Studio Notes

Video of the week

2011-12-15T23:12:00.000-08:00

A clip from Children's Games - the last section of the second act (LAB).

The Dark Night from Seth Nehil on Vimeo.

In performance

2011-11-28T13:12:00.000-08:00

Some images from Children's Games.

Crippled Athlete

2011-10-20T12:19:00.001-07:00

Band practice at The Mouth - with Taryn Tomasello and Gabi Villasenor.

Preparations

2011-10-10T23:23:00.001-07:00

Sebastian Healy recording the voice of the ghost child.

Tracing the Children's Games diagram to black fabric.

3 weeks to go

2011-10-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

Rehearsal photos by Hillary Murphy.

Crippled Athlete makeup and video shoot.

First rehearsal with video projection.

Previews!

2011-09-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

A wonderful preview article by Ben Waterhouse here...
A work-in-progress showing of Children's Games will be presented at the Portland Actors Conservatory, this Saturday, September 17th at 2pm. I welcome your feedback on this still-developing work! Joining me will be Hand2Mouth, with an excerpt of their sci-fi meditation, Uncanny Valley.
You can learn more about Children's Games (and download free albums) at my website, and help support this performance at our IndieGoGo campaign.
Here again is the trailer for the performance - look for a new trailer and rehearsal videos coming soon!

Children's Games trailer from Seth Nehil on Vimeo.

Fundraising!

2011-09-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Children's Games campaign has been launched! We need your support, large or small. The entirety of your contribution will go to the actors, singers and musicians. Please visit our indiegogo site to learn more and make a donation.
Come to a free work-in-progress showing SATURDAY, Sept 17 at 2pm: Hand2Mouth's Uncanny Valley + Seth Nehil's Children's Games - Portland Actors Conservatory, 1436 SW Montgomery.

Rehearsal spaces

2011-09-04T18:58:00.000-07:00

In Mary Sutton's basement, Matt Carlson leads the trio in process-based scores: lovely rotating and hocketing phrases are locked into a steady groove held by the keyboards. Minimalism with slightly melancholy or elegiac tendencies...

Meanwhile, at the Mouth Studio, the chorus has been exploring vocal patterns and physical shapes. Some of these shapes are determined by the score or follow a simple geometry, others are taken from the actions depicted in Brueghel's painting. His dynamic clusters of game-playing children give us body configurations, and we can expand or contract into those arrangements.
The "entropic process" has been one of the most prolific techniques in Children's Games rehearsals - morphing a phrase through rapid and repetitious passing. In this recording, you can hear the development of a sound and its associated melody from the beginning of the process. Starting with the name of a game ("Bowling with Knucklebones"), Elie and Katy face each other, passing the phrase back and forth. Meanwhile, the other four performers take turns pounding rhythmically on the singer's backs. Through incremental change, the phrase mutates, ending in beautiful onomatopoeia bell sounds and trilled tongues. In this way, a melody emerges.

Bowling With Knucklebones by Seth Nehil

"Yo-yo, Mama, caca"

2011-08-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

As I conducted research for Children's Games, there were texts I encountered which seemed to encapsulate one or several of the core themes. These almost always related to ideas of language, pre-language, repetition and signification. Finding a text like this, I could read it as a score - a set of sounds and actions. Thus, the theoretical leads directly into the practical...

From Formless: A User's Guide by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (pp 219-220):
"Yo-Yo. We could see it as the relatively sophisticated, commercially produced equivalent of the little object Freud's infant grandson made famous, as he threw the spool onto his cot to make it disappear behind the bedclothes and then pulled on the string attached to it to draw it back into view, the first gesture accompanied by a mournful "fo-o-ort" and the second by a joyous "da!" And the yo-yo is servicable in this connection in yet another dimension, since its very name cycles around the field of linguistic principles that the "fort/da" instrument articulates.
For the yo-yo belongs to a whole series of childish terms - the very earliest being "mama" and "papa", and subsequent ones being "caca" and "peepee" - in which the wild sound if infantile babbling is suddenly articulated, or spaced, or cut out, not just into perceptible rhythmic regularity but into the freestanding condition of the signifier, through the act of repetition. For it is repetition that doubles back on the first sound to mark it as deliberately phonemic by the very fact of being repeatable. Thus, as Roman Jakobson says, the basis for the translation from wild sound production to verbal behavior is, precisely, reduplication, since it is the repetition of the first sound by the second that serves to signal "that the uttered sounds do not represent a babble, but a senseful, semantic entity." Thus, for Jakobson, it is duplication that is "linguistic essence", since it transforms sounds to phonemes by marking, or re-marking them, by establishing that they "are to be recognizable, distinguishable, identifiable; and in accordance with these requirements, they must be deliberately repeatable."
"Fort/da" is not, however, one of these redoubled vocables, although the game played by means of it - in both its verbal and mechanical guise - did involve constant repetition. "Fort/da" is, instead, a game of rhythmic separation and reconnection, in which something disappears from sight and is recognized again, both disappearance and return accompanied by language that penetrates this activity almost to the point of becoming its support. For Freud articulates the "fort/da" as allowing for the rise of linguistic representation in the negation of the object (throwing it away while simultaneously producing a substitute for it in the form of a verbal sign: "fort") and in the separation of the field of the represented (the sign, the fantasy image) from that of the real ("da!"). Indeed, it is in this founding act of negativity that Freud locates the intellectual feat on which language as well as culture in general would be instituted."

Movies within movies

2011-07-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

I am now working on the "Horror Movie" section of Children's Games, a pseudo-narrative within a pseudo-narrative. As I've mentioned before, I like the idea of nested elements. I also like the limitations/freedoms that a diagetic mini-project provides. I am enjoying (self-created) pressures which require/allow me to try different forms, different textures, different senses of functionality.
To quote Chion yet again, "This embedding also paradoxically makes the film closer to a live performance; the time during which we watch the performance is not simply watching the past but also living in the present." (Film, A Sound Art, p. 275)

Language exterior

2011-07-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

I have been considering the idea of a live narrator for Children's Games, specifically an 11 year-old boy at a podium, with a light. I've been writing a variety of texts for this voice. But now that I've edited a rough cut of the first two acts, I'm attracted to the mystery of a non-linguistic unfolding, a flow of sound. Going back to Chion's definition of "ritualized cinema": "a cinema where sparse and sober dialogue, as well as the minimal place accorded to music, frees the ear and allows us to hear how sounds and the movement in the image organize time."

Obviously, the conflict/layering/confrontation of texts with tangible images produces something entirely different from either element on its own. I'm interested in the capacity for parallel narratives, non-overlapping areals of information. ...but language is a powerful tool, with the potential to overwhelm. I want to retain uncertainty regarding the narrative, even amplify it, make it stranger - I want to avoid overdetermination. Narration has the possibility of turning dances into explanations and images into illustrations. So I am carefully considering a spectrum of options. What if the narrator uses only parts of words, nonsense, sounds, repetitions? What if the narrator is a disembodied voice? What if...?

Multi-focal music

2011-07-15T17:46:00.000-07:00

The process of composing for (or within) Children's Games has been fragmented into multiple overlapping layers. 1) The entirety of the video soundtrack is being considered as a composition - including location recordings, vocal performances, foley sounds and music. 2) The chorus will perform vocal works, interacting with the video sound and occasionally on their own. 3) A trio of violin/viola/synthesizer will play music composed and led by Matt Carlson. These pieces will be mostly separate from the chorus, but will be associated with scenes or sections in the video. 4) The electroacoustic band, Crippled Athlete, will emerge in the third act and replace the other elements.
Each of these musical approaches has a different texture and approach. Each is being considered both separately and together. Crippled Athlete has been for me the newest and most challenging mode, as we've de- and re-constructed the material several times over the last year. As a trio playing computer, keyboard, lap steel, vocals, drums and effects, we've been finding a balance as collaborators between composition and improvisation. We've been developing mnemonic "mind movies" (see previous entry) to guide aesthetic choices, graphic/verbal scores and games... and most importantly repetition and improvisation, as a way to solidify tracks, attempting to give each a specific mood and structure.
Responding to the songs as they develop, we will create costumes, gestures and video projections. Here is our most recent recording, from yesterday's practice - the last of seven takes:

Northern Lights by Seth Nehil

Layer One

2011-07-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

Above: behind the scenes at The Camp and The Lab (Acts 1 & 2)
Below: the first trailer!

Children's Games trailer from Seth Nehil on Vimeo.

Stage One

2011-06-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Over the next two days, we'll be shooting the runaway camp sequence under a maple tree in the columbia river gorge. Here Alex, Fawn, Devin and Emily try on their costumes, artfully distressed by Lydia Rosenberg. On the chalkboard, a mirror drawing by Devin and Paul from Lab rehearsals. Above, a drawing led by the 'wild child', below led by the 'scientist'.
I'm excited to see the choreography/actions in the location, in makeup and costume, with the drifting smoke of a campfire... the opposite of the Lab which now has a fresh coat of white.

Mnemonic narratives

2011-06-02T21:03:00.000-07:00

Today in band practice we continued building stories around three of our songs. Because the songs don't have many recognizable landmarks, these stories are helping us to keep track of where we are and how to shape the voice. We listen to different versions and build the ideas together, sketching in details. For example:

The Tunnel

Two sisters seduced by a disgusting slimy slug

Standing on the slug, two sisters telling secrets

Hit the drums – hit the sides of the tunnel

Sighing sleepy pleasure

Trying to stay awake

Letting it go – getting seduced by aliens once or twice

Drum leading

Through the intestine

Take off child suit

Inhaling whisperings, back and forth

Build the melody by giving the next note

Then A: Ha… trading notes

Slug talk

Truth or dare

Listen to the crackles

In the Lab

2011-06-01T23:40:00.000-07:00

Alongside the Runaway Camp rehearsals, I have been working with Paul Montone and Devin Lucid as the scientist and wild child in rehearsals for the Lab. Whereas the runaways play games, these are a series of "tests"... slow exchanges of voice in demonstration and imitation. The correction of body posture, the marking of lines on a chalkboard, focused and careful. There’s something beautifully simple about these humanist exchanges – the intensity of duos and solos.

Yesterday we tried working with recursive structures - video within video - using last week's rehearsal as the instigator for further chains of mimicry. I hadn’t previously thought of including a television in this section (it’s not exactly period accurate for Jacques Itard circa 1805) but I've always been a fan of the "Droste effect" and I like the stripped down, "video art" feeling of simple black and white footage playing on a television monitor. These chains will instigate additional actions among the live performers.

We recently visited the maple tree where the runaway camp will occur. Dicky Dahl brought his camera and we taped material for the opening credit sequence.
Here is the music for that opening section, which makes it like a kind of "theme". This will be one of the few places where fully-composed recorded sound is matched to moving image.

Blade2 by Seth Nehil

Simultanous time and sequential time

2011-05-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

The activities in Bruegel’s painting Children’s Games exist in simultaneous time, but the viewer’s eyes pass from one game to another, through the perspectival space. This, of course, takes time, so the painting unfolds for the viewer in an indeterminate sequential time - each viewing can follow a different path. The thoughts and associations that generate the work in progress Children’s Games are also in simultaneous time. Rhizomatically linked, they diverge and converge, finding different connecting points, layering accumulatively or thinning into rivulets and cul-de-sacs. The actual performance of Children’s Games will exist in determined (on a macro-scale) sequential time, but should contain the idea of simultaneity. Cataloguing is one way of doing this, and Bruegel’s work is, in a sense, a catalogue. Another type of time that runs through the painting is cyclical – seasons of the year, ages of life, rituals of marking time, rituals of marking the age of childhood. Childhood activities are “timeless”, passing through time, oral tradition, changing but the same.

The story of the Wild Child of Avignon, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in a sequential structure of progression. The child begins as a savage and ends at civilization (or an approximation thereof). The system of training suggests improvement in a unitemporal direction. A telling of the story through words or images consists of a temporal compression – representing key moments in a series of transformations. Didactic sequential time…?

The horror film exists within screenal time – time out, mediated time. Repeatable time, re-screenable time.

The seance attempts to reach across time, magical time, the time of the written word.

This week in rehearsal we spent the time communicating non-verbally.

Photos by Lydia Rosenberg

Streams

2011-05-01T22:03:00.001-07:00

Building Children's Games has also been like generating and maintaining parallel streams. At this point, the streams can meander or form eddies as we try out ideas. Eventually they will all converge.
One stream is the video shoot for section one. I've started rehearsing with Fawn Williams, Devin Lucid, Emily Galash, Gabi Villasenor and Alexandra Ramirez as the feral children/runaways. In the studio, we've been working with the list of games from Bruegel, using it to generate both movement phrases and a spoken vocabulary. We've been playing with the language, breaking it into sounds or applying processes of rapid linguistic drift through repetition and distortion.
We've also been playing some of Augusto Boal's theater games (such as the one pictured above), playing a few of the games from the painting and playing games remembered from our pasts.
Running alongside is the live band stream, music that I've been improvising/composing with Taryn Tomasello and Gabi Villasenor. On April 9, we played our first "real" show. I trigger sounds on the computer, play a cheap drum machine, a broken mic and processing. Gabi sings, plays a lap steel through delay and drums. Taryn sings, plays keyboard and drums. These "songs" are deliciously dark and dramatic.

Here's an excerpt from the show, with video projections by Taryn.

Crippled Athlete April 8 2011 from Seth Nehil on Vimeo.

Rooms within rooms

2011-04-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Building Children's Games has been a bit like playing with nesting dolls - one piece fits inside another which fits inside another, etc. ...and the nested could at any point become the nester, inside becomes outside. Another example of chiasmus?

Two days ago I held an enjoyable recording session in the reverberant space above, with string players Tom Thorson, Jordan Dykestra, Morgan Hobart and Mary Sutton. These recordings will, after much studio manipulation, become soundtracks for video segments, which could become instigators of choral response, all of which will be embedded within the live performance. My task is to keep these multiple streams flowing - before they finally merge and co-mingle.
Meanwhile, the overall structure of the piece has been emerging from my year and 1/2 worth of notes. This amazing maple tree behind the home of Sara Mapelli and Theodore Holdt will become a central figure in section one, the Runaway Camp. It's hard to capture the gnarled girth of this tree in a photograph. There's a natural attraction one feels for such a tree, and the solidity it can provide for a tarp shelter, campsite, fire pit and video shoot.

In this section, the five runaways keep themselves entertained with non-linguistic games. Snow White stumbles upon the camp, an outsider to their outside. Hilarity ensues.
In section two, the wild child will be captured, separated from the camp, and taken to a Lab/Classroom by a scientist/teacher/film director. The chorus will come to the forefront in this section, rhyming and playing off the repetitive interactions between teacher and child.
The third section will dissolve into mediated abstraction and noise band. This section, the Horror Movie, will tell a story of acculturation and spectacle.
In the coda, we enter a home where a Seance is being held, in an attempt to communicate with the now-dead child. Here, games of entrainment and possession allow a message to be imprinted onto magnetic tape.

The Games in Children's Games

2011-03-11T23:54:00.001-08:00

Knucklebones Playing with dolls

Doll’s house Altar games

Owl and owl coop Pop-gun

Masking Swinging

Whirligig Blowing soap bubbles

Cap of rushes Play with a bird

Rattle Stone, stone on the leg

Baptismal procession Blindman’s bluff

Child’s stool Odds or evens

Paper scissors rock Hot potato

Hobbyhorse Hand seat

Playing drum and flute Stirring a mudpie

Rolling a hoop Girl’s hoop

Call down a bung hole Rocking a barrel

Running with a pig’s bladder Lift

How many horns does the goat have? Playing store

Making pigment from bricks A brick

Mumblety-peg Bricklaying

Pulling hair Finding fireflies

Run with a cake Round the blind man

Leapfrog Tug-of-war

Running the gauntlet Turning somersaults

Head stands Turning cartwheels

Climb over a fence Ride on the fence

Bridal procession Blind pots

Walk on stilts Blind hood

Skittles or marbles Twirl around

Walk on high stilts Swing on the fence

Hang on the fence Balance a broom

Pickaback Piggyback

Hide and seek Spinning tops

Spinning tops Who sits here in the blue tower?

Rattle Windmill tournament

Digging a well Jumping over sandbags

King of the Castle? Jumping over sandbags

Here we go round the mulberry bush Twirling

Climbing trees Swimming with a bladder

Bathing one’s feet Swimming along the shore

Before or after the swim Throwing a ball against the wall

Defecating Bowling with knucklebones

Hockey Skittles

Hare and hound Badger the bear

Frog in the middle Climbing a wall

Fighting Hitting the wall

Procession game Follow the leader

Go on a visit First one there

Follow the leader Push someone off the bench

Piggyback No English equivalent

Horse Bayard and the four Heemskindern

St. John’s Fire Dragging trees for St. John’s Fire

Carrying torches Singing at doors

Wandering Joy pennant

St. Nicholas baskets

Seeking performers

2011-03-02T16:08:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for actors/performers to play feral children/teenage runaways for the video sections of Children's Games.

Performers should be willing to develop material and be flexible in responding to a variety of methods, including scores, actions, sounds and scripts.

Auditions and rehearsals will begin in April, shooting begins in June.
Chosen performers will receive a modest fee and portfolio materials upon completion. Some performers may continue with the project, including the live performance in October 2011.

Please respond to s_nehil@yahoo.com with your performance resume (if any) and headshot by March 31st.

Films about children...

2011-02-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

Watching all of the movies I can find about evil, possessed and feral children has been a strange and sometimes tedious undertaking. It has become something of an absurd completist hobby, but I'm looking for larger patterns, or for those moments when a flash of beauty or meaning is revealed. I've seen some arguably terrible films (Alice, Sweet Alice and Don't Look Now - horror films from the 70s can be pretty risky), some enjoyable classics (The Bad Seed, Lord of the Flies, Village of the Damned, Poltergeist), and I've revisited some beautiful and profound films (The Wild Child).

Many of the films contain a scene or two that inspires a connection, or moments that seem like they could be usefully misremembered (The Changeling). "Misremembering" is a helpful tool in gathering and developing material for Children's Games. Most recent movies are too stylized or self-aware to be used in this way (The Orphan).
Occasionally, a film is extremely close to my core topic, in a surprising way. Dogtooth (dir. Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009) is a film that approaches a feeling at the heart of my project, deeper than any surface features of scary children or identifiable genre.

This beautiful, risky film overlaps with many of the issues I've been exploring - education as violence, protection and risk, the borders between children and adults, narrative as control, the use of games and boredom, connections between language and perception. It also succeeds in feeling horrific without utilizing horror genre signifiers or clichés. It achieves this through bizarre (but entirely possible) behavior, striking (but subtle) stylistic exaggerations, and perverse (but sometimes sensual) sexual energy.
A film like this is not "material", but rather a kindred world.
"...these things you might have seen in a different way, there’s something you might have recognized in them, but this thing gets distorted..." - Lanthimos, from this interview.

Some other movies I've checked off my list:
Kill Baby... Kill!
The Innocents
Children of the Corn
The Brood
Who Can Kill a Child?
Suggestions are always appreciated.

The game is on...

2010-12-22T17:56:00.001-08:00

Children's Games received a RACC project grant for 2011!

A few excerpts from the proposal:

The goal of Children’s Games is to produce a rich musical experience that is simultaneously dramatic and allegorical. After several years of collaborating with choreographers and dance companies, I am passionate about exploring a challenging, idiosyncratic and hybridized use of the theater to create a work somewhere between music concert, cinema and performance art. My primary impulse for this work is a deep concern for the ways in which corporate, big-budget fantasy images are increasingly colonizing and replacing undirected, self-motivated, small-scale play in both children and adults. Children’s Games will dramatize this struggle in an allegory of the movie-theater audience as willingly infantilized, hypnotized and receptive to dominant ideologies. Using cinematic images against themselves, I will deconstruct their effects, allowing viewers associative and imaginative freedom.

The piece will be comprised of four distinct layers: 1) a large HD video projection with stereo sound, 2) a ten-person mixed-voice choir, 3) several synchronized video monitors, and 4) a live electronic band. Each of these four zones will contain a series of "games" - scores or procedural devices that result in rhythmic and narrative behavior. Distributed throughout the performance space, individual games will overlap and interact. Organized by rhythm and intensity rather than narrative and character, Children´s Games will expand and contract, drifting from solo voice to full choir, from a single video to a dense interplay of cinema, sound effects and evocative electronic songs. Merging media and expanding the definition of music, this performance will celebrate the associative, fragmentary and irrational aspects of imaginative play.

Children´s Games will be an adventurous work filled with haunting images, vivid compositions and strange sounds. Drawing on research into film theory, cognitive science, the loss of play in children, catharsis and special effects, I will examine the power of narratives to shape our view of the world, and argue for the independence and freedom to play.

Perfectly Imperfect

2010-12-05T22:19:00.000-08:00

After watching Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977) for the third time, I have a few thoughts about why it remains so interesting... How is it that Argento never again matched the audio-visual shock of this film? While obviously sensationalist, stiffly acted and generally absurd, every scene in this movie displays an idiosyncratic approach to editing, sound and set design. Like many viewers, I am amazed by the film's confident, over-the-top beauty and grotesquery. Intensely artificial, Suspiria produces a Brechtian distance that I find thoroughly enjoyable. Cinematic effects are emphasized at the cost of coherence. While some of these eccentricities may be the result of low budgets or technical limitations, I find it more interesting to treat them as intentional - stylistically or conceptually purposeful.

Suspiria is sometimes attacked as being overly stylized, or stylized at the cost of content. However, it’s exactly this excess that I like - the way the film so obviously reveals itself as a machine for producing effects. The first thing we notice is the use of overly theatrical lighting - intense reds, blues and greens sculpt space and create chromatic drama. This is apparently a tradition among Italian giallo directors, as demonstrated in a much earlier film, Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964).

Argento amplifies the color to an even greater degree, emphasizing its garish and cartoon-like possibilities. We first encounter ballet student Suzy Banyon in the generic modernist space of an airport where the pools of primary color seem out of place. We immediately know that something is very wrong...

The same excess could be noted in the editing style of this first sequence. As Suzy leaves the airport, Argento abruptly cuts to a close-up of the automatic door’s pneumatics. The edit feels similar to the three-shot “salvo” in the “Dead Dan” sequence of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

While Hitchcock reserves this technique for the climactic moment of his film, in Suspiria it is unmotivated, and the significance is unclear. Suzy’s world is presented as one in which ordinary objects and encounters are overloaded with unexplained dread. The effect peels away from meaning and the edit becomes a stylistic device.

Sam Raimi plays a similar game with the viewer in Drag Me to Hell (2009), for example in a scene where a white handkerchief “attacks” the windshield of a car, animated by a sharp edit and a blast of "stinger" music.

By quickly deflating itself, the moment reveals how shock is unrelated to content and is instead simply a collection of techniques, designed to manipulate audience response. Raimi invites us to observe our own reactions and to laugh at the silliness of how easily we can be controlled. Argento, on the other hand, maintains a serious, even maudlin tone throughout. The same jump-cut technique is again used as Suzy rides in a taxi through the rainy night. Streams of blue water rush noisily into a sewer grate and we are left wondering – what is the significance of this shot? Should we pay special attention? Will the theme of water be developed later? Does the shot explain something about Suzy’s mental state? In the end, it seems only to emphasize a universal dread - a sense that the banal world has become filled with antagonistic ill-will.

Such antagonism is pervasive and can also be found in Suzy’s interactions with other characters. While she seems to be a sincere and well-meaning young woman, the residents of this unidentified German town are snide, ironic, rude, demanding and aggressive. Their attitude seems so entirely unprovoked that we have to wonder where it comes from. Are we witnessing the subjective view of a paranoid schizophrenic?

This transformation of the “normal” world reminds me of a description of physical exhaustion on Radiolab. As a long-distance biker pushes past his bodily limits, his mind revolts and hallucinations emerge, creating a final burst of desperate adrenaline. It also reminds me of the spooky forest sequence in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), in which the limbs of trees transform into monstrous claws, clutching at Snow White’s dress as she flees. This animation, a direct inspiration for Argento, itself
was based on classic horror films such as Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931).

The soundtrack by Goblin is another strong component of the film, and one much noticed by fans. There are a number of things that make the soundtrack unusual, beyond the groovy psychedelic music itself. First, we notice how prominent the music is, and how quickly it takes over. The soundtrack often subsumes the image and these sequences begin to feel like a music video. Apparently, the music was often played loudly on the set to put the actors in the appropriate mood (a technique David Lynch also employs). In the first sequence of the film, Argento cuts between tracking shots of Suzy in the airport, and shots from her perspective. With matched sound edits, the music is associated to Suzy’s point of view - but why? It continues through her rainy taxi journey, and returns again and again throughout the course of the movie. These manipulations of intensity are impressive and, like many of the other elements, incoherent. Where do these layers of creepy voices and demonic growls reside? They create an ambiguous space – more than soundtrack, but not quite diagetic. Overall, this excess has a tendency to flatten the film. Rather than building toward moments of violence, the entire atmosphere is suffused and equalized.

I’m also intrigued by the ambiguous role of the “band” Goblin. Too moody to really succeed outside the context of Argento’s films, and yet too forceful to operate as simply supportive emotional soundtracking, Goblin are stuck between the world of fiction and the real world.

There are other pleasurable discomforts in the sound design of Suspiria. Many of the sound effects are over-loud or over-close. The voice dubbing displays the infamous Italian tendency towards looseness, and many of the vocal affectations (accents, etc.) are ambiguous and exaggerated. The editing of dialogue reveals strange shifts in acoustics, moving inconsistently between various amounts and types of reverberation in a single scene. The acting itself feels both stilted and hyperbolic. I often have the impression that actors are reading their lines from scripts.

An additional distance is created in the lack of appropriateness in the script itself. Apparently, the lines were originally written for ten-year old actresses. When it was decided that the film was too violent for such young actresses, the script was not revised to reflect adult attitudes. Thus we have actresses who don't "fit" their lines, adult women who act like children, and a feeling that the dialogue splits away from the "reality" of a scene. This distance between the voices and their on-screen bodies again creates a beautiful artificiality.

Finally, one must comment on the outrageous geometry of the sets, with their art-nouveau curves and sinuous lines. In combination with the dramatic, richly-colored lighting, these over-embellished floral patterns and contrasting ornamentations produce a refracted, gothic, interior world. The consistency and zeal with which Argento decorates this film is excessive. Scopophilic pleasures are encouraged and in many ways become their own separate (even dominant) plotline. It’s worth noting that characters in Argento’s films are often killed by pieces of art. Is there a thesis here about the dangers of beauty?

Reality / Parody

2010-11-22T18:28:00.000-08:00

"It doesn't matter how real or true the facts are; the issue is how something that somebody says is transformed into something that will change the world. (...) That happens a lot in oral communication. I can say something - it doesn't matter if it's true or not - but your reaction and the emotion it generates within you are real. (...) The actual facts are not important but the consequences of what is said are real and tangible. I feel this way about the world in general. (...) Reality is not something that exists but something that we have constructed, and since we have made it, we can also remake it differently."
- Lucrecia Martel, in conversation with Haden Guest, Bomb Magazine, Winter 2009

"It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form."
- George Bataille

Allegory

2010-11-13T14:32:00.000-08:00

"Allegory resists fantasies of strictly teleological history in favor of fleeting instants where "meaning" is forged between past and present, in "the depths that separate visual being from meaning"."
- Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, quote from Benjamin, The Origin of German Drama

I'm becoming more interested in allegory as a means of structuring narrative, and this has been leading me into new research. I like how, in allegory, everything can be something other than what it is, or what it seems. Horror films lend themselves to this kind of reading, as symbols, stand-ins, replacements for the "unrepresentable". I am choosing to create a (mis)understanding that all horror films are 'actually' about the act of watching movies. I want to to read horror films (specifically those films that involve children) as allegories of spectatorship. I like this exaggerated sense of metaphor, the intersection of repression and fear, the formative trauma of childhood, the imbalances of power. But also the sense of play, the knowledge that "it's only a movie".
If I have a tagline for Children's Games (the way movies do), it will be "Narrative is a game we play with our bodies."

I am stuck in between the idea of making cinema and the idea of making music about cinema. As my music becomes more like a soundtrack (arranged rhythmically), I want to make videos that are more like music (arranged as a soundtrack). In any case, the conceptualizations for these videos are becoming more elaborate, to the point where I'll probably have to ask for help from a professional. As I imagine them now, I will need a soundstage, actors, lights. For example, I would like to shoot all of the 'scenes' against a rear projection screen. This will allow me to have two layers of camera work, and a disassociation between setting and action. I recently watched the original Godzilla and loved the obviously fake (yet still spectacular) array of special fx, including rear projection. What if the rear projection includes its own close-ups, edits, pans, etc., and is brought into active conflict with the shots? I am interested in pushing the artificiality of the video to the point where it can be read as something other than narrative - music. I am in awe of the moments where actual narrative films do this - scenes from Guy Maddin (especially Arcangel) or Lucrecia Martel come to mind.

What's been happening?

2010-11-01T20:29:00.000-07:00

It's been almost four months since my last post (how did that happen?) so I thought I would spend some time describing what I've been doing.

Work on Children’s Games is moving slowly, mostly on hold in anticipation of - fingers crossed – funding, but thinking about the piece has continued. Recently, research has included Nietzsche on the Dionysian and studies of feral children... I am now convinced that the work will need to go in two directions, perhaps simultaneously. First, I'm imagining a series of installation “clusters”, using video projection, television monitors and speakers. This mode can allow a non-linear, looping sensibility, with random intersections between elements. It has the advantage of being transportable and of having the possibility to exist within the gallery realm. These clusters would be a way of testing material, following tangents or developing ideas that may eventually find their way into the second stage - that of the performance. I'm now realizing that the project will require much more elaborate video shoots that I previously planned. I have a dozen scenes sketched out or scripted, and I’m now starting to think about strategies for gathering material, technical and creative resources. I am most excited about working with rear projection screens and actors.

Secondly, I’ve been making music for a new band, a project that involves Taryn Tomasello and Gabi Villasenor on vocals. Formed over the summer as Crippled Athlete, we've played one show as a noise duo, and another show as a trio, with all new material that I might describe (tentatively) as "psychedelic noise dubstep". This music has furthered a fascination with vocal sounds and percussive textures that I began in Flock & Tumble and continued on Knives. It's been fun and a bit strange to work in a format that resembles the structure of a traditional band, something I haven't done since Alial Straa in the mid-90s. The music I've been making is quite a bit more condensed and forceful than past work, with electronic and acoustic drums, distorted layers, and other effects. I hope that the band will eventually exist in the "real world" as well as participating in Children’s Games. Here's a rough mix of a new track that will eventually include vocals.

breeze by Seth Nehil

I’ve also been continuing work on the cut paper pieces (see above), and working towards proper documentation of my last three years of visual work. I was recently nominated for the PortlandNW Contemporary Arts Awards (along with about 300 others), which has provided the needed pressure to rebuild my website, a long overdue task. On the new site, I'll represent my drawings in a more vigorous way, and elaborate on how my sound work has shifted toward performance in the last four years. Look for that soon!

Speaking of online activity, I've been writing for Intransitive magazine. Several interviews are underway, including conversations with Oregon Painting Society, Sean Griffin, and Micah Silver, among others. These articles will appear over the next few months.

Irrational Degradation

2010-07-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

My increasing attraction to gothic, hyperbolic and parodic rhetoric has me reading an excellent biography of George Bataille by Stuart Kendall. I've read the pornographic novels Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon, but Bataille's theoretical works have remained somewhat impenetrable. This brief summary of his ideas has me underlining every other sentence. I'm drawn to these elaborate, knotted and knotty words: lacerations, corrosive, monstrous, sacrificial...
Some juicy tidbits:
"It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form." "A derivative work merely copies a respected original; a parody degrades that original with mocking mimicry, assaults its absent and abandoned authority. Parody is the literary equivalent of transgression, upholding as it undermines." "Materialism is above all the obstinate negation of all idealism, which amounts to saying, finally, of the basis of all philosophy." "Base matter 'refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these [ideal human] aspirations'." "'I submit myself entirely to what must be called matter, since that exists outside of myself and the idea.' Base materialism is a corrosive sense of matter, one in which form ruins."
I've always been interested in extremes, seeking out those areas that push against, struggle with, reject, distort and interrogate the status quo - perhaps as a balance or foil to my lack of actual activity in such areas, my generally placid exterior. (Though I'm increasingly worried that bitterness and aggression leak through my social anxiety...) At any rate, it remains a theoretical interest in extremities, except perhaps in art practice.
Using extremes in work is a difficult proposal, however. How does a piece simultaneously invite and assault? The accusation of difficult work is that it excludes and is exclusive. Two impulses battle within my desire - that of appealing among a wider audience, which rubs against my own tastes in repetition, intensity, ugliness and confusion. Hopefully this friction can be productive. It creates a quivery feeling in my gut, a feeling of pushing against invisible (and therefore all the more resistant) walls. The difficulty of adapting the preverbal (or even precognitive) impulses into a clear, strong voice. A cloud that rests just beyond the reach of fingertips.
My favorite work remains uncompromising, theatrical, obsessive, elliptical... and obscure. Robert Ashley, Jerry Hunt, Costin Miereanu, Catherine Sullivan. I've been thinking more and more how my favorite artistic experience is one of unresolved confusion. A kind of sustained, elevated inability to make sense of things, suspended within formal precision and aesthetic integrity. The longer a work can resist my mind's struggle to find or impose coherence, the more I'm interested in returning, thinking and exploring.
Plunging into the dark shit which animates and balances the dynamic of existence.

Furl!

2010-05-24T14:21:00.000-07:00

New full-length CD out now from Sonoris. With a beautiful 3-panel sleeve featuring the photography of Harrison Higgs. From the press release:
Furl is the sequel to Seth Nehil’s critically acclaimed 2009 release Flock & Tumble, also on Sonoris. Continuing his exploration of physically charged, acousmatic sound, these compositions whip, crash, swoop, glide and burble. Clusters of bell-like tones pierce hazy, corroded atmospheres. Animalistic yelps, distant pings, percussive bursts and glassy swells all merge in this unique sound-world. These five pieces are both rigorously-assembled and gracefully sparse. Furl will be a welcome addition to the expanding catalogue in Nehil’s futuristic organic paradox.

Write to me directly at s_nehil(at)yahoo(dot)com to order.

Variations on a theme

2010-05-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

Two more from ongoing explorations. Not bored yet...

Chiasmus

2010-05-19T12:45:00.000-07:00

I started mapping the network of associations around Children's Games, which is still growing.
This research feels like a process of expansion and contraction - edges become blurred, interests become dispersed, everything connects, and then boundaries are drawn, pieces are defined, and specific connections become more important than others. I would say that any of the actual work exists on (or draws energy from) the paths between these nodes. It's becoming clear that "Narrative as control" is the pervasive concept - the atmosphere within which the entirety exists. I ask questions to create a friction and produce a spark. Clearly, since Aristotle and Plato were also debating the role of catharsis, an answer is not likely forthcoming!
Most recently, I have identified the rhetorical device of the chiasmus as an important structural concern, one which could rest at a deep substratum. The chiasmus highlights a mutually embedded, paradoxical relationship between terms. And what a beautiful word!
Suggestions for further nodes of research are appreciated...

Why children? Why now?

2010-05-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

Blue Book Tile by Gabriel Liston

I've been circling around the motif of the child. I've been thinking about how the world of children could be seen as separate and parallel to the adult world. I find it both difficult and intriguing to try and experience or remember the child's state of mind. I've been trying to place myself in some of those memories - the way everything seemed within the impressionability of a lack of experience.
Where these states of adulthood and childhood push against each other, there exists an interesting narrative space. The "Child" is a concept - an invention of adults. The subtitle of a book I haven't read (yet) suggests there is an "impossibility of children's fiction". That is, the dynamic is always unbalanced because children can't write books to define their own experience (though there are likely some interesting examples of collaboration). There is always a power dynamic, and children are subjected to (and desire) the narratives told to them by adults. These narratives seduce, they organize the world, give it coherence. They also simplify, limit and distort. One of the things that's interesting and vulnerable about being a child is not knowing where the possible ends and the impossible begins. I remember the delicious feeling of believing (or allowing belief) in what is known to be a story - that strong desire for there to really be a world inside the wardrobe.
I've also been thinking about the way the space of childhood is increasingly colonized by adults who arrange and plan children's time. This is also a loss of wild spaces of the mind. There exists a widespread discussion about the loss of play in children (just google it). It's becoming apparent that unstructured time is being replaced by the "playdate" and other highly structured activities such as video games. Various entities want control over the bodies and minds of children - schools, parents, and not least the force of capitalism, which searches for any opportunity to transform experience into consumption. Unmeasured and "wild" experience is domesticated by brand bonding as early as diapers and chew toys.

Wherever I explore, many others have been before, and a network of thought seems to recognize connections everywhere.
One connection: I rented The Black Stallion the other day (because of the Alan Splet credit) and was pleasantly surprised. The film echos some of these themes of wildness and domestication. It seems to belong to another time, before product tie-ins and movies as a "franchise" (though I guess there was a sequel). It's quite a beautiful movie, filled with close-ups, textures and fragments, as the young boy Alec enters a dream-world through the portal/nightmare of a ship crash and island stranding. The narrative plays out in a child-logic way, fulfilling a fantasy of becoming-animal which seems to operate along mythic structures. It takes impossible leaps, from ship to desert island to small-town America, from the rustic stable to the energy of the racetrack.
The horse and the boy are analogues for each other throughout the film. On the ship, something in Alec recognizes and identifies with the horse - restrained by ropes and forced into a cell. On the island, both become wild. Alec cuts the ropes which have entangled the Stallion, setting it free. He eats seaweed, sleeps in a cave and roams the island almost naked. Eventually, the boy and horse bond - by taming the horse and wilding the boy.
Back in civilization, it's a difficult transition. Alec falls asleep in the back yard, as if the bed is no longer familiar. Following the runaway horse, he wanders through night time streets and curls up in an alley. He finds "The Black" through a kind of divining intuition, and an oblique riddle delivered by a "wise old black man" (the mystical Other). He finds the stable, which is guarded by an angry owner/ogre who, when confronted, turns into a kindly old man. Opening a hidden door, he discovers a dusty room of racing trophies and old photographs, a place of tradition and learning. Alec's obsession with the horse feels like a wish for control, a desire to replace the dead father, and now he's found a paternal place. Continuing the process of merging, both horse and boy are trained and domesticated into a horse/boy machine. "Don't take the wild out of that horse," the old black man warns ominously, and some disaster seems imminent. Will there be terrible consequences from this diminishment and control, restraining and directing the primal force of the Stallion? The Black fights and is injured, but they win the race and the movie ends happily (and suddenly) in a haze of wish fulfillment.

Another connection: I just bought two of Gabriel Liston's Blue Book Tiles. I've been admiring them for years, and was spurred by the show at NAAU that just ended. The paintings: two children burying another child in a pile of leaves, and a girl with a dead mouse on a shovel. His images feel like uncolonized child space, moments from future memory, embedded with the feeling of deep impressionability. (And they're appropriately Bruegel-esque for my tastes.)
As I'm thinking about this loss of undefined space, I've also wondered about the loss of boredom. As the market colonizes experience with endlessly absorbing brand-associated narratives and takes over liminal spaces such as vacant lots, children lose the opportunity for boredom, danger and unsurveilled play. In Gabriel's paintings, events happen with a lack of adult supervision - children in the process of figuring it out for themselves, getting hurt, inventing things. The other day, I mentioned my ideas about the need for more spaces of boredom in class, and a student led me to this appropriate quote (which he found by randomly opening a notebook):

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.” - Walter Benjamin

Oh, right. That's why we need boredom.

Pluripotential

2010-04-30T12:27:00.000-07:00

Sreshta Premnath is one of the smartest people I know. His magazine Shifter is smart too. And not just because he asked me to contribute to the latest issue on the subject of Pluripotential. You can download a complete pdf of the issue here. Sreshta requested scores, instructions and similar materials, and I took the opportunity to notate some of my ideas for Children's Games (After Bruegel), as a set of procedures for realizing independent sections.
I don't usually score pieces before engaging an experiential process. In the past, I relied primarily on recorded structures, oral transmission, rehearsal, a few sketches. I tend to distrust my imagination to accurately render the results of complex interactions. Creating these as scores which, to some degree, accept the results of their imperative, has been part of a larger shift or experiment in my process. In the few months since writing these, my ideas have continued to drift and I've added several more sections, modified others.
I see each of these sections as independent, recombinant, interlocking, possibly overlapping. They could be shown separately or together, in various combinations, and as exhibition, installation, or performance. Which has led to something of a crisis in terms of defining what it is... I could even imagine some of them existing only as proposals.
I'm interested in each of these sections as a node or point along a route of investigation, as evidence of intellectual or conceptual drift. It feels good to follow the tangents of research, but at some point unity will become an issue (or not?). It feels good to indulge in conceptual speculation, but at some point I will need to encounter the translation to participation and actuality. It's going to stay undefined for a while.

The Swamp

2010-04-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

(spoiler alert - this entry reveals important plot details.)
I've been watching horror films lately, but it's often difficult to explain what I see in them. I tend to look 'through' the films, viewing them with a lens that filters specific information. The "wrong" elements are usually the most interesting - poor dubbing, flat acting, disassociative editing, incomprehensible plots.
Thanks to a well-timed suggestion, I've been been immersed in the brilliant, unique world of Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel. All three of her films are amazing, but I've been particularly inspired by her first feature film, La Cienaga (The Swamp). I see this film as a potent meditation on the relationships between horror cinema, "real life" and representation. It takes all of the best things about horror films and accomplishes them without the fantastic, supernatural, or bizarre. It's the normalcy of La Cienaga that makes it terrifying. Here we have the internalized horror of daily life, the small perversions, widespread violence and embroidered visions that make up an ordinary texture.
The result is a parody (in the best possible sense) of horror’s focus on effects. We see this beautifully in the first scene, the first shot of shaking hands pouring blood red wine, the melting font of the opening titles, the too-loud sounds of clinking, the fragmented shots of aged bodies and the disturbing screech of disintegrating chairs dragged across poolside concrete by drunken "zombies". Sounds and gestures that would usually derive from moody superimposition are here the result of ordinary occurrence (while still understood to be stylized and "constructed"). ‘Pit’ music is absent throughout the film, while the plausible sounds of thunder, gunfire and dogs are musicalized, repetitive and ominous. This sequence builds to a minor bloody anticlimax which, in the style of Bresson, is heard, not seen, and accompanied by the film’s one and only example of nondiagetic sound – a piercing graceful ring that follows the sound of shattering glass.

As with all of Martel’s movies, La Cienaga drops us into a teeming, complicated set of relationships, without explanation. The adults are ineffectual and scatterbrained while the teenagers are hyper-sexualized and feral. A sense of torpor and horizontality dominates -sticky summer air, fetid pools, afternoon naps. A group of boys prowl the mountains with guns. We experience this world as a slight disorientation through voyeuristic subjectivity. We are always left to wonder if we impose our own perversities onto the relationships. Edits are placed to ambiguate events, leading us to suspect or misinterpret. Every time we become certain, something intervenes to destabilize.

While vampires and demons are absent, there are other destructive myths playing through these character’s lives. Namely, a pervasive racial prejudice the upper-middle class family expresses against the racially “inferior” Indians with whom they are intertwined. This is a strange power game - dependent and dismissive, attracted and accusatory, arbitrarily lazy and blaming, or cruelly suspicious and inflammatory. The daughter is obsessed with the maid, alternating between sexual prayer and recrimination. Playing against this distrust is a continuously televised sighting of the Virgin Mary by a poor family on the outskirts. The dialectic reminds me of Michael Taussig’s thesis in Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, which shows the potent mixture of fear, oppression and mystical power that accompanies a mythology of the “other”. The casual racism of La Cienaga is truly horrifying.

This is a very difficult film to reduce - each interaction feels both deeply symbolic and totally mundane. Everything is important, but a simple listing of moments in sequence would communicate nothing. The pacing maintains an ongoing and dispersed state of dread. At several points, amidst the half-sleep and lethargy, we are led to expect something terrible – something that never quite happens. Finally, in the movie’s last moments, it crystallizes. We know the innocent young boy is going to explore his fear of “African Rats”, climb a ladder and fall to his death. We know it, and still it happens. The anticlimax of this event is strangely horrible and again, heard rather than seen. Instead of “showing all” and focusing on the sensationalism of gore, we encounter accidents as inevitabilities - average misunderstandings, common deformations and standard neglect. This is the opposite of a horror movie, and/or the most interesting horror films I’ve yet seen.

Lucrecia Martel discusses her appreciation of Horror cinema here. "LM: I always work with some elements of horror. I love the dissolution of reality in horror films. The lack of certainty, and the lack of security. What are you seeing? What are you hearing?"

New Objects

2010-04-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

Sound Aspects of Material Elements

2010-04-07T16:43:00.000-07:00

John Grzinich's 57 minute video, Sound Aspects of Material Elements will be premiering at the Calgary International Film Festival next week. I had a chance to preview the film on DVD, and to play it for two of my classes recently, with John visiting. Given our history of collaboration and my ongoing studies of sound and moving image, I thought it would be interesting to narrate my impressions of this work.

Sound Aspects is a unique film, driven by sound, an elegant collection of acoustic location explorations over a three-year period. Static shots record open landscapes, blowing grass and drifting clouds, slight manipulations of abandoned and natural objects, solo engagements with architectural structures, duos and occasionally larger groups of participants “playing” simple found materials, with an emphasis on the resonant properties of tubes, wires, wind and water. In each case, all sounds are sourced within the location, augmented and activated through simple acoustic techniques – dependent on portable equipment which can mix or amplify. Each “situation” becomes an instrument, each “place” is approached as a rich source of sonic matter.

The film is interesting in its formal severity, a repeating structure. A black screen is bathed in continuous sound, and a sudden flash reveals the source of what we hear. This shot is held, or a series of related shots provide dramatic views and close-ups of contiguous space. Gently, the image fades to black, and within or around these black zones, a period of sonic overlap connects two regions. We listen in darkness until another image flashes on the screen, revealing a new source. Very slight variations in overlap and pacing heighten attention to sonic bridging (the anticipation of events through sound) as well as timbral relationships between sound-worlds. The film unfolds slowly, with each beautifully framed, unhurried static shot allowing movement to pass through. The images are crisply filmed in rich grays and blacks, which tend to equalize diverse landscapes and seasons.

Sometimes the source of the sound is evident, occasionally it is tangential or implied. Like many of John’s studio compositions, the sound is multi-layered, complex and continuous. It makes use of a kind of restlessness inherent in natural forces – the movement of water or wind, swaying branches, crackling snow. There is not, however, an overemphasis on “nature” as an idealized or separate realm. The fringes of rural Estonia provide many intermediate spaces – a territory that is utilized and activated in this project.

Sound Aspects is also interesting for its particular engagement with image-sound relationships. As an object of ‘sound art’, it negates or sidesteps a widespread fascination with acousmatic sounds (those heard without seeing a source). Here, nothing is hidden – there is a one-to-one relationship between sound and image. This showing or explication of the recording situation immediately diminishes an obvious sense of mystery (one which accompanies many field-recording based compositions) and replaces it with something much less obvious. At the same time, the technology works to reveal the unheard, to listen into materials, and to allow us what John calls a "nonhuman perspective". This is a refreshing mode, and it reminds one of the feeling of discovery. Sound Aspects demonstrates its own making, and yet is more than simply a demonstration.

I remember a conversation John and I had many years ago, when we imagined a composition in which each sound source would be documented, along with its subsequent manipulations, combinations or edits. We wanted to reveal the work behind the sounds, both as a way of observing for our own learning, and as a way of demystifying the sound production. Sound Aspects has found a way of accomplishing this idea through a dramatic simplification and limitation of the process. This simplicity is deceptive, for any number of reasons.

Field recording based composition often exists in a relationship to contextual information (or its lack). Lacking information, we listen closely for materializing sound indices to give us knowledge about the type of objects, their weight and density, or the acoustics of a space, and so on. If we are given information (recording notes, photographs, etc.), the recordings operate as a kind of signifier - a stand-in for an unknown location. We are put into the situation of imagining distant (often exotic) places and the traversal of space by absent bodies.

As is often stated, all recordings are the result of a complex chain of technical factors and material decisions – the type of microphone, its proximity to any sources of sound, the acoustics of the space, movement of the source and/or mic, etc. (Not to mention technological factors on the reproductive end…) And, of course, recordings are often mixed or manipulated in extremely complex ways which obscure sources entirely. The common argument in favor of the acousmatic is a focus on “sound itself”, but each composition finds itself enmeshed within complicated negotiations with the absent. This can be both a pleasure and a distraction. Sound Aspects, besides showing the play of materials, also "plays" this border between the known and the unknown.

Because of this, the film finds itself somewhere between ‘sound art’ and cinema. Unlike most of cinema, only real-time sound capture is used. On the other hand, we feel a strongly and persistently disjunctive relationship between what is seen and heard, because of the unusual miking techniques. While the shots are wide to medium-length, placing the figures or objects into a setting, we hear something interior. We listen into spaces and materials through contact mics or small mics inside containers, tubes and vessels. These decisions amplify, magnify and distort the sonic landscape. It feels like existing at two scales at once, like looking at an x-ray of a place. Desolate Estonian fields, ramshackle barns, windswept telephone wires, nighttime fires, abandoned and corroded metal tanks or girders, rustling grass and plants, invisible stroking of wind, restless ripples of water.

Sound Aspects of Material Elements doesn’t illustrate, interpret or elaborate upon sound with images, it just shows - demonstrating the elements at play in a particular situation. The links between sound and image are more than just causal. They are the result of careful exploration, fine-tuned framing, and a delicate balance of the haphazard with the instigated. My favorite moment in the film is when a contact microphone, adapted with many fine metal filaments, is placed on an ant mound and played by hundreds of tiny ants that scurry around, carrying pine needles to and fro. The crackly sounds of their feet on the metal disc, the soft plinking of the metal rods, and the distant, complex rustle of the entire mound create an elaborate, satisfying moment. These small creatures are activating the environment, and this in turn feels similar to other sections - a group of people pressing tuning forks onto a metal surface, raindrops falling onto concrete, or branches randomly striking a wire fence. Each situation is both activated and intrinsically active. Ultimately, the film is about looking and listening closely, exploring the potential within environments and finding pleasure in play.

Children's Games (After Bruegel)

2010-03-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

I'm interested in Pieter Bruegel's Children's Games of 1560 for several reasons. First of all, I love Flemish painting of this period and Bruegel made some of my all-time most favorite images. I like the way this painting balances the minor dramas of many small groups interacting within the architectural or map-like surface of the entire canvas. Each cluster is arranged within a network that both separates and connects. This painting supports extended viewing and can unfold like a narrative as the eye moves from one game to the next, but without any set order. Again, the idea of a network describes this structure, the evenly distributed clumps receding into perspectival distance.
A sense of detail and humor dominates, but with a strangely ominous undertone. The theme of children as adults/adults as children and that of game as life/life as game produce a distinctly resigned attitude toward the follies of existence. A poem of the time states: "Play, even if it appears without sense/contains a whole world therein;/the world and its complete structure/is nothing but a children's game." (Jacob Cats, 1622). This could be the epigraph for my new performance/sound/video piece as it develops.
Occasional bursts of violence punctuate the activities. It reminds me how, in my own childhood, games were closer to torture than pleasure. I was hyper-aware of the way that, just under the surface of "good clean fun", there broiled the dynamics of competition, challenge and disappointment.
Additionally, I'm attracted to the idea of treating art-making or art activity as a game. The research, the building of the piece, the sets of rules or limitations, the interactions with others to produce the work, could all be seen as an elaborate game (one that is ultimately very serious and totally absurd). Thinking of the work as a game attunes it with the experimental - there is no one expected outcome, many possible outcomes.
In a strange loop, I remembered reading about Inuit vocal games, just as I was finishing the score for the first vocal research session and searched through my archives. Listening to these lovely short, hocketing vocal interactions between women is a good reminder of how great work can be impermanent, primarily social, and basically "not art". The recordings I have (Ocora label) mostly end with laughter. A reminder of how art activity should perhaps be called "play" rather than "work". I love this video:

The very first attempt to use ipods as a scoring device resulted in something quite interesting, though raw. I know there's a kernel of something I like here, but I don't know yet how to refine. Is it better to have more different loops or less? More voices or fewer?
More silence? More "singerly" voices or more "ordinary" voices? The next step will be to record individual voices and to work with those recordings, both as scores and as their own result.
vocal research 3/10 (take4) by Seth Nehil

Performance Aggression

2010-03-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

L - R: Emma Lipp, Elie Charpentier, Robert Burns, Theo Holdt, Sara Mapelli, Kelly Rauer.
Ideas have been slowly gathering since November for a new performance/video/sound work. A session last week allowed me to try out some ideas for using recorded prompts as a score, with vocal performers listening and responding to prepared parts. Research will continue on how best to utilize this tool, which I think must recognize its mechanical, isolating aspects.
My inspirations for this piece have circled around the connections between children's stories and horror cinema, and ideas about violent imagery. Some of these concerns were starting to emerge in Bandage A Knife - certainly the relationship between cinema and performance, issues of cinematic violence and the division of style and content. Linda's playful sensibilities tempered my darkness in a way that was right for that project. Now, working on my own, I find myself increasingly drawn to the gothic... I'm wanting to make a piece which is overtly, even relentlessly dark. Much of this feeling is based on a forgetting of various "pop culture" sources - remembering things only as I want to see them, diverting things, or actively perverting them. And, like Catherine Sullivan, curious about the symptoms these artifacts reveal (and those revealed in my own process). At this point, I'm following many tangents which lead to various avenues of research: Suspiria to Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to the Brothers Grimm to Grimm's law of linguistic drift, etc. But not the actuality of any of these single things. Each of them could easily be a dead end, one fully explored by other artists and other works. It's something else...

I'm interested in writing and posting more about this work in progress. I want to explore and reveal the conceptual substructure of this work as it develops. At the same time, I want to be careful about allowing ideas their unexpressed ambiguity. In the past, I've been fairly private about sources and materials, thinking that they would distract from the work itself. Now I'm realizing that even "stupid" details might help to invite people into the work. On the one hand, I'm thinking of, for example, the "post-breakup solitary Wisconsin winter cabin" narrative that is constantly told around Bon Iver's album. It's a story that is united with the materials, mood and character of the resulting music, but it's a sentimental story - an overlay. I'm interested in a narrative which might itself be generative material, a narrative that is definitely unsentimental.
An area I need to research more is the question of "distancing". One of things that fascinates me about some horror films is where they remain undeveloped and flat. They are not interested in the depth of inner space, but rather the use of sensations, and a material manipulation to create effects. The wonderful Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel mentions her appreciation of this aspect of horror films and, like her, I'm interested in work which allows the experiencer to sometimes think "I am watching this." To simultaneously observe the operation of affects, and to feel effects. I'm not sure where this might overlap with Brecht's ideas.
I want to strip the surface of the work, minimize the materials, concentrate the use of insistence and repetition, extend the span of attention, focus on physical rather than pathetic effects. I'm interested in making work that might be angry, even forcefully so, but somehow without alienating or insulting the audience. The aggression of horror films is often on the surface - I want to drive it inward, create an implosion.
I've been thinking about an aggression which is not (or not only) one of content but of form. For example, a piece like Morton Feldman's "For Stephan Wolpe" which is absolutely beautiful as a surface - soft and open, composed of delicate textures - but on a formal level is so aggressively open, unresolved and unsentimental. It rejects many of the assumptions about musical form, but does so with elegant materials. This paradox and the music's utter sincerity are (among other things) what makes the piece great.

Performance Videos

2010-03-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

So, as work begins on my new project, Children's Games (After Bruegel), I've finally started creating and uploading video excerpts from Bandage A Knife (2009) and Flock & Tumble (2008). Video can never quite capture the excitement and physicality of live performance, but at least this gives some sense of the goings-on. Many more coming soon!

Bandage A Knife excerpt two from Seth Nehil on Vimeo.

Knives LP out now!

2010-03-19T12:17:00.001-07:00

Senufo Editions One. Clear vinyl, letterpress insert and cover art on chipboard sleeve, handstamped, numbered edition of 180.
Contact me for pre-ordering.

Blades

2010-03-11T21:08:00.000-08:00

Always the same questions - when to stop and which way is up.

Opening!

2010-03-10T18:45:00.001-08:00

First Thursday, March 4th, In House Gallery and Project Space

"Nehil earns a “B-” for hanging what might be the first cohesive show at Everett Station in four years. That, and he also has pretty good style." - Tanner Dobson

Grassland Alphabet

2010-02-12T12:39:00.001-08:00

March 4 - 28, 2010

Opening Reception:
First Thursday, March 4th, 6-10 pm
Gallery Hours: Sundays 12 - 5 pm
Closing Reception:
Sunday, March 28, 6-8 pm

At the In House Gallery and Project Space
625 NE Everett St. #106 Portland, OR

These graphite drawings on paper from 2008 are calligraphic exercises - letter-forms constructed from waves and clusters of marks. I imagined a field of wheat attempting to form itself into words, a mute landscape swelling in the wind, blades of grass arranging and aligning themselves. The drawings were a pleasurable labor of repetition, feeling the softness and hardness of individual lines, layered in rhythm, feeling impressions on a surface while leaving residue, the forms bending under the pencil. Quiet drawings, these are landscapes gathered into bundles.

New Experiments

2010-01-14T21:38:00.000-08:00

...with cut paper and ink.
It's good to be back in the studio, just playing without results in mind. I'm increasingly (or continuously) interested in making work that feels fragile, temporary and simple. This has been a theme in my visual work for the last few years - wanting to get away from elaborate infrastructures of display - producing something that feels more humble (yet elegant). This is a quality I've always admired in Richard Tuttle's work - an approach that in his work is so extreme, it transforms into boldness. I like that transition.
I've also been interested in making objects that exist somewhere between drawing and sculpture. These paper-cuts are essentially two-dimensional, but they float and cast shadows in nice ways - they have a potential for dimensionality. They will likely each be hung with a single pin (as in this picture). I want to make others in which the ink warps the paper and gives it more shape. I've been inspired by Micronesian stick charts, something I first noticed in the Met.

These charts map ocean currents between the Marshall Islands for navigational purposes.

ridiculous

2009-12-09T13:24:00.001-08:00

I find this to be infuriating. Where does the arrogance come from that allows someone to think they deserve a $200,000 trip to the edges of space? This, to me, is the perfect example of an increasing distance between the outrageously privileged 1% and the rest of us. When there are people who have trouble affording a bus ride to work or food to eat, how can someone justify this inane waste of basic shared resources? What allows some people to view the world as their personal amusement ride?
I secretly hope for two things. One, that the first Virgin Galactic flight will pulverize in a flaming mass of molten shrapnel. Or two, that the coddled passengers will look back at our fragile planet and reach a deeply internal comprehension of the basic interconnections between their actions and all earthly inhabitants - the fact that their wasteful, irresponsible and ludicrous two-and-a-half hour fling has dire consequences for the other 99% of the planet. I know this is an arbitrary line to draw, as the super-rich amass greater and greater material wealth, collect houses, cars, yachts, and islands and revel in their disparity while occasionally soothing their guilt with philanthropic or eco-capitalist gestures - but really, this is over the top and obscene.
I also find statements such as this (as quoted in the NYT article) to be inherently misguided: “As humanity eventually moves to other planets and bodies throughout the solar system, we will of course fly into — and eventually live in — space.” This kind of idea, which has been standard fare among technocrats since the space race of the '60s (if not before), strikes me as a flagrant continuation of the colonialist fantasy. These ideas are based on a conception of the universe as conquest.
Is it not obvious how dependent any outer-terrestrial activity is upon basic earthly resources? Inhabitants of MIR are tethered to earth, at huge cost, and I believe, given the huge distances between heavenly bodies, we always will be. Do these adolescent fantasies of a gleaming Martian outpost really have any basis in human possibility? Personally, I like it here. We as a species have co-evolved in relationship with the planet and need to find a way to make it work here. This attitude of "Well, we've used up this one, let's move on." is, to me, offensive and wrong. I imagine a bedraggled group of survivors scraping the last crumbs of TVP out of a tin, while gazing longingly back at the wrecked shell of a pollution-choked earth.
Additionally, I strongly feel that resources should be allocated to observational rather than physical exploration of space. The amazing and paradigm-shifting discoveries of the Hubble telescope and related observational tools should be the focus of cosmic aspirations. I feel the goal of looking at and understanding our place in the universe - the building and revising of cosmological models - to be both necessary and urgent. This is an essentially different enterprise from those which attempt to spread and diversify human greed and conquest.

Bandage A Knife Review

2009-11-16T15:47:00.000-08:00

This wonderful review by Catherine Thomas was published in the Oregonian today: Incohesive 'Bandage' intensely cinematic: the production marries a choreographer's and composer's best. "perversely witty" - that's good.

I actually prefer the web title Prepare to be Disoriented in several mediums. "Incohesive" suggests unintentionality, while "disorienting" allows for the possibility of a purposefully fragmented structure, which Bandage a Knife certainly has. Anyway, the review is extremely attentive and discusses all the elements of the show - video, dance, sound, dialogue.

The performance was developed as a spinning out of various tangents from the source material. One of our goals was to experiment with all the different interactive possibilities we could imagine between live dance and recorded video, live voice and recorded sound and voice. That process resulted in a large number of "moments" - and then moments accreted to moments, with an intention towards maximum disjuncture. Threads, echos, mirrorings and repetitions provide a loose web of connections.

I think incorporating narrative elements within the context of dance was the most difficult aspect - perhaps for the audience as well. The lack of narrative consequence creates a possibly uncomfortable "no-man's land". It's a place I want to explore more.

Alongside this fragmented structure, the "performance within the performance runs parallel on a suspended television monitor. Kaj-anne Pepper's solo within the all-white dripping wet "weatherbox" was a single hour-long take. A bravura action for an intimate space and an (original) audience of three.

Here's another excellent review from Lisa Radon.

Field recording gear

2009-11-15T15:18:00.000-08:00

I don't usually write this kind of post, but I'm pretty excited about finally having a semi-professional field-recording setup. I'm now using a Marantz PMD671 with a pair of Sennheiser ME66/K6 shotgun mics in shockmounts with a stereo bar and a hand grip. (Beware of the kit, by the way, the shockmounts are NOT universal). I should say "will be using" as I haven't yet put this rig to the test. When I receive the backordered Gator broadcasting bag and the rechargable battery unit for the Marantz, I'll finally be ready for fully mobile, high-quality recordings.
I haven't been making too many so-called "field recordings" in recent years, largely because of my problems with the whole urban/rural dichotomy. Recordings made around the city are sure to include distracting automobile and airplanes sounds. Recordings in lightly rural or more wild areas get caught up in issues of "nature-ism" that I find equally distracting.
At the same time, I treat all of my recordings as "fields" - I have very rarely recorded in studios, and I'm always interested in the whole range of factors which might influence the acoustic character. The size of a room, the materials of the walls, the number of participants, the placement of the mics and sound source(s), the mediation of varying quality speakers or analogue distortions, and the choice of acoustic source itself, all influence the sound. That's why Shaeffer's solfege of musique conrete is an impossibility, as well as any comprehensive notation.

Anyway, I've briefly tested these new mics and I'm quite pleased. My next purchase will probably be a pair of ME62 omnidirectional capsules (the adaptability of the K6 series is pretty great). Eventually, I would love to own a pair of the Sennheiser MKH series, my dream mics at this point.
I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on battery-powered mic pre-amps to complete this current rig. Are they necessary? Is there anything that might come close to the Sound Devices mixpre?

Growth of the Author

2009-11-14T16:12:00.001-08:00

One of the things that draws me increasingly to performance-oriented work is the complexity of authorship. I do enjoy the isolated, private give-and-take of the studio experience, but collaboration tends to be more fun, more unpredictable and more unstable. And the result is more than can be contained by any one brain - a sharing and dispersal of responsibility.
A piece like Bandage A Knife (which runs for 5 more nights!) explores so many variations of authorship, it becomes quite difficult to determine a point of origin. Some moments, such as the trio of Anne, Kaj and Rebecca with mirror, flashlight and mirror came directly out of my notebook sketches and my scripted monologue, but were developed through improvisation with Linda and are brought to life in performance through Rebecca's intonation and Kaj's elaborate and absurd facial translations.

Some moments, such as the dialogue between Kaj (below the plywood) and Linda (standing on top) were developed through improvisation, but injected with my dialogue (which is itself an interpretation and extraction of the filmic source material). Other moments were written in a back-and-forth manner between Linda and myself, with much laughter. Laughter was used as an evaluative tool throughout.

A moment such as Rebecca with projected hand gestures and a percussive score depends heavily on my studio-based video and sound composition, carefully constructed (though again, the video was assembled from an editing of Linda's improvised gestures). Rebecca's hands-behind-back trajectory within that video/sound moment was then developed from my broad suggestions which asked for her interpretation.

I am thankful for Linda Austin's willingness to allow me to develop my own directorial ideas within the safety of her studio. And it was fascinating to observe the wide variety of methodologies which make up her own choreographic practice. These ranged from predetermined and taught movement, to suggestions for improvisation ("imagine your eyes are a camera"), to a kind of aleatoric mirroring ("catch my gestures as I improvise and assemble them into your own phrase") to free-form improvisation by the dancers, videotaped and then painstakingly relearned from the tape, among others. These elements then meet discussion, suggestion and editing from the directors and the group.

What makes this issue of authorship even more complicated is the way a distinct voice shines through such an enfolded and complex development. (A standard example being that of John Cage - if he's so interested in subverting the authorial ego to allow indeterminacy, why do his pieces always sound like his?) For this reason, it's understandable that Lisa Radon would mis-attribute moments from this piece in her thoughtful review. Linda's quirky movement and choreographic preoccupations with bodily awkwardness are suffused throughout the piece - and influenced me too. This raises the open question of how the dancers subsume their own bodies within the director's aesthetic, and to what degree they are "allowed" or willing to insert their own movement idiosyncracies. The meeting point is diffuse, complex and, to me, deeply interesting.

Within cinema - another highly collaborative form - it is somewhat understood how the cinematographer, sound designer and others operate within a directorial vision. What would Ingmar Bergman be without Sven Nykvist? I'm sure that each director and each film explores these relationships in variously shaded ways, but we at least know how to think about such structures.
Modern dance/performance work, on the other hand, seems to rely much more broadly on what Catherine Sullivan calls "unique methodologies". It seems that the author's role in this kind of work becomes one of providing frameworks for improvisation, contexts for material, strategies for assembly and, of course, a guiding voice and a kind of generalized "veto power". Authorship gathers, disperses and re-gathers within the unique methodology of a director, as each participant gives him or herself to the collective creative process.

photos by Michael Degutis

Gutierrez and Sullivan

2009-11-07T13:46:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about Miguel Gutierrez' Last Meadow since seeing it two months ago during the T:BA festival. I wrote a compressed, fractured and somewhat melodramatic description of it on the PICA blog (see below). It seemed useless to give a blow-by-blow account of a performance which was so centered in mood, repetition and groove.
In general, there seems to be something about the relationships between cinema and dance. There's an interesting tension between the repeatable and the ephemeral, the narrative and the abstract, the continuous and the montaged. These questions are certainly part of Bandage A Knife, and perhaps I was thinking through some of my own problems in response to Gutierrez' work. I loved the intensity of Last Meadow and its willingness to be dark.
I can feel myself getting darker. I continue to be drawn further toward genre film, but especially horror flicks. In some way, perhaps returning to my deep regard for transgressive images such as Passoloini's Salo, or my childhood experiences of seeing Dracula, King Kong and Phantom of the Opera for free in the University cinema. I always liked these archaic images which seemed so foreign and intriguing. I like the way form and content can seem to split apart and operate in parallel - the symmetry in each shot of Salo which intensifies and counteracts the brutality; the utterly artificial lighting and acting of Argento's Suspiria which is subsumed by mood.
Right now I'm feeling a real affinity for Catherine Sullivan's work, her manner of using source material, the way she has feet in cinema, theater and modern dance, the use of what she calls "vestigal narrative". I've been wondering how to bridge these realms, how to work in the cracks between, how to make something that belongs nowhere. This talk with her collaborators Dylan Skybrook and Sean Griffin is answering so many questions, and raising others that I hope to apply to new processes. I find she's taking the words out of my mouth.
I especially appreciated the discussion of accessibility and difficulty from around 1:10:00

I come very much from theater, and in theater you don’t have this highly directed gaze. Your eyes have the pleasure to wander and to enjoy things flickering peripherally. It’s about allowing yourself to give over to a landscape than it is looking at the installation and needing it to satisfy a kind of one-point perspective. It’s about how you look at images and what in the image is ambient or what is direct. So there’s a lot about the composition that tries to allow for, as I’ve said, the pleasure of the eyes to look the way they want to look. To me that says a lot about judgement. When you’re presented with a lot of information, the question you’re forced to ask yourself is “Well, what do I want to look at?” and that says something about your sensibility as a viewer.

At the same time, I wonder about the possibility of attention in a gallery setting. When I saw Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land at the Whitney biennial, I was unable to focus, a bit disoriented by the multiple screens, and feeling that I was unable to give the piece the time it required. Sitting down to take in a performance has a way of centering and allowing patience in a way that just doesn't happen for me in a gallery. Is there a special switch in the brain when an event has a set arc? We give in to the experience and can sensitize to its universe. (But maybe I just need(ed) to learn how to watch.)
Many of Sullivan's touchpoints are somehow dear to my heart - Poe, Muybridge, Tatsumi Hijikata - early interests that I've repressed because of the impression that narrative and melodrama should take a back seat to abstraction. Now it's all coming back. How does she have the courage to be this incredibly weird, this completely faithful to the process of collaboration, to the tenuous webs of meaning and to these beautiful images? I want to see more.

Here's my review from September:
Miguel Gutierrez & Powerful People Last Meadow

The script is a controlling device. The storyboard commands. The director is an egomaniac. The movie camera captures bodies within its lens, contains them -flattens them onto celluloid. Method acting infects actors like a germ, changing gestures, changing voices. Sometimes the role carries actors into a dark hole – they lose their edges, become the character, drive a car into a tree. There is a compulsion behind the machine of Hollywood, driving its makers into standard narratives, driving audiences into admiration and emulation. A nightmare of falseness. We forget that we are immersed in artificiality. Miguel Gutierrez wants to use the cinematic nightmare as an alarm clock.
Old age is frightened by youth. James Dean represented the uncontrolled force of the “juvenile delinquent” – the scary eroticism of Elvis’ hip shake, which reminded the 1950’s of an even more frightening “other” – the suppressed energy of the American experience. The monster which we ourselves have created, fed with blood, and tried to ignore.
Miguel Gutierrez & Powerful People throw off sparks. They are driven by a demoniacal repetition, swallowed by illusion. Free-floating scripts attach themselves, forcing the dancers to vomit lines over and over. Shouting directions, moving in perfect unison, these bodies are controlled. “Take 47! Again!”
Actors can forget where the machine ends, find themselves absorbed into the tabloids which have scripted romance, scandal, marriage and divorce. This is the “moral” of Lynch’s Inland Empire (with which I could compare Last Meadow). Dancers use their bodies as machines of expression. Who owns these bodies? Do we, as observers, bear responsibility for the actions and habits of dancers offstage, who must carefully prepare themselves for moments of white-hot activity? We shouldn’t forget that we are all human beings here.
Last Meadow carries each scene beyond the limits of “enough”. It displays a prickly exterior. It exists in the moment on stage, but also in the memory of a film (or films). This doubly and triply-layered moment creates complex refractions. Something is wrong here. I want to laugh but it hurts. “You’re tearing me apaart!” Actors live a multiplied existence. Where is their “authentic” identity? What parts of previous roles do they continue to play? What parts of previous films do we knowingly or unknowingly absorb and enact?
DVD extras now allow us to penetrate the machine, to examine the construction with all its visible scaffolding. And yet, the movies never lose their power to convince, to carry us out of our bodies and into other bodies. James Dean is resurrected each time we watch his image, a zombified body compelled to repeat itself. The steps, the swagger, the smirk. And somewhere offscreen, his car rams into that tree over and over and over.

Maryanne Amacher (viva)

2009-10-24T12:47:00.000-07:00

About a week ago I was up late into the night, reading the liner notes to Maryanne Amacher's two CDs, Sound Characters and Sound Characters 2 (Teo!). I was filled with conflicted emotions, hearing her sounds and voice. I was reminded of her brilliance as a composer and thinker. Her crystalline intelligence shines through these works, but so does a kind of cracked, other-wordly perception. The most recent CD struck me as especially bizarre, her writing littered with unlikely exclamation! points!! and a passionate, eccentric, expanded awareness of cosmological events. At the same time, the music sounds heavily processed and smeared with digital artifacts - the warbled interpolation of extreme pitch shifting and other software-driven manipulations. I was (and am) filled with both deep admiration and sadness encountering this work. I remembered how instrumental she was in my acceptance into the Bard MFA program and her visible excitement in listening to the grinding, piercing noise of my CD Uva, which was included in my application. Maryanne remained a teacher and mentor during my time at Bard and, for a year or so after, I could expect occasional late night phone calls... This summer, I heard about her poor health, and I couldn't help but wonder about her well-being, and those shelves of decaying reel-to-reel tapes on the second floor of her falling-apart house in Kingston, NY.
That night, I had a dream about Maryanne - we were engaged in a collaboration, sharing ideas and sounds, deep conversations. In the morning, it passed through my thoughts "Maybe she's dying..." Yesterday, I learned that Maryanne Amacher has passed away at the age of 71.

Maryanne didn't compromise on anything. She never had money. She rarely paid attention to her body, forgetting to eat or sleep while composing. Her overgrown, decrepit house was the subject of vandalism, seen by neighborhood kids as a "witches house". And no wonder! Strange, spooky sounds drifted from the windows at 4am, deer wandered through the yard eating foliage, squirrels invaded and finally overtook the entire 3rd floor of her gothic house.
Most especially, Maryanne didn't compromise on her music. For many years, she refused to release her music on LP or CD, claiming that the sounds coming out of those "wretched boxes" could only be a faint approximation of her work. While working on an installation, she would spend months in an exhibition space, moving speakers one inch to the left or right - literally playing the architecture.
Maryanne always thought at the edges of the possible. She imaginined a use of DVDs to release 6 hour compositions, with long silences between sounds - allowing the listener an entirely different relationship with the music, one that she considered more organic, more alive. She was waiting for the next step in audio fidelity to master her many unreleased compositions. She theorized that a 196k sampling rate actually begins to mirror the speed of neurons, producing a huge leap in clarity and vividness of the sounds.
Reading the liner notes for Teo!, you can feel her struggle with the decision to release this work. The sounds may be created and contained in recorded media, but they are NOT recorded works. They are produced for specific sites and situations, designed to respond to living spaces, breathing acoustics, dynamic surroundings. She asks the listener to imagine these sounds streaming out of 48 speakers, in geometric configurations, surrounded by the traffic and noise of a busy Mexico City plaza. This, of course, is an impossibility, and we are left with a flattened, contained representation of the work, not the work itself.

During my last year at Bard, after the vandalism of Maryanne's home, I had a fantasy of archiving all those endangered reel-to-reel tapes. These are artifacts which deserve to be stored in a temperature-controlled room at MIT, or in the basement of the NY Public Library. Maryanne was an absolute pioneer in the field of sound installation, a "guru" of electronic music, and a composer of astounding skill and vision. This work must not be lost to the squirrels and rain! But I soon realized what a task it would be. It would require living in Kingston for at least a year, carefully baking each tape (to keep the magnetic coating from separating from the plastic and falling in a pile of dust on the floor) before digital transfer. It would require grant writing, and the support of some major institution. Most especially, it would have required the help and support of Maryanne herself - something which could not be counted on, as I learned when publishing her 1977 paper on "Perceptual Geography" in the pages of FO A RM 3. I'm not sure what has happened or will happen to the Amacher archives.
In the end, perhaps this all makes sense. Maryanne Amacher insisted on treating her sound as a living thing. The experience is the art, not some mass-produced product. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to experience one of her brilliant, beautiful installations. Like all living things, those too have passed away.

Neighborhood Notes

2009-10-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

Eve Connell was kind enough to come to a rehearsal and interview me and Linda Austin about Bandage A Knife for the website Neighborhood Notes. It's a good peek into our creative and collaborative process one month before opening night.

T:BA Festival

2009-09-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

Hey! I'm writing reviews over at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art Festival Blog:
http://www.urbanhonking.com/pica/
Check it out! Leave a comment!

Is pleasure a relevant lens for thinking about experimental music?

2009-09-04T16:28:00.000-07:00

It can be an interesting exercise to try and view one’s “own” subculture with an alienated gaze… I’ve been feeling this way about experimental music the past few years, and have been wanting to articulate my shifting sense of doubt about a type of art that I once identified with strongly. Experimental music can provide an instant sense of community, and it feels odd to both participate and to feel separate.
One recurring question I’ve had is about the role of pleasure in listening to music that might be determinedly anti-comfort, anti-tradition, anti-beauty. My goal in asking is not to form an overarching theory about pleasure. There are infinite loci of pleasure, both in terms of making and listening. Pleasure as a subjective experience comes and goes – the same piece of music finds different places of interest depending on the moment, the context, the level of attention, and any number of other factors.
Experimental music is paradoxical in its formation as a genre. The term is problematic because it would best describe an activity that is constantly breaking apart under its own process of self-inspection. One thing I’ve noticed is that the rules actually seem to be multiplying. In addition to the usual concert-going conventions of classical music (audience should sit quietly, contemplating the music, and should clap after an appropriate pause), some areas of experimental improvisation have added several more layers of implicated or unacknowledged structure. For example, the set should consist of one long piece, or at most two; no leader or conductor should be hierarchically positioned; no pre-determined plan or score should guide the music, except for perhaps a few simple parameters; nothing resembling “music” should be played, even when traditional instruments are present; in many cases, timbral beauty should be resisted.
It’s a paradoxical position - the conventions of breaking the conventions. The restrictions of experimental concert practice have created a position within which any form of aesthetic conservatism mustn’t be used – regular rhythm, melody, and pitch have been removed from the palette of resources. These are deliberate choices, but they can feel diminished rather than expanded. Anything traditionally pleasurable is seen as conservative, and therefore must be withheld.
The history of 20th Century music contains many examples of withheld pleasure. The “progress” of the modernist avant-garde consists largely in the denial of familiar pleasures. Composers and musicians push audiences to accept gestures which are extreme in relation to their cultural context, and the accommodation of the new territory creates a new form of pleasure. The NPR program Radiolab had a fascinating section on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and its passage from riot-inducing avant-garde to Disney soundtrack. On a neurological level, the brain enjoys challenges, and assimilating unfamiliar sound combinations gives pleasure.
In many cases, it seems that while some types of pleasure are denied, a replacement can be found. For example, in Cage’s iconic work of withheld sound, 4’33”, we can find new pleasure in the absurdity of the theatrical gesture, the neo-Dada humor in the stilled player(s), the social tension of an audience attempting to be quiet. (Witness an orchestral version for an amplification of such characteristics, broken by the coughing, shuffling release of “allowed” noise during the movement markers.) Perhaps, maybe, one might experience the stated goal of 4’33” - the pleasure of hearing all sounds as music and the replacement of orchestral entertainment with the joys of apperception.
It’s not that I’m a stranger to the exquisite pleasure of displeasure. One of my favorite examples is the 2-CD “TNB Est Mort” by The New Blockaders. This grinding, crushing, wailing, dragging piece of noise music is broken into four approximately 25-minute sections, each of them continuous, unbroken, unchanging and similar almost to the point of being identical. In this case, the negation of musical pleasure is replaced by the monumental decision to just continue - the sheer excess of the composition extends beyond the bounds of tolerance, forcing the listener to either submit or reject.
I’m guessing that one underlying cultural metaphor separates pleasure into two varieties – that of the body and that of the mind – intellectual or sensual. Perhaps this division drives the pursuit of an arid aesthetic within experimental music, which is supposed to be smart. I suppose it also drives the vacuity of many popular musics. We could say that a song like Pitbull’s “Hotel Room” – which I find adventurous and hugely engaging on a timbral level - displays an entirely empty and surface-oriented lyrical content. This emptiness plays into the song’s function as a dance track. It emphasizes an unthinking, body-oriented listening.
I recently attended a concert of improvised music at the sparse but beautifully resonant Gallery Homeland. Performed was a duo between Bryan Eubanks on electronics and Vic Rawlings on electronics and cello. The sonic structure was typified by whooshes of white noise, crackles of contact mics, piercing high-frequency tones and crunchy electronics bursts. I’ve enjoyed music by both of these musicians on other occasions, but on this evening I found the music dry, timbrally predictable and sometimes painful on a basic auditory level. I really wondered what there was to find pleasurable – not because I questioned the musicians themselves but because I wonder about my own quality of attention.
In some improvised music, predictable structures are replaced by instrumental virtuosity, but this is a music that purposefully distances itself from displays of virtuosity. Some composed music orients the listener around processes of memory and recognition, but this is a music that is constantly drifting - neither static enough to be forgetful nor organized enough to be memorable. Most experimental music (and, I would argue, pop music) finds pleasure in new timbres, but here I found myself over-familiar with the limited range of non-musical sounds and physically repelled by the high-frequency sine waves.
Matt Carlson suggested that the locus of pleasure in this type of music is a deep self-identification with the players and their decisions. Each new sound, each interaction is viewed through a lens of asking if each choice was a ‘good’ one - “If I were playing, would I make the same decisions?” This requires an extremely close attention and when it works, it can also produce that attention. But perhaps it also emphasizes an insider’s understanding of the means and results. Does it exclude an unfamiliar audience to utilize only this kind of listening?
I ask this question of my own work as well, out of the desire to include more people in my sonic interests - not to meet an audience at the level of predictability, but to somehow draw them in. I would suggest that it has become more unpredictable to include “musical” structures and sounds in experimental music than to exclude them. I have been sweetly surprised by the music of Giuseppe Ielasi, for example, which draws elements of rhythm, melody and pattern into a fractured, difficult and gloriously unconventional framework. (Matt Marble wrote a nice review of Aix here.) Ielasi resists any blanket statements about the direction of his work or experimental music in general. Future projects may include minimalist drones or free improvisation. At the same time, these elements are not combined in a bricollage of various styles – they feel deeply committed and personally relevant. Each project is truly an experiment.
...
I felt the need to write this essay, but now I wonder about posting it. I would like to stop defining my interests in the negative. I hope that it might start some interesting discussion.
I’m becoming more and more convinced that commitment is the key term in the exchange between artist and audience. It is commitment which opens up the possibility of pleasure – through the means of attention. The energy of commitment itself can come from any number of sources, cultural or personal. It gives force to the act of attention, and anything becomes interesting given close enough attention.
From here on, I'll be writing more about the things that have caught my attention.

plait reformations

2009-09-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

One of the wonderful things about the new studio has been returning to previous work and viewing it in a new light (figuratively and literally). I unwrapped all the pieces of Plait and have been crystallizing them into finished structures. Here are a few in the process of forming.

Turns of phrase

2009-08-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

In my dispersed and fragmented reading lately (am I becoming guilty of the micro-attention span?), I've been noticing how various authors use rhetoric. I'm referring here to language which works as a subtle manipulation in the favor of sound or persuasion. Since I've been involving myself with so many texts that develop arguments as a mode of writing, I've become very aware of attempts to use words as a means of creating meta-narratives or expressions of interpretive authority.
Even when texts recognize and give lip service to the postmodern ideas of plurality and the imposition of narrative, they often seem to engage linear ways of speaking, embedded in the very language. I realize that writing is meant, in part, to be seductive - to produce pleasure through the spinning of ideas and the rhythm of words. But am I asking too much for writers to give attention to accuracy and the implications of phrase?
I'll choose a few examples from diverse sources that I've come across recently. This isn't meant as an attack on these particular texts, but more as a question about a pervasive use of language. Seth Kim-Cohen was kind enough to send me his new book In the Blink of an Ear - Toward a Non-cochlear Sonic Art. I'm only 70 pages in, so I'm still not sure what is meant by a "non-chochlear sonic art", but I've been noticing a heavy use of rhetorical language throughout. It's been unclear when he is describing notions of art history, and when he is making use of them himself. One brief quote: "Duchamp siphoned off the power of modernism's original combustions, energizing first Jasper Johns and later, more securely and more incontrovertibly, the conceptual artists of the 1960s and '70s." This probably seems like a minuscule example, but in light of the book’s examination of Greenberg, Fried, et al, I can’t help but think about the ways in which art theory has been so often the attempt to construct a more authoritative story about who did what “first” and what kind of doing is “best”… These stories reinstate progressive notions of artistic activity which lie somewhere deep in the very basis of our thinking. I think these notions sneak into the language, often without notice, subtly shaping our overall “map” of a complicated, conflicted and infinitely detailed terrain.

The meaning is clear enough - Duchamp's work early in the 20th century was rediscovered by artists 30 and 40 years later, who felt a resonance with his appeal to the "grey matter" rather than the retina. But notice how the construction of the sentence places Duchamp as active, giving him a kind of magical (energetic) power over those who came later, giving Duchamp metaphorical access to the “gasoline” which drives the “engine” of modernism. By implication, this metaphor creates a direct line through history, reinforcing the idea of history as direct lines, even in opposition to the paragraph's surface idea.

In a local example, Calvin Ross Carl posted a response to a review of The Manor of Art, a 110 artist show: “Shows like this are poisoning the well and help in maintaining Portland's appearance as a haven for scrappy amateurs, and we are much more (and better) than this.” The comment has sparked a firestorm of responses, and rightfully so. The metaphor has descriptive power and one can agree or disagree, but I am so (yawn) tired of this manner of speaking. “Portland Art is such and such…” “The Portland scene is doing such and such…” So many of the stories we tell seem wrapped up in essentialist notions – these polemical ideas which emphasize linearity, unity and cohesion. Is there really a “well” of Portland art? Can Portland appear any one way to this imaginary “Viewer”? Are “we” really any one way? Who are “we” anyway? Not only is this kind of linguistic construction tedious, it just seems plain inaccurate. Which is not to say that Calvin is committing some kind of linguistic crime… as I’ve said, these constructions are pervasive, insinuating and practically inescapable.

Other times, I think authors simply become carried away with the flow of words. From David Cox The Lens of Images: "As we move toward a database culture in which all texts are made available to all others, the empire of signs starts to crack as surely as the Berlin wall." Really? Is a collage-based aesthetic and a mouse-clicker’s leveling of all information as a potential download really going to deconstruct the semiotic nature of things? Does the availability of a text really give it more importance or power? It sounds great… It helps to build a polemic in support of a coined term - “database culture” – by indirectly referring to recognized authority (Barthes’ Empire of Signs) and important historical events, but does it accurately and specifically observe?

It’s my belief that specific observation is the antidote to these problems. In Calvin’s comment mentioned above, and in the 40+ responses, there are various heated declarations, vague generalities and blanketing statements, but no close attention to individual artists or works, no use of critical observation to analyze the apparent issue. The more we can look closely at specifics, the less tempted we might be to make broad gestures. The more we can think about individual people and the more we can engage subtle, distinct particularities, the less we’ll have to rely on oppressive essentialisms.

As David Bordwell says in the introduction to Theorizing the Moving Image by Noel Carroll: “Much of contemporary theory in literature, art and film consists of assembling received doctrines of vast generality, recasting them to fit one’s interests, yoking them to other (often incommensurate) doctrines, and then applying the result to the task at hand (typically interpreting a particular artwork). If the theorist undertakes analysis of a theory, the process usually focuses on rhetorical argument rather than logical inference.” Carroll’s writing (what little of it I’ve read so far) is refreshingly careful, thoughtful and precise. Just using the title as an example, he chooses the verb form “theorizing” to stress the active process, and to avoid the singular term “theory”. And then he uses “moving image” instead of “motion pictures” to allow an open definition of the subject, one which makes room for non-pictorial films, as well as television, video, computer animation, etc. I’m looking forward to delving into this text.

Words have power. Even single words can carry deep meanings. Metaphors create powerful mental images which affect our models of the world. I believe it’s worth thinking about how we use language.

Fall Arts Preview

2009-08-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

Article on Bandage a Knife
Here.
IMAGE: Christine Taylor

Reviews

2009-07-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

Been getting some nice, thoughtful reviews in the blogosphere. Really encouraging.

Touching Extremes
Just Outside

new CD!

2009-06-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Flock & Tumble is out now from Sonoris (France)! This music was mostly the result of my scoring of Linda Austin's dance piece, Circus Me Around, which ran November 2007. For that production, the sound was dispersed on a roughly cross-shaped four-channel system, across three separate but simultaneous performance areas in a large warehouse. This album marks a major shift in my compositional style (at least to my ears), emphasizing a more song-like structure, a more obvious inclusion of the voice as material, and a finer degree of attention to micro-structures.
Confusingly, this is not the sound for my own performance piece of November 2008 titled Flock & Tumble (I'm still looking for a label for that material, which will be called Furl.)
The beautiful cover image is by Harrison Higgs.

new studio!

2009-06-22T10:35:00.001-07:00

A few shots from the build-out of our new studio... with the help of the amazing Theodore Holdt. We'll finish mudding tonight and start thinking about what to do with the crumbling wood floors. I'm looking forward to pulling out some older work, seeing things in conjunction, and thinking about how to organize a showing. Kelly's looking forward to large, clean walls and space to begin installation-based pieces. We're both looking forward to the greater sense of community that will come with the group of 20 or so artists who are also building spaces. We'll be putting energy into a communal area where everyone can display work - and of course a big studio opening party later this summer.

2009-06-12T21:10:00.001-07:00

I finished one today, three others almost there. Two new canvases are stretched. I want to cool down the composition, make the brushwork both more contained and more spontaneous.

auditory practice 2

2009-05-26T21:27:00.001-07:00

I'm interested in the way sound connects to other things, forming temporary alliances. Rather than seeking a primacy or purity of the auditory, I like its contingency.

My fascination with the tactility and physicality of sound is what now attracts me to working with dance. Choreographers are also working with a kind of resonance between the bodies of the audience and those of the dancers. While (probably) unable to perform their actions, on some level we “feel” them, in a neurological way. The weight and density of the dancer’s body, the breath, feet, sweat and pulse of the dancers become associated with the metallic or wooden or watery sounds, complicating both their gestures and my music. Through the laws of magnetic attraction, impulses of movement become connected to sonic impulses, creating strange overlaps and correspondences. In some ways, this completes a loop - the removal of sound from action in capture and the connection to a new action in performance - but in a way that is shifted and shifting. Dancers allow themselves to find and feel the pulse, and I find ways to adjust and respond to their gestures. These elements become linked, but tangentially. The link occurs primarily in the experiencing of the moment.
I want to recognize all listening as happening within and through a body.

auditory practice 1

2009-05-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

I am experiencing a near-total block with composing. Not too unusual in general, and as preoccupation shifts to visual work, focus on sound tends to lessen. I experience a fairly constant doubt around the creative process, but I most often find a way to become fascinated by something. I can't go on, I'll go on...
But this current feeling is more extreme and part of a larger, gradual shift. I've been listening mostly to underground pop and various dance musics lately, and more and more interested in making something which reflects my enjoyment of those forms. But filtered through my lack of musical skill and my "mis"understanding of those sonic worlds. On the other hand, I occasionally become tired of the attitudes and limits which surround all kinds of musical activity - the conventions of genre or sense which make a cultural object identifiable. Sometimes, while listening to music I'm overwhelmed by the "belongingness". I want to hear things which can't be identified, can't be named. And it's also the kind of music I want to make.

Perhaps I'm moving away from making sound work which is organized into "tracks" and gathered into an "album" (it's getting increasingly difficult to find willing labels, anyway). I'm more interested in sound work which directly relates to an event in real time. Simultaneously, I'm moving alongside "real music", wanting to act as some kind of reflection. In the next few weeks or months, I plan to write occasional posts on my past and current composing, in an attempt to find out where I am. I would also like to start writing about the music of others I enjoy, attempting to articulate my appreciation of diverse sounds. This might be a way back in.

Accumulative Interlocking

2009-05-20T11:46:00.000-07:00

One of four smallish canvases in progress...

Improvisation continues in relationship to existing marks. The window is propped with a hammer, the sounds of continuous traffic. Drips on the freshly painted floor. I have been thinking about DeKooning (especially early and late periods) and Amy Sillman. Painter's painters. The sensuousness of the brush remains, with varieties of buttery, liquid, dry... the saturation of color which charges my retina and continues out into the world.

Forms are carved out. I'm not interested in depicting things. I'm feeling the way marks can open and question, or seal and confirm. I feel completion as a kind of interlocking, arrived at through accumulation of moves. As with sound, I try for velocity. I've also been thinking about wildstyle graffiti, the graphic quality of letter forms, which has been a longstanding impulse. Wildstyle graffiti is all about interlocking, the interplay of letters and the spaces between, which compete as foreground and background, positive and negative space, form and void.

Mural by Zephyr

I've been photographing various stages of these paintings in progress, trying to understand the way early, arbitrary marks can shape or determine later decisions. Trying to understand the way a consistent vocabulary rises out of an accumulation of small decisions. I gave up oil paints for about 8 years. I remember being frustrated with the problem of defining a vocabulary, the repertoire of personal forms. It's still a problem. I want these paintings to maintain ambiguity, places where forms could be one thing or another - or both.

I feel almost guilty for making paintings, abandoning any pretentions to sculptural form. A flat surface with shapes and colors. A medium in which one must trade between the refinement of materials and the crush of historical weight. An online review of Amy Sillman's recent paintings mentioned that an opinion of her work moves around the fulcrum of your opinion about the possibility of abstract painting. It's an issue I try to forget in order to continue. Seeing a small annex of Sillman's paintings on paper at the Brent Sikkema gallery in February reignited something. After months of internal debate, I finally took the plunge. It feels good.

2009-05-14T12:07:00.001-07:00

I'm now a few months into twice-weekly rehearsals with Linda Austin, building material for our movement/sound/video performance, along with the dancers Anne Furfey, Rebecca Harrison, Kajanne Pepper and Lucy Yim. This is the first time I've started a dance/sound collaboration from the very beginning and it's been fascinating to observe processes for constructing. Linda uses a number of methods for improvising, gathering and remembering sequences, utilizing a combination of technical means (video-taping and re-watching) along with individual and group memory. It's been a tangible luxury to develop all the components of the piece simultaneously and interdependently.

I've been recognizing the importance, in various creative ventures, of just "getting something out there". I've never been one to plan something and then attempt to match reality with that already complete mental conception. The movement towards action begins with an impulse, an image, a dynamic, etc. This impulse is the trigger for improvisation which places something before our senses - a thing which can be examined, revised, tweaked and adjusted. Within performance practice, there's the interesting opportunity to incorporating the filters of each participant. For example, Linda might perform an improvisation, instructing the dancers to "catch" movements and to assemble them into a phrase. We watch each of these phrases as solos and as a quartet, begin working with the quartet, making changes in timing and moving towards ever finer adjustments. Within an hour, we have several minutes of new material to expand, shelve or discard...
I'm interested in producing video material in a similar way, through group improvisation and play - within situational contexts rather than strictly movement-based concerns. Working with a set of materials and methods, unpredictable things may happen, and I can videotape continuously. Combing through this stockpile of material, I can select images or sequences which have strength, and refine the procedures for another session of taping.

Since I've been painting again, these procedures for "getting things out there" seem not so different from approaching a blank canvas, making a gesture, observing, reacting, making another gesture, obscuring, erasing. I suppose it's all very old-fashioned. This approach has its dangers for me as well, largely the problem of becoming attached to material just because it has been externalized, diminishing the possibility of change. There is an addictive freshness to the blank canvas, the equal possibility of all options. The rupture of the first mark which immediately begins to close off or determine future gestures.
As I was yielding the brush yesterday, I was listening to an interview on NPR about O.C.D. behavior, a disorder which makes extreme this fear of the determining consequences of action. A man who was literally paralyzed by the fear of "something bad" which might happen as a result of his actions. But of course, even non-action is an action... Putting material into the world requires a certain fearlessness, combined with clear observation and a willingness to change at any point.

2009-03-18T17:05:00.001-07:00

A few from a new series. The first diptych is approx. 21" x 31", the second approx. 26" x 33". The third drawing is approx.22" x 25".
I feel that I am re-engaging a form language, and after finishing a few more of these, the next work may be painting in earnest - canvas, oils, color...

Garbled Repetition

2009-02-21T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking about the use of "extreme" repetition in movement phrasings. I'm interested in the processes of imperfection and ambiguity which are inherent in human reiteration. The forces of physical inertia, a mutation through fatigue or boredom, change through slurring, blurring, mumbling... The possibilities of scrambled or emergent meanings, a multiplicity of hearings and interpretations.
Another album on heavy rotation in the studio lately has been Radiohead's Hail to the Thief. Previously, listening to their other albums, I've been put off by Thom Yorke's nasal vocals and the anthem-rock theatrics, but this one has been hitting some pleasure centers. In the course of one song, there's the repetition of a phrase, "It should be ringing..." (it should be raining, it looks like rain in.. It could be Reagan...) The slurred and circular performance allows variations in emphasis, emotion and a linguistic imprecision. I want it to continue, to be more extreme, to become uncomfortable, to push and pull with equal pressure.
Toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat toy boat tou boat toubut toiu bout.

Narrative Tangentiality

2009-02-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

Finished composing for and performing Montauk with the Liz Gerring Dance Co. and now back from the run at the Baryshnikov Art Center in NYC. Returning to the ink paintings and now working with black acrylic, india ink, and a bit of charcoal in addition to the blue ink, and larger pieces of paper (I'll post some new pictures soon). It feels great to be back in the studio. Listening to Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives - two or three "episodes" each day... Despite my deep admiration for a few particular pieces (Automatic Writing, The Wolf Man, and especially In Sara Mencken Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women), it's only my second time listening through this sprawling opera.

Robert Ashley's music is a wonderful example of ambiguity - structures as non-structures. There's a quality of endless wandering, limitlessness. I admire this quality because my own music seems to become, in the course of things, resolutely unambiguous. In reaction to or against the segmented, ordered quality of my recent performance piece, Flock & Tumble, I've been interested in shifting more towards structures of narrative ambiguity and thinking about what that might mean in the upcoming project with Linda Austin.
Ashley seems to have recognized some hidden attribute of television, some rarely utilized possibility for expansion. Over the winter break and in the midst of snow storms, Kelly and I watched the first and second seasons of Mad Men, which might serve as another example (though far more conventional).

The potential within the framework of a television series is something Twin Peaks first noticed and utilized in a self-conscious way. The open-ended aspect of television gives the possibility of endless narrative expansion, something that Mad Men uses to create a network of characters and psychologies rather than a narrative arc, following endless side-paths within an established group of elements. A revelation of character rather than plot, a deepening of interior space. Very little happening on the surface, but great depths below.

Perhaps this all has something to do with a working method that starts without possibly knowing the ending. A reliance on brainstorming, automatic writing... A faith in the generative properties of the network.
Soap operas take this tangentiality to absurd extremes, but with reversed emphasis - lots happening on the surface and very little below. This was recognized and parodied by Lynch in Twin Peaks, and even mirrored by the television show within the television show (Invitation to Love). A certian degree of amnesia is necessary to continue.
Perfect Lives remains slippery in every way. The established elements of piano, organ and voice are a kind of changing same, constantly flowing, a pattern of syllables... Even instability is unstable, as short "songs" emerge and then disintegrate. A few phrases, names and places stick. Perhaps patterns would emerge with repeated listenings, and I would like to finally see the video, which is now available on dvd.
Robert Ashley also talks about engaging different attention spans, something I've been pondering lately. I'm wondering what the effect would be of extreme repetition of dance events, "looping" single actions or phrases of various lengths, working with the varieties of memory - immediate, short term and long term. (Does anyone have the approximate lengths of these categories, neurologically-based?) What would be the difference between a five second "loop", repeated many times, and a 30-second "loop" or a two-minute "loop"? Or loops that tangent partway through their repetition... I'm interested in the live repetition of human gestures because of the inherent impossibility of exact repetition. I'm interested in using this repetition as a way of accessing the brutality of separation, the way that violence becomes aesthetic.

2008-11-17T12:54:00.000-08:00

A few from the new series, ink on paper.

Flock & Tumble!

2008-11-01T12:20:00.000-07:00

... is almost here. Our first rehearsal in the space is on election night (what was I thinking?) At this point, I'm confident we'll have a reason to celebrate.
This performance feels like a celebration, a very formal one. I intend for humor to pierce the weight at all points. Kathleen and Rikki of Woolly Mammoth have given brilliant performances as hypnotized hand signalers. I can't wait to see and hear it all together.

See you there?
www.brownpapertickets.com/event/42133
November 7, 8, 9 8:00 pm
doors, drinks and hors d’oeuvres at 7:30 pm
AudioCinema, 226 SE Madison

Jerry Hunt, 1980

2008-08-06T16:23:00.000-07:00

This is taken from a 1980 KPFA interview of Jerry Hunt with Charles Amirkhanian which can be found here.

About performance...
"I like the signing of sounds. And for performance particularly, I don’t think of myself so much as doing performance art as just a concert with the signing of the sounds in a variety of ways. It’s like maybe a color added to the surface of the sound in some way, so that people are not just sitting there watching me work gadgetry. In my mind it makes the rhythm structure of what interests me clearer, it makes the intent become more direct and more immediate, at least on some level. To my mind it does. I like that sense of directness and immediacy."

About titles...
"I like to have a certain formality in respect to both myself and the world and that’s just one clue to it - it’s not the only clue. There was a time when I thought, “Oh, I’ll just call it ‘Turkey Trot No. 1’, ‘Turkey Trot No. 2’”. It’s just not in my character nor in my mind to be able to do it that way. There are certain formalities. The titles are representations of layers of those formalities, because there’s a certain distance that I like. I’m not very interested in music, in a way, you know! ...or in art or technology or anything. Why still do it? Maybe that’s a little clue into what keeps my interest going. But each one I see as just continuing folds of concerns of mine. And if I don’t start with the abstraction, I’m hopelessly lost later. It just keeps it clear in my own brain, and I think it suggests a little bit. I don’t want a title to be too suggestive, but I like it to be sufficiently suggestive to give people indications of what orientation, what position they might expect from me, at some point. I realize that frequently what actually happens and the expectation of the title is very distant. Which is at once intentional and is not. I both intend and I don’t. Because I’m obsessed with the idea that there is nothing at the bottom of anything. And if there’s not, then why not? Why not?"

These have been my thoughts precisely. I'm sympathetic to the idea of the work being "bottomless and without foundation" (as he says elsewhere in the interview). I share this fascination with the way a work can be simultaneously empty and full. It's a construction which rests (in both formation and reception) on contingency, and yet it works.
Also, I have been searching for a way to articulate this reversal of what seems to be the usual relationship between sound and performance. In placing the sound as the primary component, the visual and performance ideas are layers which emphasize and make clear the rhythmical character of the piece, unfolding out from the sound.

And in the music itself, I admire Jerry Hunt's way of creating formless form, in which events or moments of unity seem to be like ripples on the pool of larger movement. And his use of voice, and acoustic noise-makers such as rattles, and his operatic/absurdist use of sources such as George Elliot and John Dee... much more to explore here.

proximation

2008-07-14T11:54:00.000-07:00

I'm considering the space between notes (bursts, iterations, events) as a moment of charge. Utilizing an erotics of distance: the use of the call to connect across space, invigorating a shared medium (atmosphere). The space between is a charged waiting - a poised position. Balanced by an erotics of proximity: the "tuning-in" of closeness, the ways of changing and being changed by those who are near.
Within the model of compression/expansion, each individual is charged with the minor catastrophe of breaking a silence, instigating a tumbling chain of events. On an individual level, the compression occurs as a small loss of self-awareness around the burst, following by an expansion outward with the ear.
Distance and proximity interact as a self-organizing form. This is my interest in a school of fish or flock of swallows. I am con-fusing spatial distance as an analogy (map) with temporal distance (between events). Always staying near, neither too close nor too far. Keeping an always-same but always-changing form, self-maintaining but allowing for rupture at any moment. A proximation of form.

2008-06-05T15:46:00.000-07:00

The Promenade crew (from L - R) Bill Will - installation, Bill Boese - light, Elise Bartow - coordination, Linda K. Johnson - dance/performance, Seth Nehil - sound.
South Waterfront Neighborhood Park (SW Moody & Curry), July 19th
Gathering beings an hour before sunset - bring a picnic!

2008-06-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

After almost a year, I have finally begun to document this group of drawings, sculptures and sculpture/drawings in a way which approximates their intended display. A week of black-hole days in the studio (as in forgetting to call people, check email, etc) - cleaning, painting, arranging and photographing these pieces. A steady diet of Morton Feldman. The fan in the window blowing cool sunny air (and black particulate matter). So far, 7 single drawings, 2 diptychs, 2 small drawings with wood pieces, 6 wood-only arrangements and 2 large drawings with wood. Balancing set arrangements with the potential for improvisation. Link to an online portfolio.

2008-05-29T11:25:00.000-07:00

Currently reading:
Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture by Patricia A. Turner
On Photography by Susan Sontag
The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy
Sound Design and Science Fiction by William Whittington

Beyond my own continuous curiosity, looking for those bits of writing which
might be appropriate to foundation-level readers, containing abstraction while rooted in the particular. Writing which considers the way objects and images operate, asking important questions about the authority of the voice, the use of media in the production of ideology, the responsibility of the image-maker, the impact of reproduction... unpacking, through a multitude of specific examples. That's the goal for the next semester - an omnivorous interest in cultural artifacts of any variety, whether it's a blockbuster movie, an abstract painting, a glossy advertisement, a documentary photograph, a racist ceramic cookie jar, a font, a newscast, a building, a public park. Not to equalize these "objects" but to observe them in all their specificity. I want to move away from art-world specific considerations and to view any object as potentially fascinating, any object as a carrier of layered meanings.
Any suggestions?

2008-05-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

New earth pigments have expanded a range of colors.

Shelves are constructed and need to be sanded and painted. Drawings on paper are nearing completion. Arrangements are being experimented. Summer brings open days and the possibility of long studio hours. Maybe a box of saltines and a jar of peanut butter... It's the perfect season to be in the studio - not yet blazing hot when that late afternoon sun comes directly through the windows.

Performance questions

2008-05-12T13:16:00.001-07:00

I’m interested in the yell - the shock as a moment of compression and expansion, a release of energy. I’m interested in making bold, clear forms, in reacting against timidity. The yell/shout/exclamation is suggestive of animal characteristics - the oddity and violence of a frog inflating its air sac and the release of that air in a compressed burst which charges the space between. The power of waiting, a group which is poised in the edge of breaking a silence... each performer can be the one to disrupt the structure, balancing on the edge of a catastrophy. The yell as rawness, untrained vocalization. Anyone could make the sound without special knowledge or practice. The yell as a basic, unformed element of music which punctures. By altering factors slightly (extension, tonality) the yell can become pitched - it exists between noise and note. I’m interested in the balance between talking, exclaiming and singing. Crossing between the communicative and the aesthetic. Finding a base physicality which joins the act and the sound.

I’m interested in boldness, clarity, force, perceptual derangement, intentionality, spatial dispersion, emergent form, shifts, demanding durations, engagement, physicality, patterns, darkness, repetition, off-balance structures, tension, care, precision and wildness.

compositional terms

2008-04-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

Each new batch of sound pieces tends to concentrate around a group of terms, ideas or concepts, without necessarily abandoning previous ideas. Since December, I have been making new recordings, pieces, sketches and sounds for various functions (dance score, installation, CD). While still working with ideas of "flocking", tumbling" and "awkwardness" which were the main focus of Flock & Tumble (see below for elaboration), I have been identifying some new concerns:

Velocity - The concept of "sound-objects" (Shaeffer's term for discrete sonic occurences) never made sense to me when I was involved primarily in creating "strata" of sound. Recently I've been collecting separate (rather than continuous) strikes, scrapes, thuds, bangs, pings, whips, gongs, drops, clatters, clinks, cries, rumbles... These occurrences form themselves into chains (sometimes with some help). The attack and decay of each event can be manipulated. The speed, power and physicality of attack and decay build velocity. While the composition moves at an overall pace, velocity works through individual sound objects. Velocity indicates force, aggression and physicality - occurring as an object which has weight and implied materiality.

Material Index - the term derives from Michael Chion's analysis of film sound, and refers to the way in which material density and substance is inscribed into recorded audio, and the way that sound might either correspond with or contradict visual information. Tati's footsteps are an example, in the way different, often very unrealistic foley effects determine a character's presence. The use of ping-pong balls for footsteps creates a hollow, springy character, often without our conscious awareness. This indexical and sensual aspect of sonic material has always interested me, and in the use of simple materials for sound production (metal, wood, glass, etc.) I have realized the degree to which we are able to decode and imagine the tactility of those materials through their resulting sonic character. The "woodness" of sound from wooden objects (for example) is intrinsic and almost impossible to obliterate.

The character of sound matter is imbedded deeply in my work despite modifications and alterations (pitch manipulation, reversing, layering, editing, etc.). In my opinion, this creates a primary complication to the idea of "reduced listening" through using acoustic sources. However obscured or hybrid, something of the initial material is retained. The ear is finely attuned to the qualities of weight, density, rough and smooth - sensations to which sound experiences are connected in daily experience. My own interests include the full range of mutation, hybridity, obscurity, confusion and recognition, while avoiding illustration or description.

Sounds are always (as has often been stated) sounds within a space - which carries its own material index. Mediation (the imprint of media on the spectral or textural character of a sound) provides another aspect of material index which can be manipulated. The particular and unique combination of matter, media and space for every recorded sound is what makes Shaeffer's goal of a complete solfege of sound impossible (though it shouldn't preclude attempts at precise description).

White noise and artifacts - I previously identified this as a component of "awkwardness" and I've been lately listening to clicks, pops, distortions, traffic sounds, far-away voices, tape-hiss, etc with increasing pleasure, as an integrated component of the sounds. I don't want the process to be invisible.

Depth - As I construct flocks of sounds, I work with them at a specific distance in representational space, imprinted by the material index of real acoustic spaces. I work with the ear's movement between different depths, and the dynamic of sounds which move or interact among and between different depths. Thinking of these flocks as points of activity at various distances, producing a complicated mobile - never static.

Tangentiality - A compositional strategy of decentered elaboration. Mutating and disturbing individual sonic elements, allowing a piece to follow multiple possibilities with a limited range of sources, shifting them in space, density, depth, interaction, etc. Shifting views of sonic clusters to reveal a variety of perspectives.

May 22, 2007

Flock & Tumble - a definition of terms.

The composition of Flock & Tumble combined the intensely detailed and the haphazard. This methodology meant being open to chance while paying attention to the "purpose" or necessity of every sound at every moment. Recording and manipulation of sounds involved strategies for random behavior, including:
- recording in noisy environments which contain traffic, rain, wind, people, dogs, radios, etc.,
- a lack of monitoring between overlapping layers,
- improvisatory recording sessions,
- providing participants with only schematic scores (such as indicating pitches as "high, medium low"),
- and the blind layering of individual sources.
In response to this randomness I chose to where and how to emphasize and elaborate, moving into microsecond editing. For example, I created many "hybrid" events by precisely matching/masking multiple envelopes into unified new sounds.

As I worked over the last 6 months, I developed terminology which refers to various structural techniques or methods. Two of these terms became the title, in which I take the ideas as a compositional spur. By "flocks" I refer to sound-events which occur at irregular intervals in varying densities, forming clusters. This is a behavior which occurs on the level of individual layers, each distinct source or element within a composition. It is a form of continuity which links sound objects (discrete sonic events) into strands of intermittent occurences .

Whereas "flocking" is horizontal, "tumbling" is vertical, a relationship between two or more strands in which a sound triggers one or more further sound-events. "Tumble" is the perceptual grouping of sequential sounds into a causal relationship. It could be seen as a "meta-flocking" across layers of the music. These structures come about both intentionally and unintentionally, often arising through accidental correspondences which are then emphasized purposefully.

While the concepts of "flock" and "tumble" are largely specific to this series of pieces, another idea has enveloped my approach to composition in general for the past few years. "Awkwardness", used positively, is a vague and difficult term, more a quality than a thing. It comes in part from pushing against my own comfort levels in the creation of music. It relates to the degree to which I can remain surprised at my own work. It is a sense of unfamiliarity shading into rejections of "the rules". It is also an undefinable "feeling" in the music, a subjective pleasure which may be brought about, in part, from things such as:
- sounds that are too brief or loud in relation to their context,
- recordings that are distorted, warped or noisy,
- backgrounds or environments for recordings which are filled with low-level noise,
- long pauses,
- and sounds which are too "human"/"animal"/"organic"/"artificial" in relation to their context, at times creating a contrast between natural and artificial.
Awkwardness may also linger atmospherically from the use of real acoustic spaces, echoes and reverberations, and especially the confused layering of multiple reverberant signatures.
Awkwardness could be opposed to a cool, refined or machine-like texture, though it should ultimately be elegantly awkward and intentionally accidental.
Awkwardness leans toward an incorporation of humor, oddness and drama, but without specific referent.
It is a floating term, attaching itself on various levels of the work.

collaborations

2008-04-02T11:37:00.001-07:00

Recently visited the Mill End Store with Diana Lang and purchased fabric for Flock & Tumble dancers Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner and Linda Austin. A perfect environment for appreciating the details of materials. No piped-in music, natural light and blissed-out quiet. Woolly will be clothed in raw muslin, with shimmery frills, in colors as seen above.

Meditations in the midst of fabric bolts followed some strange tangents. I'm interested in the infinite specifics of various materials. In this case cotton, linen (my favorite), lycra, polyester, silk, bamboo, hemp, nylon, etc. Each has the possibility to seduce with their individual colors, textures, reflectivity, softness, stiffness... not to mention the rituals of folding, cutting, labeling and displaying. There's a concentration to places which are dedicated to materials, a specialized focus which I find attractive - Kremer Pigments is another of these. Or the paper drawers of well-stocked art-supply shops. Or certain old-fashioned lumber yards. Or maybe the light bulb lady on Mississippi (though her shop is a bit cluttered to feel calm). These places contradict the modern desire for convenience and all-inclusive availability. I hope we don't lose them.

There's also the relationship to materials which is implicit in each of these examples, a relationship which builds through use. It's the information held in hands and muscles - a tactile knowledge. A true craftsperson refines this connection though a preference for certain qualities based on predictability and intimacy. I feel like a voyeur to such practices, as I never fully belong to any. Like attending a religious service, I can observe, appreciate and enjoy but never fully belong... Perhaps this is due to my interest in observing meta-patterns, applying comparative models, and breaking down divisions between categories, genres, etc. I've always been a bit mystified by those who dedicate themselves entirely to one thing - Zen buddhism, experimental music, ethnomusicology, oil painting (while of course understanding that there is more than a lifetime of depth in any of these). Applying these thoughts to Flock & Tumble, I wonder how to describe and promote this merging of music, dance, video and performance which will (hopefully) contradict all of these categories.

Yesterday I finished the mastering of Flock & Tumble (the CD which shares only the title, forthcoming on Sonoris) with Timothy Stollenwerk. Now it sounds delicate and brutal at the same time.

muted light

2008-03-31T12:12:00.000-07:00

Day through billowing plastic. Moving through drawings and cleaning, elaborating, finishing and fixing each as inspired - one at a time, as single images. My goal is to complete and document these series in the next month, feeling more or less finished with the 'statement' as such and very slowly drawing a boundary to define this body. Shifting to concerns of display, I will be building shelves for groupings of wood pieces, so that each may be displayed at a different height, from floor level to eye level.
Listening to specks of hail striking the windows.

found

2008-03-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

this strangely complete discography on the Spiritual Achives blog.

Flock & Tumble - Screens and bodies

2008-03-17T19:52:00.000-07:00

A large performance event, Flock & Tumble is scheduled for the first weekend in November at AudioCinema (226 Se Madison St in Portland). A large, empty warehouse, 12 sound-makers (performers), 4 channels of pre-recorded sound, 4 video projections of the dancers Linda Austin, Wooly Mammoth and others, with clothes by Diana Lang. At this point, I am working with 5 sections - an opening "tumble", three "flock" sections ("Flock", "Swarm" and "Torus") and a closing "tumble". Loosely speaking, (that is, as far as I know) a tumble consists of actions which are passed sequentially from one performer to another, while the flocks use rules of behavior taken from animals (birds, insects and fish) to create clusters of activity. The dancers perform only in screenal space - projected onto the walls.

What does it mean to dance on a screen? Why are the dancers in this piece separated from the activities in “real time”? Perhaps simply to create this space for “unreal time”. I have been interested in the possibility of simultaneous frames which “open up” the edges of actual space into alternate ones. With the emphasis on the plural. These are not spaces to lose the sense of the body (as in the typical cinematic experience of "suspension of disbelief” - though these videos will clearly draw on filmic inspirations. I have been noticing the movement of bodies in films which exist on (or across) the edges of “realism” - the carefully choreographed actions in Bresson’s prime output. The way sitting down, turning the head, placing a hand on a bench can be both completely normal and totally stylized. He achieved this hyper-awareness by filming many, many takes of the same seemingly unimportant movement. On the 40th take, the actor finally reaches an appropriate level of automatism. “Don’t we complete most of our actions in a kind of automatism?” he asks.

Another very different film has informed my thoughts - a Japanese yakuza flick called “Branded to Kill” which takes the stylized choreography of genre-specific conventions - the gunfight, the chase scene, the violent death - and twists them into dance. Falling back into a spinning office chair, the wounded man spins around not once but three times, calling attention to the falseness of the entire construct. Calling attention to the beauty of pure movement which fights against the story while furthering it. There’s something about this fighting and flowing which can exist together. Maybe we can call it “Suspension of belief”...

Bodies will be multiplied by four, though not mirrored. Staggered flashes. Where does the individual movement exist in this multiplicity? How does the body contribute to the larger pattern? How does the repetition of movement create sequential pattern? These are questions I leave to the dancers, as authorities on the subject. Perhaps it can spark a conversation. I would like that.

Music has been underway since December, though I have to imagine much of the final result. In combining live activity with recorded sound, I want these elements to coexist, sharing space. I imagine voice to be a primary tool of the performers, while the recorded compositions are "instrumental" for now (concrete and electronic sounds).

scatter logic

2008-01-22T21:38:00.000-08:00

Brushing through a book of Barry Le Va in the library, his work resonated (not for the first time) as an idea of investigating drawing. I'm looking for a way of drawing across, on and with objects, materials. Becoming slightly more clear about how objects have presence. A few weeks ago I dreamed of tall flags or banners hanging from poles and touching the floor, a dark, ominous and somewhat awkward presence. I have been at the sewing machine trying to reconstruct that image in some way. Painting fabric with a mixture of graphite powder, water and acrylic medium results in a dense black surface which turns silver with rubbing or distress. It also results in black hands and fine graphite dust everywhere. Which is not terribly good for keeping all those other mostly white drawings clean.
I keep cutting across the flags and then re-sewing, shifting their angles. I want an unstable feeling, similar to the balanced plywood pieces. The idea of shifting like fractured sedimentary layers. All of these objects suggest a ground plane.
Lately in the studio I move between sanding and priming plywood, cutting and sewing fabric, and hectic clusters of graphite marks on paper. My creative attention is split about equally between drawing and composing, as I've been recording new sounds (springs, trombone, plucked strings, metal) and starting the first stages of new sound clusters. I've also been in a process of mourning the closing of the Portland Art Center's old town exhibition space, helping to write the history of that space and think about potential futures which could include flexible, project-based collaborations and activities. It's a tremendous loss of invested energy from everyone involved, and it seemed on the edge of real fruition. At the same time, not being weighed down by high rent opens up room for different and exciting modes...

chilly in the studio

2008-01-22T21:27:00.001-08:00

but I'm warming up with some labor intensive drawings. Fela Kuti is the soundtrack of the week.

Summary but not summery

2007-12-03T00:21:00.000-08:00

This Wednesday, the Portland Art Center's fund-raiser PDX Panels show opens (300 panels by 300 artists), along with It Takes a Village, a show of volunteer's work which I'll be in. This is the first showing of Plait, which will continue to expand and be reconfigured (image above).

Returning to the world of sound, it looks like I'll be making a multi-channel sound installation for Diapason Sound Gallery in 2008 and perhaps have the opportunity to work with a dance company in NYC. And I'm glad to say that Sonoris will release my new solo CD Flock & Tumble this Spring (most of which was used as a score for Circus Me Around by Linda Austin Dance last month).

The plastic on the studio windows is billowing, the rain is pouring, the kerosense heater is burning, the music is playing and I am drawing.

Questioning

2007-11-26T17:05:00.001-08:00

Pondering a random stacking of pieces today, I recognized something that is close to my original mental image of these pieces. Meanwhile, there is a hesitant start on a drawing to be held in place by a large pieces of glass, behind the wood pieces. And a series of smaller graphite drawings which will be mounted on the wall behind tempered glass.

Framed or unframed, clusters or compositions... These days I am craving a clear voice in my head which would say "Stop now, go here, try this." Especially the "stop now". There are so many places to be charmed along the way, so many potential combinations. Lack of wall space complicates things a bit by crowding together different series. That's why we're going to take apart the loft in the studio and turn it into a large work surface. We haven't been sitting up there anyway... Though the sunsets over the West Hills from the 8th floor can be nice, it makes me depressed to view the constant stream of cars on the Interstate, slowly burning through the last of the oil.

Anyway, a recent tip on where to buy large sheets of used tempered glass suggests an opportunity to play with multiple clusterings/layerings. Questioning the form of these many bits which make up a whole, I conclude not to conclude - deferring the decision to adapt to a particular space.

A weekend in Gull Harbor, WA with Kelly offered the chance to reconnect with natural patterns - ferns, moss, shells, ripples in wood, mother-of-pearl. On the bookshelf of the B&B (where we were gifted a free room), a chance encounter with the book "A Pattern Language". There's something intriguing here, though I'm not sure yet what it is. The idea of a "living" city or "living" house, "living" courtyard, etc. is not so much different from a living painting. And certainly my interest in pattern has not abated...

legibility

2007-10-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

From about 2003 - 2006, I was asking myself questions about the possibilities of communication in drawing. I was questioning the ability of clear "speech" through art and, in doing so, seemed to reify the doubt, making illegible work (about illegibility).
I'm realizing today that I have shifted away from those concerns and I hope that in turn my work has become more coherent. I've drifted from questions about communication with the landscape of memory to the landscape itself. I am still interested in the ways we "read" the environment, but in the new work, the answer is more certain. These are artifacts which depict the becoming of their own artifactness. Coring down under the surface, the conclusion is clear: the inevitable large-scale collapse and eventual renewal of the landscape (and of course the species within that landscape).
This work (through a kind of absence) concerns the interdependent nature of species and environment - figure and ground. There is a triple folding-in of character and landscape. The earth pigment drawings are figure on the ground of the wood panels, which are themselves figure on the ground of glass/paper/wall. But the earth pigment drawings are themselves also landscapes... grounds for absent (or more accurately - buried) figures.
This shift arises from two larger questions, one global (how to continue in the face of things) and one personal (how to find a voice, both in my work and in a larger community). Two questions I would like to return to later...

Plait

2007-10-02T17:43:00.001-07:00

Accumulation of raw shapes...

Layering and sanding

Plait is a series of drawing/sculpture works very much in progress. New series often begin with a meeting point between an idea and some kind of material resource (or limitation). In this case, the desire to make drawings on solid panels (rather than the fabric and/or paper of the last few years) was met with the chance encounter of a construction company which provides scraps of high-quality plywood for the taking. I had in mind an image of stacks of strips, layers upon layers. The odd sizes and damaged corners of this source wood provoked the accumulative shape building. Pieces of found glass provided the opportunity for transparency and depth.

These individual "puzzle pieces" are cut, sanded and primed, and then layers of lines are built up through successive applications of earth pigment and gesso, and subtracted or exposed through sanding and rubbing. A continuing "play" with these pieces leads to arrangement of larger forms.

Plait follows a long-standing fascination with the merging of horizontal and vertical time, which has been strengthened by reading Jared Diamond's descriptions of archeological sleuthing in Guns, Germs & Steel and Collapse. Plait is a landscape made up of layers. There is a potential for meaning to arise from fragments and cross-sections of layered material. Information is buried - hidden in accumulation, waiting to be discovered and decoded. It asks for a reading of the ground, finding an alphabet in the dirt, grass and stars, coaxing words from objects - a reconstruction of history from artifacts.

Occasionally when working on these drawings, I think of Mrs Cunningham's 3rd grade class, which had an exciting new kind of organization. The classroom was set up in a series of stations, at which students would find projects to complete before moving on to the next station. At least, it seemed exciting and new, at first but quickly became tiresome, a daily repetition. The first station every morning consisted of hand tracing, and then filling in the hand with parallel lines - across the fingers and palm of the hand shape, as even, close and neat as possible. The intention of the exercise was to strengthen hand-eye coordination. I remember being both fascinated and annoyed with this activity. I disliked the repetition, but enjoyed the loosening of time which occurred when I focused on the meditative, simple drawing of parallel lines. When I explained this activity at home, my father traced his hand and we spent an evening filling it with spirals, stars, swirls and other shapes, a response which felt like a slightly dangerous breaking of the rules. Both the meditative process and the rebellion found their way deep into my conception of drawing as activity...

Re-orient

2007-10-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

This blog grows out of a general re-orientation in the way I'm thinking about my work, one based on an erasure (or rather, a letting go) of divisions between various modes of making (and therefore thinking) - sound, drawing, sculpture, video, performance, collaborations. In equalizing my work in all of these practices, I begin to think of them them as parallel. They may exist separately or in various reconfigured groups. I'm still wondering what an exhibition might require - what might it include or exclude? How much is enough, how much is too much? I am interested in adaptiveness and overlap... Adapting to a particular space (without being entirely site specific, at least in a strict use of the term) through overlapping various modes. In thought, this leads to a place where meaning can drift across media - forming complexes of distinct but complementing bodies of work. Quite practically, this approach grows from the fact that I have been drifting in the studio, moving from drawing to sound to video editing to writing to sitting and staring...

A large part of this recent re-orientation is a (perhaps gratuitous) matter of self-definition. After ten years, I have a growing feeling that I am no longer interested in calling myself an "experimental musician". For one thing, I am no longer interested in making "music". It's more that I want to make sounds about music - which means paradoxically that the work has become more "musical" - in order to comment on music. A subtle but important distinction, at least in terms of the self-perception of why I do what I do.

Also fading in my mind is the term "sound artist". As I have been equalizing practices, I come to all of them as containing or embodying a kind of "listening in". I will try to return to this idea, which grows from thoughts about the mirroring empathy of physiological body sensation. Sound is often said to be the most physical of materials because it operates in close union with touch, moving through and around the body. Recently I have been moving towards a consideration of all forms of apperception as forms of "listening" - which then leads me towards various prepositions: "listening into", "listening with", "listening under", "listening through", etc. etc. This is the engine which drives my current work...