a beautiful sunny day. and no atom bombs or anything. So I decided to
go check out a couple sound installations around Manhattan.
----------------------------
"Mahler 21 Project" by Chistian Fennesz, at the Austrian Cultural Forum.
How enlightened and slightly bizarre, I thought, for the Austrian
government to be treating New York to Mego acts. (They just had a
whole festival of electronica a week or so ago, which included Pita.)
the Fennesz 'installation' proved to be a CD playing through a lone PA speaker,
(mono? is it a concept or did the other speaker blow out?). The room
hadn't a door, and the often-subtle music was graced by all sorts of
accidental sounds from the people in the vicinity, their voices and
footsteps reverberating in the clean modernist architecture.
I was expecting from the title that Fennesz would DSP the hell out of
Mahler, to the extent that it wouldn't matter what his source
material was, but I was only half right. Mahler was glimmering
through most of the music, which did a couple of things -- gave it a
hint of tonality, and a bit of the fantasy-world that late romantic
orchestral music can conjure. The whole piece was about a half hour
long, and divided into about 10 sections of contrasting texture. I
was much more aware of Fennesz being a minimalist that I'd noticed
before. Where Mahler's music is rich with detail, evolving ideas and
has a wide, sometimes explosive dynamic range, Fennesz reduced his
sources to short loops of just a few notes, which were then
stretched/processed/processed-more into fairly static, hypnotic
textures.
The segment that won me over got progressively quieter for about ten
minutes, until it was just barely audible. it was a simple idea that
managed to work magic. A few segments were kind of Gas-like,
orchestral bits time-stretched into slow, ravaged dreamy things. On
the whole, the piece was rather seductive. Joins Akira Rabelais and
Ekkehart Ehler's forays into the world of glitchy digitally-distorted
classical music (enough for a sub-genre?).
-------------------------------
Tetsu Inoue "Active Dot (study for 16 lines)"
at Engine 27
quoted 1 line http://www.engin
>http://www.engine27.org
Hm. Well, the presentation was more serious. The receptionist lets
you into the silent room, where 16 speakers have been set up. The
computer dims the lights in the room as the music begins. removed
from the rest of the world, all you have to think about is sound.
Unlike the idea of stereo, or quad sound, or even the multichannel
systems in movie theaters, the Engine 27 16-channel speaker set up
isn't symetrical or orderly. It's a long thin room, and there are
several semi-circles of speakers on the floor, speakers hanging from
the ceiling pointing in various directions, and some speakers up by
the ceiling in various locations. there's no 'ideal' listening
position. You have to walk around and check out what's going on in
various parts of the room. All the different musicians who make
music for the space use the same eccentric speaker placement.
Tetsu Inoue's piece uses abstract, dry digital sounding noises. The
piece is about 15 minutes long. It was a series of episodes; a
certain sort of sound (like 'droning' or 'clipped' or 'really high
pitched') would begin in one speaker, and then take over the room,
gradually, with variations and all sorts of spatial tricks.
It was quite elaborately worked out. You really had to walk around,
and it was interesting finding parts of the din you had only vaguely
surmised from the other side of the room. Sort of thing you just
couldn't experience on your home stereo.
Still...I'm surprised to realize that it's not intrinsically exciting
to witness complex panning per se, seemed a little academic maybe.
k
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