested cultural and contextual evocations that intentional source-bonding gives rise to. There could be a lot to explore there. As Denis Smalley (2007, pp. 38) states, ‘on the other hand, the kinds of spatial forms and organisation found in the natural environment could be taken on by spectromorphologies whose surface identity might appear tangential in source-cause terms. The idea of source-bonded space is never entirely absent.’ I am compelled to violate the obsession with the acousmatic veil by pursuing the facets of enacted space and aural inference.
References:
Smalley, D. (2007) ‘Space-form and the acousmatic image’, Organised Sound, 12(1), pp. 38
