In the Halls of Awaiting, ages fold over endlessly.  The only light is the clear black.  No setting off… no journey.  Movement is infinite.  There is no longer a difference between color and time.  Rub your eyes to find the environment best suited for your survival.  Steal glimpses of others’ worlds until yours finally assembles itself.  Until then, stay absent… seek comfort… remain distant….

-Mike Connelly

things used: gouache, acryllic, watercolor, collage… all 9 x 12 watercolor paper

[View with PicLens]

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Current topic:  What Does Prolific Mean?

Some bands and labels seem to crank out albums at a pace that makes listeners either race Pokemon-like to collect ‘em all, or else wonder about how much effort could possibly be put into each one. But what does being prolific mean to an artist? Or to a critic who writes about all those albums? We’ve heard from Ben Hall and Brandon LaBelle, and next week we’ll check in with Mattin. Today, writer and violinist Dan Warburton talks about what prolificness means for a music journalist.

*****

DAN WARBURTON:

“There’s too much music to listen to,” sighed my old professor Alexander Goehr at the end of one of his lectures during my first semester as an undergraduate in Cambridge. That was back in 1981 – I dread to think what Sandy would say today, not that he’s likely to be spending his retirement in leafy Suffolk surfing the web for the latest Wolf Eyes downloads.

Goehr made his gloomy remark at the beginning of the decade which saw the explosion of the new music market through the cassette underground. “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band,” wrote Mark Perry famously in Sniffin’ Glue – he might as well have added: “This is a cassette. Make a copy. And another. Now release an album.” Cassettes eventually went out of fashion (though I see they’re making something of a comeback these days), replaced by the CD-R and, more recently, the download. Perry‘s punk vision of the democratization of music has come true: now anyone can release an album. You don’t even need to learn three chords anymore – in fact, you don’t need to learn any: just hang a mic out of your window and, presto! A field recording!

Whether or not this is a good thing is another question. For those whose avowed intention it is to subvert and undermine the record industry, it’s probably wonderful news (I’ll leave it to my pal Mattin to discuss the political implications of all this in his forthcoming contribution to this discussion); for those of us who have to write on the subject and who are, for better or worse (worse, in my view) considered as reliable guides through the new music jungle, it’s nothing short of a motherfucking nightmare.

I’ve already written at length over at Paris Transatlantic (here for instance) and elsewhere on the depressing predicament I find myself in as a reviewer, faced with an ever-increasing pile of new CDs (and, happy to report, more and more vinyls), condemned to live in an eternal present tense (or tense present) with almost no opportunity – unless I decide to give up sleeping altogether – of going back to survey anything more than a tiny part of the discography of the artists whose latest offering is being channeled straight into the inner ear (yes, headphone listening is essential for almost everything that turns up in the mailbox).

How am I to approach Mike Connelly’s Failing Lights (which I’m enjoying immensely, as I type, by the way) in the knowledge that I have barely a dozen releases of his music in the collection? Does this album tie in to some other area of his work that I’m unaware of (I imagine it does)? What else should I be listening to to provide the necessary context for a review? With other artists I have, I’m ashamed to admit, more or less given up: Braxton releases arrive, are extracted as mp3s, listened to once and then consigned to the outer darkness of the hard drive (and the discs passed on – I have a dear friend whose collection proudly boasts not only the complete Braxton, but the entire discographies of Han Bennink and Peter Brötzmann, not to mention several thousand other free jazz albums).

It’s interesting that both John Olson and Mike Connelly choose the same jigsaw image when discussing the subject – Olson quoted in Ben Hall’s piece above (“they’re all puzzle pieces of the same set of trees and it all fits together but you don’t need to finish the puzzle to understand the whole thing”), Connelly in his interview with Byron Coley elsewhere in this magazine (“I’m definitely into the idea of documentation, but I also think that not every piece of it is necessary. It’s all just glimpses into the process. Especially with Wolf Eyes, we always have different tour tapes and CD-Rs and etc. A lot of times, they’re just different takes on our practices and rehearsals. I see those as interesting, and some people do want to have them all. It’s not that they’re important, in and of themselves, but it’s important that they’re there. If you get those pieces you’ll be more aware of the whole.”). But how many pieces of the puzzle do we need? And, assuming we manage to acquire the requisite number, how long will it take us to listen to them, even just once? Compared to the sprawling Wolf Eyes discography, Joe Morris‘ is quite manageable (I don’t know what the hell Phil Freeman is rapping on about, but then again, I rarely do).

It seems to me that the best thing to do is to abandon all hope of ever being able to see the Big Picture, and simply enjoy what little one manages to get hold of without worrying about where it might fit in. Working on the assumption that cream rises to the top of the bottle, I’m willing to accept that many musicians of real talent, ingenuity, technique and, yes, musicianship, will eventually come to my attention one way or the other. And even if they do fall by the wayside, it’s a fair bet that those who have discovered and appreciated their work will make it available to others online. I recently listened to an old punk / new wave cassette compilation made for me by a friend back in Cambridge (I dearly love it, so much so it made it to number 19 in my own Top Forty a few years ago) and, seeing the fragile state of the old Memorex C90, decided I ought to have the songs in digital format on the mp3 player to ride around town with. It took four hours hard surfing and three gigabytes of downloading, but, yes, I found them all – even “Hey Ho Hey Ho My Cholesterol Level Is Low” by Danny and the Dressmakers (on an EP entitled Weird Noise on Fuck Off Records – ah, those were the days). Hardly cream, I hasten to add, more like a gob of spit in saucerful of skimmed milk.

So perhaps the kids who are spending their pocket money buying up Wolf Eyes CD-R burns after gigs will one day, ten, twenty or thirty years down the road, stick them up online for us to find. If we’re all still around to do so, that is – there’s enough to worry about in the world today without moaning about having too much music to listen to. There’s always room for more, whether you like it or not, Sandy.

*****

- Giancarlo Toniutti, from the liner notes to #7 & 8

An Examination of the Catastrophe Point Series, #1 – 8

Umbrella Action is a series of essays, articles and interviews with artists working at the borders of sound and performance, by Seth Nehil.

*****

Text in regular and bold by Kiyoharu Kuwayama (K.K.)
Text in italics by SETH NEHIL
All photos by Lethe
Translations by ALAN CUMMINGS

A Catastrophe Point builds slowly, with occasional booms of cavernous metal, or small dragged objects of metal and stone in hollow sweeps across the ears. They continue in long cycles and intermittent strands. It is easy to lose one’s way among this constantly failing temporality. Dropping shards of metal clatter against a steady quiet tone. Suddenly, a series of loud tonal blasts, like a distant ship horn. Later, a burst of faraway violence and close falling pieces. Rarely, a musical tone, like a battered piano.

Did you know that the Catastrophe Point series would span across many albums when you started? Do you know how many will eventually be in the series

When I finished editing #1, I had the sense that this project would continue for a long time. And so long as there are no dramatic changes in myself or my environment, I feel that the series will continue.

Many of your works have been recorded in a Warehouse along the Nagoya waterfront. Why are you interested in these kinds of spaces? Is it something other than the acoustic signature?

In June 1999, I was asked to create some sounds for a piece by an artist who was part of a group exhibition at the warehouse. Many of the artists in the exhibition employed sound in their works, and when I walked into the space for the first time the reverberations from all of these pieces hit me as a harmonious whole. It even felt like the
 combined sound was a separate piece itself. Then, as I was walking around the warehouse to look at each of the pieces, I noticed that the sound and echoes varied depending on where you stood in the space. That got me really intrigued by the unique possibilities of this particular warehouse.
 Straight away, I got in touch with the manager and two months later the first Lethe.Voice Festival was held there. The warehouse closed down as a venue in 2003, but while it was open I was able to experiment with lots of different recording techniques. The results of these experiments can be heard on Catastrophe Point 1 and 5.

A catastrophe point is an area that expands, absorbs, encases and is self-destructing. This chain of action is a punctuated equilibrium. Everything exists within a disturbed space. We hear at the point where a vibrating surface meets a surrounding medium. Each piece looks into the crashing of waves on a distant plane, layered with the non-articulate scratching of stubborn angles. These are loosely monochrome compositions, featuring a simultaneous foreground and background, multiple frames overlaid, each existing across extreme depths.

As a consequence of my fondness for extreme echoes, it was entirely natural that I would start recording in warehouses and at construction sites. Kuwayama-Kijima’s “00/10/17″ was particularly important to me. It was recorded at the construction site
for an underground highway tunnel, in front of a huge ventilation fan. We recorded it in pitch blackness, surrounded by the deafening roar of the fan, so that we could neither hear nor see each other. In other words, each of the performers and the ventilation fan were creating sounds independent of each other.

Each performer can thus neither reject the sounds from the other performer or the environment, nor allow them to pass through the body, or reflect on them with a surface level of consciousness. I consider these means of production as a way to disrupt my focus on my own actions, to avoid rejecting anything that comes in from the external world, and to avoid overly-predetermined processes. What exists in my solo performances is a kind of thought experiment – a way to alter the form of my existence and its location through the means of sound and action.

Time and distance are invisible things.

When we try to make our impulses audible, multiple impurities and filters come between the starting point of that impulse, its progress through the body, and the creation of vibrations in the air that will deliver the impulse to another person. For example, reverberations and echoes exist between the starting point and the body. While in reality it would be impossible to completely remove these obstructions, in the realm of a thought experiment it becomes possible.

Your compositional structures are quite diffuse. Long lengths, continuous sounds, and a lack of coordinating points between sonic strata lead a listener to being lost within the pieces. Do you have goal points in mind as you work (places where each composition is headed), or ideas about global development across time?

As far as humanly possible I try to start recording without a fixed image of the completed work. The only thought I keep in mind is that it is for this series.

When I was recording in the harbour warehouse, I would load up a two ton truck with the recording equipment, my instruments and a load of old junk, which I then set up around the space so that I could immediately record any sound produced. I then started creating sounds according to how I was feeling on that day, at that particular time.

Because I chose this particular way of working, I ended up with a lot of material that I wasn’t able to use. For the recording in the Swiss underground shelter (#6 & #7), I used
 materials that I gathered locally and a violin that I had brought with me. At the abandoned power station in Scotland, I only used rubbish that had been left behind in the building.

By my own internal clock, it feels like I can concentrate for around twenty minutes when I’m listening to someone’s performance or a recording. I apply the same time scale to my own creations. When I’m editing them, for example, I don’t have any specific goal for how long they should be, but most of the finished tracks end up being around the twenty minute mark. I do have several pieces that are shorter, but compared to the other pieces their creation was governed by a specific narrative development and to me they feel very strongly intentional in their nature.

Is Catastrophe Point purely acoustic?

On a very few occasions I do actually use electronic sounds and electronically amplified materials. The materials I used on #5, for example, were particularly memorable. For the purposes of another project, I had rigged up a mic and a hundred metres of cable to pick up the sounds of the waves from a pier and then broadcast them inside a harbour warehouse. Perhaps the cable acted as an antenna because it also picked up radio traffic between ships. The raw material I used for #5 was a recording of these sounds and the echo in the warehouse space.
In addition, on #7 and #8 there are parts that have been extremely simply digitally manipulated. I don’t use many electronic sounds or digital manipulation because they seemed unnecessary for this series, but the performance of electronic sounds plays a central part in other projects.

Has there been a development of the concept or the sounds from C.P. #1 – #8? How have your ideas changed?

My own internal standards for choosing to release a work are: “is it of a higher quality than my last release?” and “does it include some element that the last work did not?” Other than those two conditions, everything else is open for destruction. Also, once I’ve finished editing, I try not to listen to it for a year. After a year, I listen to it again and if there are no problems, then I release it. If it needs further work, then I work on it some more. If I decide that even further work can’t salvage it, then I destroy it.

There have been no fundamental changes in the series itself. Each time I record I discover something new, and by bringing conceptions and methods I gained in other projects into the Catastrophe Point series, each volume becomes different from the last.

Over the five continuous years of the Lethe.Voice Festival, I was able to invest a great deal of time in researching the characteristics and vibrations of the harbour warehouse building itself and the best ways to record them. #5 was recorded there in the last year, and in that sense it represents a turning point in the series. On the volumes that have followed #5, recording ceases just as I come to understand the unique spatial features of places that I am visiting for the first time. Elements of these places have given me a new perspective.

Several months ago I finished editing #9. This volume was created by using randomly selected materials recorded between 2001 and 2006. In July I recorded sounds and some video footage at a big studio for #10, and I am currently working on editing this new material.

We are hearing a residue of activity, ordinary materials, violently strewn. Cantilevered tension, handholds of stone, the friction of disintegrating surfaces. These are layers of condensed and folded dust, underneath explosions of fragmentary steel and glass.

…..

Echoes are sounds that I myself have created and then forgotten about, until they return. But I found that by treating these sounds on the same level as other environmental sounds, they can be very useful in helping me to deviate from my own actions.

The method I use when performing with other people is to first to remove the filter called “dialogue”. Because we are performing together, it is only natural that their sounds will enter my hearing and that the sounds each of us create will influence the other, but I believe more important is to allow the body to respond before the mind.

Do you consider each Catastrophe Point to be compositionally separate and distinct?

I believe them to be a single process. It’s a mystery how long this process will continue, but when it reaches its conclusion, I hope that all of them together can be seen as a single work.

Would you encourage listeners to mix or layer volumes?

That’s an idea that I haven’t tried yet – so I think I will now. But, otherwise, I don’t encourage my listeners to do anything in particular. If a record has been released and someone has paid the necessary price for it, how they choose to listen to it should be up
to them. When I buy a record and it doesn’t quite hit the spot, often I will try listening to it through a guitar amp, or equalizing it, or manipulating it in some other way.

In the studio, the residue of action is multiplied into slowly spiraling clumps. The same space is applied again and again, unifying actions at disparate distances, volumes and intensities. There are always multiple interacting planes, ignorant of each other.

When I experience a performance or action, I am far more interested in the philosophy that lies behind the actions rather than the sound or expression. If you understand that each performer possesses their own unique philosophy or thought and their own language, then dialogue becomes unnecessary. I have discovered that all around the world there are performers who possess this same sensibility. Similarly, events can occur in which performances taking place in different places and different times can have the same significance as performances which take place in the same place and same time.

Norwegian artist Lasse Marhaug is known for his torrential output of harsh noise albums, both solo and with Jazkamer, and for his excellent Pica Disc label. But few people are aware that he is as passionate about movies as he is about music.

Part 2 | 8.26.10

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN (2010)
Cat-and-mouse thriller about a father who takes revenge on not just the criminals, but the whole legal system after his family is horribly murdered. A few enjoyable sequences of action and vengeance, but after a while the plot holes grew so big even I had a hard time ignoring them, with the final sequence making so little sense it’s hard to believe a major studio would release it.

THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY (2002)
I’ve had a bad case of Beatlemania since I bought the remastered The Beatles ”In Mono” box-set earlier this year. It’s been great rediscovering their music. I shamefully admit having forgotten how good ”Sgt. Pepper” and ”The White Album” actually are. So the time was right to re-watch this engaging documentary on the fab four. I saw it on TV when it first aired in 1995, but this 2002 DVD box-set edition runs ten hours; four hours longer than the TV edit. Very well made and extremely enjoyable. I actually wish it was longer. And my favorite Beatle? Ringo.

INCEPTION (2010)
I quite enjoyed this new action flick by Christopher Nolan. To my surprise, because Nolan’s films usually rubs me the wrong way, and because I’m skeptical towards ’dream films’. (I prefer Jason to Freddy Krueger). But in INCEPTION the dream stuff kinda worked for me. The decent action sequences probably kept me distracted throughout. It’s a mess, but a fairly entertaining one.

DOROTHEAS RACHE (1974)
Radical arty/sleazy 70’s German film on sexual liberation in which the unscrupulous 17 year old Dorothea discovers the world of sex through working as a prostitute. Drifting through the city (Hamburg?) she has various kinky and erotic encounters mostly with older men. The actors talk to the camera and several sequences are in a pseudo-documentary style. Someone mentioned this in the same league as (the brilliant) SWEET MOVIE, but it feels more akin to the Swedish I AM CURIOUS films. Some funny sequences, but got tedious after a while. Hard to find and probably just as well.

PREDATORS (2010)
Having re-watched PREDATOR (still good) and PREDATOR 2 (still not so good) a few months ago I went into hoping for a good time, but not expecting much due to (the terrible) Robert Rodriguez’s involvement as writer/producer. But it wasn’t too bad. Pumped-up Adrian Brody and other super-soldiers are kidnapped and dropped on a jungle-planet where they run around until most of them are killed off. Some good action and more gore than the Alien vs Predators films. Jungle setting is also a plus.

BAD BIOLOGY (2008)
Woman has seven clits, is a nymphomaniac and needs sex all the time, often killing the men during the violent intercourse. Two hours after she gives birth to deformed babies which she dumps in the trash. Luckily, she meets a man who has an insatiable gigantic mutant penis. Only problem is that the penis has taken off on its own and started raping women. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen any film with a plot like this before. BAD BIOLOGY is Frank Hennenlotter’s (BASKET CASE, FRANKENHOOKER) comeback film, and it’s trashy fun.

THE CRAZIES (2010)
A deadly virus makes the inhabitants of an American small town go nuts and start killing each other. Soon the military arrives and starts killing the crazies. The hero sheriff and his pregnant wife must battle both the crazies and the military to get out of town. Since zombies started to run a few years ago there isn’t much difference between these crazies and modern day zombies. Except that the crazies doesn’t eat you, they just kill you. This might be the best of the George Romero remakes, although that’s not saying much. Car wash scene is the highlight.

“I hope you’ll continue to read the rest of these wrapups even though I will tell you know that nmperign & Jason Lescalleet were the BEST OF THE FEST. Ding ding, no more calls, we have a winner. I had high hopes for the set, but I never expected this. Starting slowly and haltingly, Lescalleet spent the first three or four minutes of the set running a single tape loop and rummaging through his suitcase for forgotten equipment. Little by little, Bhob Rainey and Greg Kelley’s alien transmissions fed into the rotted tape loop (unlike fellow loop guru Joseph Hammer, Lescalleet prefers to keep his tape loops pinched, mangled, and dirty — no clean white gloves here), accumulating small details while the tangled mass of mixers, filters, tapes, and small keyboards were routed and re-routed. The organ-sound of the loop reminded one fest-goer of Hermann Nitsch, and the middle section, during which Bhob blew stuttering electronic-sounding flutters into his mouthpiece-less soprano sax and Kelley taunted his trumpet with thin slices of metal, took on an early Organum sound; the really loud stuff, like “Pulp,” y’know. Lescalleet switched tape players, making pervasive sound changes in the mix, spurring Kelley and Rainey to new sounds, the three operating in union, playing in perfect sync, coaxing overtones and frequencies no effects pedal will ever replicate. Lescalleet moves a mic into the space between the trumpet and sax and hands each of them a clip-on contact mic just as it seems the set is about to end, and the metallic buzzing and screaming builds even higher, but without a climax. Lescalleet hits the floor, grabbing at the tape loops, fighting the motors, even putting a heavy boot down onto one of them to slow it down. The loop, which to this point had fed back the horn lines into a fierce metallic ringing, was now slowed into a coarse, ambient whisper. Tension mounted, and as the foot is lifting, the screeching resumes, sending Kelley and Rainey into a frenzy of overblowing, blatting, and full-on mayhem. Somewhere, for reasons unknown to them, the members of Borbetomagus were feeling a little burst of endorphins. The set climaxed in supernova-level intensity, and left jaws on floors. Probably in my top 5 favorite performances ever, not just this festival. The triumph of craft and deep listening.”

What, you need videographic evidence? Here ya go:

Nmperign & Lescalleet at Neon Marshmallow Fest (Day 3 Matinee, 8/21/10) from Bullart. on Vimeo.

WOW! Way to go, guys…

Benjamin Rossignol / Ophibre: I have a tendency to start out on a piece as a drone but often find myself feeling like it requires more and more work as it forms. It becomes like cutting my own hair, if I’m not careful and considerate, I begin to over-add and it gets chopped up into an overwhelming mess. I am a chronic complicator of my work. What music that does make it out of my apartment represents something I have sitting on the very edge of and that had driving me mad for a few weeks… and perhaps my music seems a bit dronier to me than others because I let it ferment for so long and listen to it repeatedly so many times that I become fatigued and loud details blur in my mind. It becomes something that I want to listen to while it is being composed but almost never again after it is finished.

I: What does a drone mean to you? In other words, what aspect of drone resonates with you personally?

O: Drone to me means expressing things in really small ways. At a certain point of trance, or when you have become accustomed to drone, composing for me becomes paying attention to the small details in a piece. I think its interesting for a music to transcend a referential nature and become “self-less”, that it doesn’t have to reference anything but the waves that make it up. Synthesized and incoherent sounds achieve this much more I find.

I: Some of your early pieces have a sculptural quality to them. The tape that comes unspooled, or the reel of tape in a painted box.. the puzzles pieces… can you talk about what motivated this sort of work? Who did you think the audience was for these works? Do you still think of your publications as objects?

O: When I first came to Boston in 2004, I kept seeing amazing looking tapes and CDs at Twisted Village, many of which I found myself purchasing on the attractiveness alone, never having heard any of the artists or labels. I originally set out with the object series as something that would attract people to my releases, with the hopes of ultimately purchasing them. It was more of marketing decision than an artistic one. However, the more I worked on trying to create a provocative looking tape, the more I came to see them more as an artistic opportunity. Become good friends with Jarrod Fowler, who has shared many ideas with me and introduced me to artist-books, inspired an attitude in me closer to that of a media artist than just a noise-guy and encouraged me not be afraid of producing conceptual work.

I: You’ve talked about your music in terms that makes me think of psychedelia… altered states, dreaming, trance… can you tell me a bit about how that developed as an interest of yours? How has it changed over time?

O: Like many people, I became very interested in things of a psychedelic nature when I attended college. Psychedelia led me to become more interested in the role of art in culture, ethnomusicology and general ontological questions in regards to music.

I: Some of your work makes explicit reference to audio artifacts. The cover of “Phase Plane” is that grainy pic of what looks like a 3M advertisement… and I have one CDR by you which, according to the sleeve notes, changes sampling rate over the course of the piece. Why is this reference to artifacts important to you?

O: When studying sound reproduction and especially with methods that are digital, it occurs that what one preserves is only a representation of a phenomena that the given method can store. Given that digital sound reproduction has progressed so telescopically in the information age, trailing behind this evolution it has been an the expanding time line of the new unintended, accidental sounds and artifacts. To me, artifact represent an expanding pallet of sounds at hand to use, as well as to use referentially. As far as affecting my music, working with artifacts sometimes set off ideas to create whole pieces about them. The artifact piece you refer is entitled Drone Works for Differing Digital Audio Formats and Encoding Methods was the culmination of an experiment that took about a year and half to complete, where I explored every possible format I could find and collected my favorites onto one disc. In an almost scientific pursuit, I applied different encoding methods onto the same drone in 2 minute segments, but arranging them to create a contrast and narrative that I thought was interesting. I think that album sums up my musical pursuits fairly completely.

I: What do you do for your day job? Does that inform your practice in any way?

O: Right now, I work at an audio gear rental facility specializing in wireless audio. Having worked there for bit now, I might just have to include the use and investigation of radio transmission into my music.

I: I’d love to learn more about the analog synths you build. For how long have you been doing this? What are you working on now?

O: Building synths has seriously been on my mind for a number of years, especially after having been employed by Jessica Rylan at Flower Electronics in the end of 2008. In some ways its one of the most foolish ways to waste your time and can literally consume your life if you let it. There are very few things I have found as frustrating as dedicating yourself to a tiny complicated circuit for weeks on end and then not being able to figure out why the bloody thing won’t work. Some projects I have never figured out and form a small graveyard on my bench. However, when the circuit does work and surprises you every time you turn it on, that is when you are rewarded for your suffering.

Currently I’m working on a modified version of Casper Electronics’ “Drone Lab version1.” Recently I have completed a semi-modular synthesizer box based on several schematics including some by Nicholas Collins in his book Handmade Electronic Music, “The Cacophonator” circuit designed by Arthur Harrison and various filters and VCA’s from Ray Wilson of musicfromouterspace.com.

*****

Byron Coley: Is there a central theory behind Failing Lights?

Mike Connelly: I’ve always been doing solo stuff. With Failing Lights, I started doing things under that name around 2004. It’s just another outlet. Another piece of the puzzle.

B: Where’s the name come from?

M: I don’t remember the specific moment where I came up with the name. But I think the idea – failing lights – can apply to a lot of things. A lot of people tell me different things about how they see the name. For me, it’s just the idea of things not necessarily working. I kind of like that notion – things not working the way they’re supposed to. I think we all can relate.

B: I remember an old Failing Lights cassette that sounded like you were just screwing around with a very messed up cassette deck.

M: A lot of that stuff is done with really messed up cassette decks. But the album itself has a lot of instruments. There’s a lot of guitar. And a lot of it was recorded while Wolf Eyes was on tour last summer. So a lot of the source material was recorded then, just in motel rooms and people’s living rooms. Then I took it and messed with it. There’s actually no way anyone would ever actually hear this, but I know it’s there – if you listen real closely you can hear Olson’s sewing machine, because I was recording in the living room while he was sewing.

B: That’s your little Nurse with Wound tribute. Right now, how many different performance projects are you doing under different names?

M: Right now, the things that actually play out would be Wolf Eyes, Hair Police, Birth Refusal (which is me and Olson as a duo) and The Haunting (which is me and my wife). Those are the ones that really play live. There are lots of other things that are just for recording. Maybe once in a while, just around town, I’ll do a one-off thing under a different name. But those four are the main things that actually tour.

B: Do they all involved distinctly different concepts?

M: Yeah. There’s something conceptual that distinguishes each project. But for Birth Refusal, Olson and I always try to come up with a different idea. Like, last summer we did a tour where we didn’t bring any amps or electronics or guitars or anything like that. It was all just cardboard, junk… Olson brought a tree branch. The idea was we’d just have to take those and do a gig. We did three shows like that – no amplification, no nothing. It turned out great. So Birth Refusal a lot of times just happens in that way. We’ll decide to do something we’d never normally do in our other bands. But a lot of time it’s just instinctive. It’s hard to put a finger on what the exact difference is, but I know it’s there.

B: Documentation seems extremely important.

M: For sure.

B: Do you think that’s good?

M: I’m definitely into the idea of documentation, but I also think that not every piece of it is necessary. It’s all just glimpses into the process. Especially with Wolf Eyes ,we always have different tour tapes and CDRs and etc. A lot of times, they’re just different takes on our practices and rehearsals. I see those as interesting, and some people do want to have them all. It’s not that they’re important, in and of themselves, but it’s important that they’re there. If you get those pieces you’ll be more aware of the whole. It kind of goes back to Throbbing Gristle. I was always so fired up by the idea that every show was recorded and you could get access to them. That was very interesting to me. It’s the same with jazz, of course. To me it’s always interesting to be able to get access to the process. It’s neat to be able to hear how Coltrane got to Giant Steps. But it’s not interesting to everybody. Some people just want to have the albums, and that’s fine. Of course, I also think there are a lot of people who don’t need to be documenting themselves as much as they do.

B: Well, I think it lends a certain amount of credence to things that are at least released through a label I’ve heard of. It conveys the notion that at least someone besides the creator has heard and vetted the thing and believes there might be someone interested.

M: It’s a weird time right now. CDRs are so easy to create… it can be a great thing, but at the same time it’s hard to wade through everybody’s output. I was talking to Dom (Fernow, aka Prurient – ed.) the other day – we’re the same age, I’m 30, he’s 29 – and we’re kind of the last age group that got into noise before the internet was really the main thing. We were the last guys sending checks to RRR. I wrote a check to Aaron Dilloway for $8 when Dread came out. And that was a more difficult thing to do. It required a bit more concentrated effort. You’d get the RRR catalog and you didn’t know who anyone was. So I’d just go by names. The new generation of musicians doesn’t have the same problem. If you want to hear Black Flag, you can just download every Black Flag album. Whereas when I got into Black Flag I didn’t even know what album to order. I think the first one I got was Wasted Again. I got it and I thought – oh, this is sort of weird. But I miss that in a way, because it was so exciting. The first Bad Brains album I got was I Against I and I hated it when I got it. I was wanting something like Pay to Cum. I love it now, but at the time I didn’t know. I was just ordering from the SST catalog and that’s what I chose. But now people coming up have access to everything. The immediacy takes a certain something away from it. The information focus seems to have shifted to message boards, and people have adopted the impression that their own opinions are really important and that everyone needs them. If you go to YouTube, there’ll be ten thousand comments by various self-appointed VIPs.

B: When did you really start getting into noise?

M: For me, when I was 13 or 14 I went to Lollapalooza and I saw the Boredoms. I’d never heard of them before. They were opening and I just flipped out. I was going to see Smashing Pumpkins. That definitely set me on the path. Then there was Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers and that kind of stuff. But I’d read about Merzbow and Masonna and those kind of guys. When I got to college, I started working at the radio station immediately. The first day, I was already at the radio station. I had just come back from the record store and I’d bought that Harry Pussy single they did as Toxic Drunks. This guy was there and said, “Oh wow. If you’re into that you should check out this Merzbow CD.” He gave it to me and that was it. I pretty much fell in headfirst. That was around ’98. Next he brought me a RRR catalog and I ordered by name – Macronympha, Smell & Quim – just things I thought had amazing names. I also listened to tons of other music, but it became my focal point pretty quickly.

B: Were you doing any music before that?

M: My first band was just a straight noise band. I was never in a regular band. Never had a punk band in high school or any of that. I did take guitar lessons when I was in seventh grade, so I could kind of play a little bit. But I never really learned how to play anything. So it was immediately just weird.

B: So you did a few things before Hair Police?

M: Yeah, but nothing that was ever very well documented. But it would be with this guy Ross, who got me into noise. We played together a lot, then he just dropped out of music. So I was doing a lot of noise stuff and just weird shit around Lexington. One of out big gigs was opening for The Make Up at a huge show in Lexington and we just drove people out of the room. It was great. Lexington is a pretty small town and everybody knows each other, so they would let us do things once in a while. We would get on funny gigs like that sometimes. But Trevor and Robert are a few years younger than me. They were going to high school around Lexington and they would listen to the radio station. So we met like that. They would call up my show and we just became friends. We were all doing various other things, then one day we decided to combine forces.

B: What was the name of the project with Ross?

M: My very first band was Hexose. That was with Ross and this guy Matt Minter, who was on the very first Hair Police record, and is now in this awesome band called Wretched Worst. That literally started the weekend after he gave me the Merzbow disk. It was just like – okay, perfect, sounds good.

B: What kind of equipment did you use?

M: Same sort of stuff – guitar, junk, vocals. It was just whatever we had around. It was a total mess and everyone hated us. There were four or five people who were into it and that was it. Eventually it grew from there and I never looked back. I always just made the most fucked-up noise in town. I was never very interested in making any other kind of music.

B: So this was long after the Slint era.

M: Yeah. When I first got to school all those guys were fading out, but people were trying to hold onto it. Slint was Louisville’s last big claim to fame and they didn’t want to let it go. This was end of the Quarterstick era.

B: Hair Police came together quite organically.

M: Yeah. One day we just got together and started playing. That was it. It has always been like that. It’s a very instinctive and organic band. We have a real connection.

B: And you all kept doing lots of other projects.

M: Yeah, and I think that’s super important. Wolf Eyes is the same. It gives you other outlets. When you get back from tour you can work out all these other ideas you’ve gotten with different bands or in other projects. Then move back to your main bands. And it works in cycles. Each project has a subtle influence on everything else you do.

B: Failing Lights does live shows?

M: Yeah, I haven’t done any extensive touring. Mostly locals and one-offs, but I’m looking to possible do some more stuff later this year. It’s cool to play solo. I’m so used to playing with bands or duos that it’s really different. Playing solo is a totally different beast. I used to really hate it. Now I’m getting a bit more into it. I love the communication of playing with someone else, but I’m working on doing it more.

B: Solo electronics really puts you on the line when you do it live.

M: Totally. You’re just up there and the focus is all on you – there’s nothing to fall back on. But that’s part of the whole philosophy – if you give me a beer can and a piece of cardboard, I’ll do a set. That has to become your philosophy if tour a lot. Because everything always breaks down and you might not be able to fix it for a gig, so you need to be able to think on your feet and just go with it. I’m not one to stop and restring my guitar. And everything breaks. I’ve done Wolf Eyes sets where my guitar went out on the first song and I just grabbed a microphone and mouthed the guitar lines or whatever. And the guitars I play are always so cheap. For instance, Wolf Eyes was playing in Madrid and my guitar just fucking ate it. We’d been soldering it throughout the tour and Nate said, “Just go buy a new guitar. Fixing it is taking too long.” There was a music store right next to the venue and I ran over there with a guy who spoke Spanish. I told him to tell them I needed the cheapest guitar they had. He told them and they all started laughing. They said they’d never had anyone tell them that before. But that’s how I’ve always been.

B: Considering how you treat guitars, that’s probably a good idea.

M: Exactly. But for me and the guys I play with, that’s always been part of our thing – drop us anywhere, give us anything to play with, and we’ll do it. It’s always been my thinking — it’s the person behind the gear, not the gear itself, that’s important. So I can never make a blanket statement like – “Oh, I hate laptop.” Because I’ve seen awesome laptop and I’ve seen bullshit laptop. It’s the person behind the machine that’s important.

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Byron Coley is a writer/archivist living in western Massachusetts. He currently contributes columns to Arthur, The Wire, and Bathyscaphe, and manages the Ecstatic Yod Collective.
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Papin Sisters Studio

Top “shelf,” left to right:

Multi-channel radio (shortwave, am / fm / PHB / WB), gift of Philip von Zweck. Often used in conjunction with digitech PDS-8000 looping / sampler / pitch shifting pedal (directly in front of the radio). To the immediate right of the pedal is a ~barely~ visible hand-held 1/4” cassette player.

Polivoks synthesizer. Acquired 2005, I’m guessing. I had wanted a synth for a while, had a sense of what features I wanted, but prices seemed a bit prohibitive. I found this online, picked up a fantastic step-up transformer so I could use it, had Midwest Music Menders adjust and clean some bits and pieces, and the synth has been an integral part of my studio recordings ever since.

Lower “shelf,” left to right:

The purple viper, a custom built 4MS pedal; it’s essentially a stereo noise swash tweaker, but it’s nice to be able to run it into itself and play with those parameters—plus having two independent channels processing different sources is nice. Sitting atop this is the requisite death metal distortion pedal. The knob-like item behind the distortion pedal is a sequential time/date stamper that comes in handy on some random bits of metal.

On top of the rackmount gear are two microcassette recorders, a minidisc recorder, maybe four contact mics, and a Line 6 distortion pedal (that I rarely use). The two microcassettes, with both variable recording and playback speeds, are enjoyable partly for their flexibility, partly for the “raw/rough” sounds of the recordings, and partly for their size. The minidisc is mostly for field recordings where I want to step up the audio quality: fire, storms, machine shops, etc.

In the rack I have (besides the Furman power strip) a Lexicon Jamman and an Alesis Midiverb, which, combined, make up a lot of the processing core of my gear; both were acquired in 1995/96, I believe. Two SM-57s are hanging out on the latter two items.

The Newcomb turntable was acquired from the first community college I taught at; it had been sitting in my office in a corner until one day a memo came around saying all offices were going to be completely cleaned out. I asked the dean of my department if I could just take the thing and she said yes. It replaced a Califone that died a few years back.

In the back and out of sight are two Casio SK-1s, a pile of modified (melted, scratched, etc.) records, and some pieces of metal and metal assemblages. All of this gear runs through the mixer and into my dedicated “audio” computer, where, like a lot of people I suppose, I have both multitracking and stereo mixdown programs.

And the Misfits needlepoint is from a good friend.

Current topic:  What Does Prolific Mean?

Some bands and labels seem to crank out albums at a pace that makes listeners either race Pokemon-like to collect ‘em all, or else wonder about how much effort could possibly be put into each one. But what does being prolific mean to an artist? Or to a critic who writes about all those albums? Last week, Ben Hall wrote about the economic limitations on improvising artists who depend on a record label to publish their work. Over the next two weeks, we will hear from Mattin and Dan Warburton. Today, Brandon LaBelle, author of the new book Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (2010, Continuum Books), weighs in…

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BRANDON LABELLE:

I have very distinct memories of visiting Aron’s Records in Hollywood. Beginning in the 80′s as a high school student, I’d drive into Hollywood on weekend mornings to spend a few hours sifting through the used bins of records, examining covers for signs of provocation and promise – I was not there to pick up the latest release, but to explore the unfamiliar, the mysterious, the daring. The used record bin was a source of discovery, and each record, with its scuffs and abrasions, a process of identification and attraction. I’m sure this memory resonates with many readers here, and for myself, this became a ritualized event deeply connected to the imagination and the emotional life.

These weekends eventually spilled over into weekdays years later, as I finally moved into the city. In the early to mid-90s, Aron’s also developed an “experimental music” section, thanks to the likes of Damion Romero who (if I remember correctly) became one of the buyers for the shop at that time; all of which coincided with my own deeper immersion into the culture of sonic art: the experimental music section became a site for connecting to the greater culture of noise happening out there in the world and within which I thought I might participate. I would enter the record shop and head straight to the experimental section, which was rather tiny in comparison to the other parts of the store. There I would look at each record, tape, and CD, reading carefully all their available notes, wondering about the sounds contained therein, while eventually selecting a few considered items to take home. From Cranioclast to Zoviet France to Organum and Arcane Device, not to mention all those noise tapes from Japan (Aube, et al), or the more conceptual projects of RLW, SBOTHI and the SELEKTION releases, having access to this material significantly fed my expanding sonic attitude, as well as the expanding noise scene in LA at this time. In the end, I attribute my own full-blown embrace of experimental music to these four or five bins found at Aron’s Records.

I recount these memories because the expansion and total restructuring of both the production and consumption of experimental music has radically shifted, as we know, replacing the ritualized search for that rare import to the downloadable file always already available. (In giving a quick google on Cranioclast – a group I have not thought about it in more than 10 years – I have already accessed more information on their activities than I ever knew before, not to mention accessed a few sound files.) In addition, the proliferation of experimental music and sonic work has certainly been influenced by the availability of digital tools, and the connective networking of sub-cultures across the globe through digital systems, making the sharing of sounds an extremely smooth action. Even now, writing this on my laptop I have within my reach an enormous amount of on-line work all within a few clicks. For myself, I take this as an extremely interesting and provocative development (which of course spans beyond the field of experimental music, to generate a “networked culture” which Kazys Varnelis highlights as a deep paradigm shift in society), which must also be heard to influence our listening habits: might the proliferation of sonic matter and dissemination point toward new understandings of music in general?

I’m reminded in turn of Adorno’s own critical appraisal of new modern forms of production, distribution and consumption of music in the 1930s, which for him stripped the aura of high art music to create a culture of regressive listening: making available the classics of modernism to radio listeners during an afternoon of house cleaning, for instance, developed within the public “certain capacities which accord less with the concepts of traditional aesthetics than with those of football and motoring.” Music for Adorno was relegated to a form of “entertainment.” I somehow wonder if the opposite is actually occurring today: even though the ability to consume musical material has intensified (and mostly on speaker systems that Adorno would certainly have something to say about), I feel that we may actually be listening with deeper creative and generative flair. The “process based art” Ben Hall maps out in his text is not only apparent on the part of the producer, artist or composer; but in turn, on the part of the listener and receiver, whose act of acquiring a given work, through an array of means, participates within a greater flow of identification and incorporation and sharing – how sound and music, because of their proliferating output and dissemination, find further points of contact within our lives, and importantly, as collective material.

Even though I may never experience again those great pleasures in finding one rare copy of a limited edition Zoviet France record, this also makes me appreciate how more connected I am to an ever-growing culture of sonic production and diffusion. This may also diffuse the intensity of our concentrated ear, as was noted in some of the respondent’s comments. Yet I wonder if this may only be part of the creative and critical movements of our contemporary auditory culture, as the flipside to the more positive suggestions I’m mapping here: with diffusion comes both the loosening of a particular system as well as new possibilities for connection. The degrading of the original object may certainly turn music into forms of pure information: immaterial code without “real” value. (The closing of Aron’s Records in 2005 after years of being the most important independent record shop in LA may remind of these proliferating consequences…) Yet the flows of information also find dynamic pockets of listening and appropriation to possibly create new forms of community – what drove Adorno mad was not so much the shattering of his precious moment of listening, but his understanding of music’s direct connection to questions of the social structure. For myself, I remain extremely curious and optimistic as to where the contemporary model of proliferation may ultimately lead us, and what forms of identity, politics, and intimacy, not to mention music, this may inspire.

* * * * *
Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer working with sound and the specifics of location. His work explores the space between sound and sociality, using performance and on-site constructions as creative supplements to existing conditions.

We caught up with Sigtryggur just before he embarked on a short solo tour through Europe and asked him to tell us about one small aspect of his listening experience that shaped what he does today.

Intransitive: What were the three albums that changed the way you think about making music? Tell me what they were… how and when you heard them… and what the experience of them inspired or shifted in the way you compose, perform, record, or whatever aspect changed as a result.

Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson: Tricky questions these… hahaha… only three. Hmm… Kraftwerk comes first. At first, I didn’t hear a whole album, only a few tracks which would be playing on top of Icelandic TV commercials, the ones that would only show a picture with a voice over, the old ones, I think you know what I mean. Anyway, they would always play Kraftwerk on top, the instrumental tracks. i just remember the purity of the sound and the simplicity of it and having a ear worm after hearing that and was dying to hear more… I always thought that Kraftwerk was an Icelandic band. Back then i didn’t understand German and when asking my parents about the TV commercial music they would tell me it’s Kraftwerk and i always thought they meant “Kraftaverk”, which is Icelandic and means “(a) miracle”….

i would have to say the second would be Napalm Death “Scum”. When I listened to it first back in 1989, I immediately fell in love with what i was hearing, I had never heard anything like it before. Mind you this is before the internet, and in those times you couldn’t pick up such records from the records shops here in Iceland. I think they must’ve made a mistake while ordering in for the store where i bought it… in those days, I was listening to a lot of metal and punk, mostly Slayer, Crass, Dead Kennedys etc… in Iceland back then, there were no real “this or that” scene. What I’m trying to say is that you either liked pop music or metal/punk/extreme music etc. Anyway, when got back home and played the record i fell in love with the “speed”. It sounded perfectly normal to me. I guess i have ADHD or whatever they call it. At least that music soothed me (so does Merzbow) and “speed” makes me calm. So I must be hyper active or whatever they call it, I have never gone to doctors for a check up mind you. Needless to say, I formed a grindcore band only a few weeks after I had bought the record.

The third one would be Nurse With Wound “Sylvie and Babs”. I heard it in the early 90s, when Stilluppsteypa started doing more experimental stuff, using analog effects, farfisa organ and a tape machine. That album pushed us into a void that we are still stuck inside of.