Posts archived in Artworks
Snow, Philadelphia, 12 19 09
Sixteen inches of snow this weekend. The present artwork is to be filed under “horror.” It was recorded in the morning. The sensibility is kind of an urban interpolation to The Thing.
In it, I walk around the block, getting chased by wind chimes. FYI, my shoes are the rhythm section.
Chris DeLaurenti, field recording specialist and member of the Phonographer’s Union, was on KUOW’s “Weekday” program yesterday to discuss many of the most important issues around the study of sound. This post is a listening guide to the discussion, and serves also as a pretty decent primer for understanding how and why sound is useful as a type of analytic material.
“Sound Studies,” while increasingly common in the academy, still lacks basic definitions. This post is part of an ongoing effort to provide clear, descriptive expositions of what the study of sound encompasses – as an art form, as a humanistic science, and as a general philosophy.
Speaking of film, as we have been, Melena Ryzik interviewed Clint Eastwood’s Academy Award-winning sound designer Alan Robert Murray yesterday.
The pursuit of authenticity apparently knows no bounds. Says Murray:
We went and recorded a lot in South Africa and tried to be accurate to the background. My recorder went to the shantytowns. We found circa 1990 phones that we believed would be in Mandela’s office. We went to Robben Island — the jail door you hear is actually Mandela’s cell door. We got to record in his cell, which is kind of eerie.
and …
In South Africa, we recruited 25 guys, professional players that they rounded up in Cape Town, and we had a professional rugby coach there. We got them together and we set them 25-30 yards apart and said, O.K., you guys run into each other as hard as you can. And I mean, it was just brutal what we got back.
Ryzik professes honestly that sound design is a mystery category, Academy-wise, that it’s “one of those categories that make people lose their Oscar pool.” Murray, like most people who deal with sound professionally, is obviously used to the association of invisibility with nonexistence that accounts for such a lack of awareness. (He starts the interview by saying “thanks for noticing. A lot of people just think the sound happens when they shoot the movie.”)
Coming up: a sound studies primer
Precious, out for about a month now, was a tremendously complicated movie to attend. Audience members were divided on how to respond, vocally. How should people react to difficult art? Loudly or quietly? And if loudly, how? This problem took on an ethical dimension, and the sound of the theater became one of the key ways that viewers experienced the movie as a document of race and racial difference.
For many people, Mazen Kerbaj is just Mazen Kerbaj, an accomplished graphic artist and trumpet improviser who’s toured and recorded in France, the US, Lebanon, etc. He’s gotten plenty of well-deserved, enthusiastic press for his playing.
Plaza Garibaldi, Zona Rosa, is a mariachi band supermarket. Peaking in numbers on Friday and Saturday nights, bands gather to perform for potential clients. (Anyone.) As no band is more than a few feet from several others, the air is thick with mariachi music. Sometimes in sync, often not. An occasional harpist or guitarist performs alone.
The musicians do not play full songs. Instead, disconnected snippets – a brass section, unaccompanied, showing off how good it is – just imagine if you hired them to play with a full band for your quinceañera (Mexican sweet fifteen party)!
(P.S. Check out Billtron’s recording of the exact same event.)
What are the consequences of believing in the synchrony of representation and space? Usually not confusion. More often hucksterism.
October 21, 2009
The double-wide storefront across the street had been shuttered for two months. Once I saw some guys getting arrested in front of it on my way to work in the morning, but that was the most action to be observed there, and it seemed unrelated to whatever business was hiding inside. Then, just last weekend, the metal gates finally flung open, like God parting the waters at Yam Suph. But what was revealed was far more miraculous than anything in the bible.
The building is home to Buzz-a-Rama “500,” the last remaining slot-car establishment in the city of New York. The owner, Frank Perri, 74, claims that there used to be 30 or 40 such venues throughout the boroughs, back in the late 60s and 70s when he first opened. Children worked on their personal cars over the weekend, and then brought them in to race on lovely and elaborate courses. This article suggests that the name Buzz-a-Rama “captured the energy of the hundreds of teenagers and kids who used to crowd into the room on race days, and also the sound of the cars themselves, a high-pitched, insectlike whine — the sound of constant speed.”
A short documentary has Mr. Perri yelling at a child who claims his fingers are numb, among other amazing old slot-car guy moments.
This is a montage of crushing sadness and fleeting joy (the essence and the promise, respectively, of fandom.) Mostly joy, though, last night, because the Phillies won. I cheered silently for the concept of Manny Ramirez, and for Chan Ho Park’s fabulous new beard.
In the 1950s, music enthusiasts in the Soviet Union made copies of banned Western records using sheets of x-ray film purchased from clinics and hospitals. Photographic film, like wax, acetate, or vinyl, is thick and firm enough to be used with commercially available music engraving machines. X-rays weren’t the ideal medium, being prone to warping, but they worked well enough, and were cheap to boot.
Sound in Bangkok
