Ariel's Freaky Disco

I went to see Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti last night. My big question going into the evening was: what is he going to be like as a live performer? Before-hand he was out on stage brooding and looking awkward. Dressed in white jeans and striped Russian navel shirt he aimlessly paced up and down playing anxiously with his hair. He stared vacantly at band mates as they hurriedly readied their instruments and then he stood, centre stage, rocking from one foot to the other scrutinizing the crowd face by face. His demeanor changed as soon as the music started. Singing he looked focused, and as the set progressed he relaxed and started to let loose. During one early song he removed his belt and proceeded to swing it around his head accidentally whipping his own arm. Then he took the belt and feebly lashed the monitor speakers lining the front of the stage. Returning to the mic stand, he dropped his trousers to the knee revealing baggy black under-pants rumpled up at either side to his hips. This wasn’t the first time the trousers came down either, later when asked to ‘show us your cock’, they came off again, only this time fully and permanently. He performed the final stages of the show in what could have been his pajamas - underpants and tee. He thrashed about the stage with great energy and exuberance but he can’t really dance. He was pretty inventive with the belt though, it featured throughout - done up in a noose around his neck, swung around lasso-like or just dangled between his legs. There’s no doubting his creative intelligence and originality. I suspect as time goes and he settles into this new way of doing things we’ll see more drama (and, I hope, costumes!) in Pink’s performances. His theatrics last night were a bit silly but never-the-less endearing, there was no irony; this is just the way the man gets down - like a child messing about in his bedroom when no one’s looking.

Much has been made recently of the new material and what Pink’s transition from lone bedroom recordist to live group means for his distinctive lo-fi sound. I’ve not got much to add now, skint I haven’t heard all the new album yet. Based solely on last night I’d say having a band has extended his range of possibilities. For example: though some of his old tracks have a swaggering rhythm, I’ve never danced to them. His music has always been a head-phone listen for me in part because the loose beats and less-than-metronomic playing don’t help a dancer keep time, but also because his small sound was never sufficiently enveloping. Last night, backed by a tight band and amplified over a huge sound-system I felt it and danced...

Explore the Roar

I got chance to visit Niagara earlier on in the week and so took some recordings. The first is of a quick auditory drift around an amusement arcade. The second is of the falls – I wrapped my recorder and microphone in cling film to waterproof them and took the Maid of the Mist boat with a hundred or so other tourists right up to the foot of the Horseshoe Falls.

Sound Diary #2

In Treatment Season one DVD box set - 01/06/2010 - 10/06/2010

The sounds heard are simply those made by the therapist and patient – mostly talking, and some ambient sound. For the voices the show uses the audio equivalent of a close-up shot, but when the camera pulls away to reveal the larger context of the therapist’s office, with its collection of model boats and shelves full of books, the microphone stays stolidly still. And so the dialogue is at a higher volume than the dialogue of other TV shows I’ve seen, or at least without music and significant background noise, it seems louder. You hear vocal nuance clearly – inhalations and exhalations of breath, heavy silences, breaking and broken voices, sighs and you often hear emotion affecting speech. The therapist is a professional listener and this show makes demands on the audience to attain a level of listening skill akin to his.

In this way sound contributes to one of the shows most important effects - the creation of a deep, humanist involvement on the part of the audience with therapist and patient. The ambient sound has it’s role to play here too. You hear the sound of an occasional car passing on the road outside or bird song in the nearby trees. These background sounds make the show perfect for home viewing as the ambient sounds of our own environment merge seamlessly with those from the TV set. Again, the sound functions to draw the ‘viewer’ into a very particular setting.

Music rarely accompanies the action, when patients speak about their emotions, relationships and memories there is no heavy handed music guiding our interpretation or marking moments of high drama and clinical breakthrough. There are a number of different tracks that feature as the closing credits roll, but the DVD package`s main piece is a gentle piano motif repeated slowly over the top of a warm, continuous, subtly modulating, synthesizer chord. It`s sparse, minimal and entirely appropriate for the mood of the show. Often I found myself just listening to this piece, re-living the episode`s key moments, or thinking about my own life and the parallels with the issues and emotions brought up in the session. Either way this music, empty and soothing, provides a welcome rest from the emotional intensity of the scenes.

Anempathetic film music

Last week I saw Eisenstein's Strike (1924) screened at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel as part of Early Monthly Segments' celebration of Worker's month. Given the global age of austerity we are now entering the choice couldn't of been more apposite. The film was accompanied by a live score performed by Canadian composer and experiemental muscian Allison Cameron. Cameron used a range of different instruments and sound making machines – guitar, thumb piano, effects pedal, record player, wireless radio – to create a sparse and abstract sound world - isolated notes pierced unevenly textured sheets of radio static and a broken record skipped relentlessly, its pops and crackles repeating in a rhythmical pattern that partially masked the original orchestral content. This foreboding mechanical monotony, which drove the piece forward, was accentuated by something beyond Cameron’s control - the basso continuo for the entire work was the film projector's whir. Its light, flitting drone underscored the haunted feeling evoked by the music.

The music didn’t take on the scene’s rhythms or express its emotional core. There were accidental points of convergence where sound met vision; moments where that heard could conceivably have been the sound of events seen. But for the most part the score was, in Michel Chion's term, anemapathetic, meaning it proceeded, like the broken record and vintage projector, ineluctably, undaunted and almost oblivious to the film’s unfolding narrative. There’s a dramatic scene early on in the picture: a factory machinist is wrongly accused of stealing a company micrometre. The cost of replacing the lost tool, which management cruely demands, stands to financially ruin him. His shame in unfairly shouldering this accusation and his frustration and anger at not being believed were almost unbearably intense emotions to share. This unusually ferocious intensity was, I would argue, the result of Cameron’s skilful positioning of the scene against a backdrop of profound sonic indifference. This is for me where the power of her score lay – it made you feel more strongly.

'eavesdropping on what isn't there'

David Toop in conversation with Geeta Dayal -

I think that the point is – and this is the main thread of the book, if you like – that sound has this characteristic of the uncanny, that sound is to some degree a ghost, and hence this expression in the mediumship of the listener. Sound is transitory, ambiguous in its location in space, and it’s uncertain; it lends itself to representations of uncertainty. It lends itself to feelings of dread and fear and loss and these emotional states, these extreme psychic states. It lends itself to mysticism, all these ineffable experiences. These sensations of immateriality. And so it’s a very powerful tool for musicians, but at a certain level, in social functioning or whatever, it’s perceived as being unreliable.

The way we describe reality is always through seeing and touch; seeing is believing. So listening has this negative quality, which is of course tremendously interesting. It can always have this sense of the uncanny. You can never be quite sure of what somebody has said to you. You can never be quite sure of the source of a sound, particularly when the source of the sound is hidden from you, which is often the case. We make suppositions all the time about what we hear. For that reason, sound is very important in, for example, supernatural fiction. One section of the book is focused on ghost stories and horror stories particularly from the 19th century beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, going through to all these late 19th century and early 20th century writers like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood and Wilkie Collins, and onto 20th century writers like Shirley Jackson. Sound is often a kind of portent; it’s a sign that something bad is about to happen. Very often there’s a silence, and then there's a strange sound and the bad stuff begins. It’s almost like sound is the presence of a ghost, because sound has the quality of a ghost. You know, that the sensory quality of the uncanny is mentioned by Freud in his famous essay on the uncanny. He doesn’t elaborate on sound; he just makes the point that we have these deep childhood fears. In that sense for me, the book is personal. I went back to my first memories of sound, and they tended to be very fearful. Things that go bump in the night. These hyper-acute experiences of listening – which I tend to think of as paranoid listening – in a way you’re eavesdropping on what isn’t there. It’s manufactured in the imagination but it becomes very real, in an experience of terror.

The rest of the interview is here.

Radio and Transmission Art

Chuffed to see that we arrive in Toronto at roughly the same time that this starts:

A month-long celebration of radio and transmission art including performances, installations, radio broadcasts of commissioned works on CBC radio's Living Out Loud and the Radio Without Boundaries Conference. Featured artists: Götz Naleppa and Frank Kaspar (co-presented by the Goethe Institute-Toronto), Charles Stankievech, Gregory Whitehead, Andrea Dancer, Emmanuel Madan, Anna Friz, Rebecca Singh, Erik Laar, Shannon Cochrane and many more.

I've no doubt - radio is important to Canada and Canadians. The first thing that struck me was the shear number of stations. As well as the numerous, vaguely differentiated, commercial stations, there are community stations – First Nations, & Chinese, University Stations and CBC radio 1 & 2. I’ve not encountered any pirates yet. Canadians (well, Albertans at least) seem to spend allot of time in their cars and invariably listen to their radio when they are. Radio does seem to be the ambient medium of choice out here - a couple of times I’ve come back to someone’s empty house to find a tinny radio playing to itself (like in the Gaddis novel JR). Hopefully this festival and conference will help me understand the nature and history of this love affair better.

Edmonton Sounding

The first recording was taken at Rutherford House on the University of Alberta campus - in the parlor there sits a gramophone. The second was taken five minutes away under the Waterdale bridge. And finally, there's a recording of the periodic spectacle of West Ed. Mall's fire breathing dragon.

I.T on Film Music

The excellent Nina Power turns her attention to film soundtracks:

Increasingly film music seeks to lend humanity itself a veneer of the cinematic, an eco-friendly soundtrack to dampen the fears of the antagonisms and asymmetries of everyday existence. Coupled with the painful loudness of Dolby surround sound and the brutal atonality of sounds of cinematic violence - explosions, car crashes, gun shots - the modern cinematic ear is trained for nothing less than the sickening, yet omnipresent, combination of cruelty and fake humanism that characterises contemporary life.

Glad she mentioned Shutter Island as an exception to the general 'Revenge of the Visual'. At times while watching the film I felt that the sounds were more significant and divulging than the images. Generally the music choice displays similar paternalism and philanthropy to the Golden Age of British public broadcasting discussed in this essential Quietus review.

Sound Diary #1

The Canadian Rockies 23/03/10 – 26/03/10

We followed the Maligne Lake road up to Maligne lake – It’s between seasons now so no tourists are around. The lake is completely frozen. There is a profound stillness to the place. Those sounds that are audible – the ravens shouting at each other on the other side of the lake, the pine swaying and creaking behind me are amplified by the otherwise absolute silence. Coming from the city I’m unused to this degree of quiet. It’s unsettling and reminds me of those passages in Heidegger on anxiety where he talks about those revealing but unnerving moments where there is nothing to hold onto.

I never get used to this feeling -seeing so much and hearing so little. At Peyto Lake the silence is broken by a weird intrusion. There is a wind up audio guide to the glacial formation of the mountains and lake below. I gave it a go in English and then in Japanese, the Japanese version has a short piano piece playing in the background. When the pieces finish the immediate silence was even heavier.

The great sound of the Candian Rockies at this time of year is the Spring thaw. We visited a number of falls and rivers that were, depending on environmental factors, at various stages of deliquesence. The great roars of the Athabasca and Sunwapta falls are reduced to nothing in winter. Frozen, the falls make very little sound. In Spring the water begins to forge new channels beneath the ice surface and you can hear this filtered flow sound.

At Johnstone’s Canyon the river was largely frozen, a layor of ice covered a water flow of indeterminate size and strength. In places, where the surface ice has melted away, you can glimpse the clear waters flowing underneath. Wallace Stegner’s Mountain Water with its ‘ roar that shook both the earth and me’ is not there at this time of year. The river’s sound more like mountain streams when exposed. At one point the river’s water treated the ice’s underside like a drum, hitting it repeatedly, creating an arythmic bassy thud. As well as water flow you hear a lot of dripping. Not particularly interesting or pleasant for the most part unless the dripping was in a cavern when it took on wholly new reverberant qualities.

Summer must sound completely different, louder here.

We spent a lot of time on the road. We drove the 230km from Jasper along the Icefields Parkway to Banff. This must surely be one of the most scenic drives in the world. For the most part the radio was off. We had no cassettes so the only sound in the car was the sound of the car. For those drivers distracted by the scenery and veering over to the other side of the road there is an ingenious piece of sonic technology occasionally deployed called the rumble strip. The first and only time we strayed onto the rumble strip I was shocked. The whole car reverberates and the almost pleasant hypnotic whirr of the car changes suddenly to a much more vigorous shaking. The sound, which seems to occur after the initial shake and shock, is loud. The rumble strip works via what Steve Goodman terms sonic affect, it utilizes pre-perceptual vibrational force to bring about an immediate response – attention!

Before heading to Banff we spent two nights in Jasper. The dominant sound here is that of the Canadian national freight trains moving slowly through town. The trains are exceptionally long, some of the world’s longest I’m told. Carriages are as far as the eye can see in both directions and the chain takes over 20 minutes to pass by. The freight is mixed - there are single stacked inter-modal cars, what looks like oil tankers, and wooden wagons, each is rich in its own sonorous quality. One night I got to stand next to one as it moved by. The sounds emanate from the car’s wheels pressing down on the track, this resonates in the container’s materials and reverberates through its empty space. These creaking, groaning, screeching sounds are tempered by the pulse of the labouring locomotives.

On Wednesdays and Sundays the Whistle-stop pub hosts an open mic night. We had a seat in time to hear a guitarist tuning his four guitars; he’s an excellent slide guitarist. The agenda for the evening was simple: anyone could come along and perform, if they needed accompaniment there was a house band consisting of guitar, bass, drums and Moog organ on standby. It was the house band who started things off with a few rockabilly numbers. Other local artists performing on the night were diverse – there was Willie, a stalwart of the local folk and blues scene, who played harmonica and sung, two young rappers who sung about summers in the city, several anodyne acoustic guitarists, and a local country band with soft female vocals. An influx of migrant workers from the Philippines has meant that karaoke has become more prevalent in town. Here two Pilipino lads picked up bass and guitar to give us a rock cover.

Sonic Warfare: reading notes.

Currently reading and enjoying Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare. More than anything I like the way it thinks sound in terms of vibration - terms that lie beyond the current, fairly lacklustre philosophy of sound. My intention is to engage more deeply with the book's metaphysics, particularly the idea of a virtual unsound, but for now here are some of my expanding reading notes.

Chp. 8 Sonic Affect vs Sonic Effect

What's the difference between the sonic effect and sonic affect?

First - what is a sonic effect?

It is the product of a number of researchers working out of the Centre for research on sonic space & urban environment at the University of Grenoble. Their work is distilled into the book Sonic Experience edited by Jean Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue. There are various effects – drone, ubiquity, filter and so on. But they all share the same general structure, diagrammatically the sonic effect is:

The effect is the totality of what is shown above. It is the sounding object; the environmental influences shaping and forming the sound spatially - which is the subject of audio-architecture; the positioning and speed of movement of the listening subject; and finally the cultural and aesthetic priorities that determine how a sound is interpreted. Language offers a good example of this kind of determination. Everyone who can hear can hear a word, but how you determine the meaning of that word is dependent upon your cultural upbringing. It is this last part that I have had most difficulty with - how do you rigorously think an audio-culture? Isn’t that too broad a thing to be of any use?

Anyway, what’s the difference?

Affects are immediate responses to vibrational stimuli, they precede the delineation of subject and object, phenomenological notions that the effect is grounded on.

They are the products of two differing things: sounds have effects and vibrations have affects. Vibrations may be heard, but may also be beyond the threshold of perception. And so an affect can occur without any sound. Is the term experience suitable for thinking about affect? Are affects subjectless experiences?

In Harman’s terms – affect is an ontological concept as it refers to the make-up of every being (is Goodman going to develop this idea that everything is composed of vibrations?) And effect is metaphysical in that it discusses only a particular type of being – sounds (the sonic effect is an alternative theory to the objet sonore and the soundscape). This raises the question of the possibility of sonic realism for me in an admittedly rather vague and undetermined way – how can you think sound independently of anyone hearing it?

Finally - they have different relations to causality. The effect has a situational or contextual or even occasional cause (must re-read Harman on cause). The cause of the effect is not simply the sounding object, but additionally the space it sounds in and through, the subjects positioning and the culture of the individual listener. All these factors shape and to a degree cause the effect. I’m not sure what the cause of the affect is. The affect seems to function in part by not having a cause – where’s this feeling coming from? Affects appear to dissociate from the cause. What is this process of dissociation? How is the affected implicated?

So what is Goodman’s problem with effects?

Simply that human audition is given primacy. He calls CRESSON on their correlationism. And not it seems from some ontological argument but from its inadequacy in accounting for ‘post-cybernetic warfare’, which I’m not sure I get yet. He’s right though - integral to the theory of sonic effects is the correlation between sounds and listeners. Sonic effect cannot be a realist concept. (Unless, can we think it in terms of a series of Latourian translations?) He does however like the encompassing evental structure of the effect. The way the body is implicated in the production of sound effects as much as the medium, environment, sounding object and so on. This is for him (and me) a welcome development of the outdated idea of an isolated listening subject.