Processed

Some Thoughts on Venice, Brooklyn

Venice, Brooklyn was a shotgun multimedia improvisation assembled and performed by the Glass Bees on September 20, 2009. Early that morning, Jason Das and I traveled to areas along the Atlantic coastline in southern Brooklyn, specifically visiting neighborhoods and marshland that scientists have predicted to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the coming decades. We visited Dead Horse Bay, Floyd Bennett Field, Gerritsen Beach, and Sheepshead Bay, documenting them with sound recorders, photographs, watercolor sketches, and video, and collecting objects we found there. Later that day, we presented an improvised performance in the front vestibule of Envoy Enterprises, a gallery in Chinatown, New York City. Our field recordings, visual footage, and physical detritus became the raw material for a sound collage and temporary installation. Amplified sound was broadcast into the street, and visitors were invited into the gallery to listen more closely on headphones. All materials and sounds we presented were gathered, created, displayed, performed, and disassembled within an 11-hour period.

In a formal sense, Venice, Brooklyn was a significant stage in the ongoing evolution of the Glass Bees. From our inception, a core goal has been to adapt and respond to the situations in which we find ourselves, improvising with the materials we have at hand. But although we first formed as a purely musical project, our approach to improvisation is increasingly open to experimentation in other registers. In this case, our perambulations early in the day were conducted in the spirit of the Situationist dérive. Our motions were an attempt to actively engage with the city, getting lost while discovering corners previously unknown to us, paying close attention to things typically unobserved, exposing hidden histories, and finding utility in objects that have no use. Although we set out that morning with a general sense of what we were looking for, what we returned with was largely accidental. Our installation in a gallery in Chinatown constituted an improvised, impressionistic remix of what we had experienced earlier in the day.

We developed this project in response to a call for proposals issued by the Conflux Festival. Conflux is a New York City-wide gathering of visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers, and the public, created to “investigate everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological, and social practice.” Our interest in climate change and its potential effects on the city came out of my work as a science editor. It’s been difficult to avoid thinking about this profoundly depressing issue, and our inability, at all levels of society, to properly reckon with it. For centuries, people up and down the Atlantic seashore have built their lives, their communities, their very dreams on the assumption that land is land, and sea is sea. But the line demarcating these two worlds is slowly crawling uphill, making the precautions we have engineered increasingly insufficient. It is now conceivable that someday the locations we visited could suffer a similar fate as New Orleans, or Venice, or Bangladesh, all of which are in the process of being submerged. What would be lost if these areas were inundated, we wondered, and how are people preparing?

 

Like the haul of some anachronistic anthropological excavation, the evidence we gathered in our fieldwork was largely quotidian, but often telling. The sounds we used during our performance at Envoy were sampled from field recordings of what we encountered—antique bottles washed up on the shore, dumped in the bay decades ago but mysteriously resurfaced as litter once again; a bristle-less hairbrush, corroded clean by the brackish water; a watchdog protecting its owner’s property; a young girl pulling a wagon; shortwave weather reports; and interviews with people we met along the way.  The photographs we took and the watercolors Jason painted were snapshots of life in these places—a row of houses and the canal in Gerritsen, advertisements for new harborfront condominiums at Sheepshead, a path through the marshland, a table of trophies, a pinwheel, a dilapidated barn.

An elderly woman who took interest in Jason’s sketching explained to us that Gerritsen Beach was initially developed as a small community of summer cottages, inaccessible in the winter and occupied during the hot weather. That people have since built out these cabins into larger, more permanent houses just a few feet above sea level suggests an indomitable impulse to claim the coast and its watery pleasures. It also speaks to what Columbia University climatologists Klaus Jacob, Vivien Gornitz, and Cynthia Rosenzweig once described, in a study of the potential effects of climate change for New York, as "littoral environments … caught between the twin pressures of development and increasing coastal hazards." Like the nearby Whitney Mill that years ago served as an industrial focal point of the area, this unique and charming neighborhood of narrow streets, short blocks, and dense housing could someday be abandoned, this time badly flooded or even swallowed by the ocean.

That day we also passed through coastal areas that remain sparsely developed, a buffer zone to mitigate the consequences of storms for the city’s inland settlements. Home to abandoned barracks and functional U.S. Marine and Coast Guard installations, these isolated areas also offer open spaces psychically far removed from the congestion just a few miles up Flatbush Avenue. At Floyd Bennett Field we found a miniature formula 1 race course for remote control car enthusiasts. When we approached holding our audio recorder, the organizer introduced himself, explaining that he’d been afraid we were from the Parks Department, recording decibel levels as evidence for a complaint against him. After reassuring him that we had no intention of causing problems, he told us about the troubles his club faces in finding a permanent place to enjoy their hobby. They’d been evicted form the Aviator Club when the former aircraft hangar was turned into a sports complex, and now made the best they could of an uneven patch of tarmack they’d claimed. As the cars hurtled around the course at startlingly high speeds, his story was one of displacement, of a small but enthusiastic community forced to relocate due to forces beyond their control.

With flood prediction maps in hand, it was not difficult to see that in the long term, the built environment around us was similarly provisional, temporary, and in the process of migration. Scientists now know that certain effects of climate change are irreversible and unavoidable, and governments and individuals will be forced to adapt to a new reality. If they don’t, places around the world including these outlying regions of New York will be endangered, and their residents will be uprooted for higher ground. Many of those places will have an even harder time coping.

In Manhattan, concrete and glass high-rises belie the fact that millions of people live here on islands, and that their settlements rest just feet above sea level. To us it seemed provocative, then, to bring peripheral areas into dialogue with Downtown. Models of the potential effects of severe storms in Manhattan predict that neighborhoods not far from the Envoy Enterprises storefront could also be inundated. Even moderate storms will have the power to render the city’s infrastructure useless, as occurred one morning in the summer of 2007, when an early morning downpour incapacitated the city’s subway system, leaving thousands of commuters with no choice but to hike miles to work. How are we preparing for a potentially far worse sequel? Could we do anything about it if we wanted to?

Fundamentally, the question of what investments and sacrifices we are willing to make to cope with the effects of climate change is a complicated calculus of risk assessment. With so much competing information and so many unknowns about the extent of climate change’s effects, how do we define a reasonable level of preparedness? Such questions are not new, and evidence of the ways in which we have answered them fill the space around us. This is a theme that the Glass Bees have explored before, and in this sense we see Venice, Brooklyn as part of an ongoing project begun in a July 2009 performance we held at Monkeytown, a venue in Brooklyn. There, we (along with sound artist Andrea Williams) improvised a soundtrack to a two-channel video projection created from footage gathered at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Although today it is primarily a destination for weekend getaways to the beach, Sandy Hook has a long and rich military history, dating back to the nineteenth century, when bunkers were dug into the dunes to protect New York Harbor. The fortifications developed as technology evolved, eventually including a Nike missile installation erected in the 1950s to shield the city from Soviet bombers. All of these defenses eventually became obsolete and were abandoned.

No attack ever came against New York, but does that mean that these precautions were foolhardy? We will never know. Because the fossils of this era sit on a sandbar just a few hundred feet wide at some points, however, we might expect that nature’s invasion of the same terrain will have dramatic effects, and strategies against it will become increasingly difficult to devise. Can we live with this? How are we preparing for these changes? The very week that Venice, Brooklyn took place, world leaders met in the United Nations General Assembly, once again averring that something must be done to address climate change, but refusing to make concrete proposals about the measures everyone knows are needed. With a major climate change conference coming up in Copenhagen later this year, prospects are looking increasingly slim that the essential consensus needed to address this complicated, global issue will materialize.

In a small way, Venice, Brooklyn was an attempt to focus on the material reality of what is at risk. Data and statistics can seem abstract to the nonscientist, and it won’t be until people’s lives are impacted in concrete, physical ways that the full extent of the phenomenon will be understood.

Although the trends are clear, climatologists admit that the specific effects of climate change are difficult to predict. New York City will have no alternative but to improvise, to adapt to the changing environment in which we find ourselves...  perhaps not unlike a certain, transitory multimedia installation presented on a stoop in Chinatown.

Visit the Glass Bees for audio and video from this performance.

The Glass Bees at Monkeytown - October 10

If you're in New York City on October 10, come to Monkeytown and hear the Glass Bees. We will be improvising live sound for video projections by artist Peter Shapiro Guillaume Clave. This will take place as an installment of the Forward Motion Theater's EyeWash series. Monkeytown is a very special venue, with comfortable seating and four huge video screens. We're very excited and hope you will be too.

Also on the bill:

MOSTRA + Nico Mazet
VBLANK + AUTO DA FE
VJ Pixalot

Monkeytown
58 N. 3rd St. (btw. Kent & Wythe)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
$5 + $10 food/drink minimum
Reservations recommended.
718-384-1369 or monkeytownhq@aol.com

Go to http://glassbees.com for lots of sound and a new documentary film collaboration with filmmaker Nerina Penzhorn. Thanks to my co-Bee Jason Das for the flyer.

Feed Me With Your Hiss

With such high expectations for My Bloody Valentine’s first performances in over 15 years, how could they help but disappoint? Since fading into obscurity following the release of their monumental 1991 LP Loveless, their gauzy, tremolo-drenched sunshine has spawned whole genres of imitators. The sound was ubiquitous in the East Coast indie rock scene of the 1990s (see The Swirlies, Velocity Girl, The Lilys, Mercury Rev), and continues to feed inspiration to various subgenres of contemporary fringe popular music (see Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Ulrich Schnauss, Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series). Loveless and its legacy continue to feel relevant, even if the initial shock has faded through the intervening years. How would the band, so loved despite the lengthy separation from its adoring audience, rise above being a mere novelty act?

Reviews of MBV’s UK shows this summer inevitably remarked on the massive volume of their sound system, and their September 22 appearance at New York’s Roseland Ballroom more than fulfilled the promise. Security guards at the club entrance offered earplugs, while signs warned of the noise to come. The Valentines’ set WAS loud, very loud, and video projections and strobe bursts were designed to disorient. The delicately layered arrangements that make Loveless such a rich listening experience became absorbed in a relentless haze of overdriven Marshall 4x12s. Less “dreamy” selections like “Feed Me With Your Kiss” were washed out but for the body blows of Debbie Googe’s bass. And when the crowd hunkered down for the forecasted 15-plus minute squall of “You Made Me Realise,” the air became viscous. Audience members raised their hands in the air not in salute, but to bathe in the shock waves emanating from the stage. The band’s gambit to justify its resurrection was to deliver an overwhelming dose of shock and awe.

MBV has been a contender for the title of “world’s loudest band,” and the concert seemed a determined attempt to lay claim to the title. But why this mission? For someone so notoriously exacting in his studio production, why would Kevin Shields & Co. approach this live display with such blunt instruments? And if the audience came to pledge its love, what did it receive in return?

Critics have remarked on the sexually ambiguous sensuality of MBV’s late releases, which emerges from the lazy beauty of the production and the near interchangeability of Shields’s and guitarist Belinda Butcher’s voices. Songs like “Come In Alone” seem to invite us to recline in a soft, melancholy bed, but what might await us there is not always clear. Though we overhear snatches of romantic negotiations, linguistic meaning ultimately fades into pure, abstract sound.

What keeps the songs from becoming simple sentimental escapism is the storm just outside the bedroom, the overdrive that blurs the lines separating the melodic hook from the white noise threatening to dissolve the song into abstraction. What astonishes about the recorded MBV is how well Shields navigates this line between sweetness and blinding light. The music seems to embrace, but one can’t help but be aware that the love on offer will deliver neither comfort nor protection.

In performance, the thunder at the edges of the song overwhelmed the melody. Like the explicitly noise-based music that has had its ascendancy in recent years, MBV’s concerts are exercises in extremity. They are orchestrated both to mesmerize and to repel the listener, and if love was in the air, so was a clear power relationship. In response to its adoration of its heroes, the crowd was given pain, quite literally in the case of at least one UK-based fan. Listening became a physically masochistic act, as all risked permanent physical damage to be in the presence of an improbable reunion.

Under such an overwhelming barrage, the only choice was to fill in the melodic gaps mentally, to imagine that the subtleties present on the record were actually being played in the concert hall. It was an act of remembering a long lost love, all these years later, for which subjecting oneself to the violence latent in the band’s recordings was worth the struggle. It was characteristic of the entire My Bloody Valentine experience. With rumors circulating about the possibility of a new record in the future, one can’t help but wonder if this is another tease. But if we went home battered, we will savor the experience for a long, long time.

Update on Recent Projects

Occupied with various vacations, home renovations, and childrearing duties I been delinquent in maintaining Processed. Here are some things I have been working on, though.

In an earlier post I briefly summarized a program on recent developments in neuroscience held in conjunction with the Aspen Ideas Festival. I recently completed production of the New York Academy of Sciences eBriefing on the event, and it’s available with open access at www.nyas.org/brain. In addition to some fine reporting by my colleague (and a gifted science writer) Alan Dove, we also posted complete slides/audio/video of the event, as well as a set of video interviews with the speakers and a printable e-book composed of transcripts edited for home consumption by yours truly. I’m thrilled with how it turned out, and you should visit to learn more about how to teach monkeys to play video games, why your brain waves are like an iceberg, and why that lesion in your prefrontal cortex is unlikely to keep you out of jail should you choose to murder your irritating neighbor.

My musical project, The Glass Bees, has been running for a bit over a year now, and continues to be very productive. To date we’ve posted 21 tracks for a total of approximately 120 minutes on our website, and Jason Das and I are quite happy with how things are going. Jason also just completed some housekeeping on the website to make it more attractive and to give you the chance to create a Glass Bees mastermix. You can also subscribe to our podcast to hear the latest tracks as soon as they are posted. If you need advice on where to start listening, try these recent favorites: Preface Introduction, Triumph, Thunder on the Prairie, I Shot the Serif, and Guitar Solo. All tracks are improvised live to a single stereo microphone and digital recorder. There are no overdubs and we try to edit as minimally as possible.

Until now The Glass Bees has been purely a studio/web project, with very little effort to actively cultivate an audience. We are slowly beginning to think that the time might be coming to go public. There is work to be done to set up a show, and maybe even to compile the recordings on CD. If you have a party coming up that will be attended by the types of people who can tolerate drones, loops, feedback, and unusual instruments, or if you know someone who organizes such affairs, drop us a line.

I’m also in the process adding a couple of blogrolls to the right column with links to recommended reading and listening, should you be interested. Please stay tuned.

77BOADRUM

While the rest of the planet was spending 7/7/07 watching the Live Earth concerts, Yamataka Eye of The Boredoms instigated a special show in DUMBO that included a thunderous ensemble of 77 drummers. And it wasn't some hippie drum circle. Thanks to the generous souls who posted this edited video of the spectacle, and for all of these videos. I am very sorry I was out of town and missed this, though there is still hope for me. The Daily Swarm has a nice collection of reviews and info, and claims Eye is planning another show on 8/8/08, including 88 drummers.

Dub Housing: Joel Sanders's Architecture of Surveillance

Architect Joel Sanders presented his Mix House project at Postopolis (video if you scroll down here), having been invited following this enticing post from Bldg Blog a few weeks ago (Click here first for pictures and additional information.) The Mix House is not just another modernist contortion, but a dwelling as three-channel audio device. Outfitted with architectural features and parabolic microphones oriented to capture sounds from the street, the backyard, and the sky, it gives the homeowner the ability both to listen in on the soundscape surrounding him, and to mix and record the three inputs into a musical composition from a command station in the kitchen. It's a contemporary twist on what Brian Eno in the 1970s described as his "efforts to produce original pieces ... for particular situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres."€ Here the compositions are not composed for specific spaces, however, but by specific places at particular times. These recordings might then be broadcast as audio perfume throughout the neighborhood, or saved and replayed to color the house's interior like a shade of paint, or furnish it like a 21st-century remix of Erik Satie's Musique d'ameublement.

Sanders explained that the Mix House is the first project he has developed to deal explicitly with the sonic possibilities of architecture. It's an inspiring thought experiment, since it provides a fresh reconfiguring of the ordinarily visual and tactile preoccupations that determine so much of what we experience in our built environments. As Sanders pointed out, citing historical work by Emily Thompson, except for concert hall architecture "we're typically indifferent to acoustics, unless something is wrong."€ The goal of sound design is often to craft space in ways that prevent us from even noticing its sonic character. Though often outfitted with a/v systems these days, it is still unusual that a piece of architecture could be constructed specifically to emphasize and utilize these characteristics. As Bldg Blog points out, the Mix House is a live-in musical instrument, offering its inhabitants an array of opportunities to create art from the ambient environment, and to customize the sound of their own space.

Such an innovative, interactive design is fascinating, but several conceptually unsettling leitmotifs also emerged over the course of Sanders's presentation. Tellingly, the architect placed his project in the context of both the early warning listening systems that England began constructing prior to World War II, and modernism's iconic floor-to-ceiling glass window, which offered the owner the unimpeded ability to monitor and blend into the landscape surrounding him. In this sense the Mix House is also a tool of surveillance, a topic Sanders has also explored in projects like his House for a Bachelor. Here, he sank the front lawn below ground level to give the owner the ability to remain unseen in the dwelling's core while simultaneously experiencing the environment around him. He can walk into the external environment, yet he is simultaneously protected and detached from it. The Mix House incorporates a similar visual sense of what Sanders characterized as "vulnerability,"€ but gives it a sonic turn.

Sound theorist Douglas Kahn is among those who have found a critical importance in the difference between vision and sound. In Noise, Water, Meat, his study of sound in the arts, he observes,

Although light traverses the space between an object and observer just as readily as sound does between an action and listener, the reflection of light is understood not as an action comparable to one that might create a sound but, because of a constancy of action, as the result of a state ... Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences...

Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality.

For Kahn, whereas vision is an act of one body perceiving another discrete body in a subjective relationship, hearing is an act of mingling between bodies. Italian Futurist painters like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla sensed this possibility in paintings like The Street Enters the House and Speeding Automobile representing the turbulence of modern life as an amorphous interweaving and interpenetration of lines of force. Musician and critic David Toop also heard this in his landmark book Ocean of Sound when he described ambient music as an art of "openness,"€ in which the composer recognizes the importance of the sonic dimensions of life and the connections that tie its various elements together. The ambient attitude is not only an aesthetic choice but a political act. Whereas the eye has been conceived in modernity as a tool of subjective perception and interpretation of a world that is "out there,"€ the ear is omnidirectional, permeable, and impressionable, surrendering to the influence of the wider world, while seeking to incorporate it into one's own being. If the eye is an organ of division, the ear is one of community. "There are ear plugs,"€ Toop writes, "but then I just hear the sound of my own shell."

The Mix House's openness, as a machine for listening, is a profoundly wary one, however. One might argue (and Sanders indicated that others have suggested when reviewing his project) that the house could very well achieve the same goal merely by opening conventional windows. However, by adding extra steps of mediation in the form of overengineered prosthetic ears, the architect is exploring a queasy tension between private and public spaces. The Mix House incorporates sounds of the neighborhood within itself, but only if the windows can be shut tight and the sounds can be personalized through manipulation. The inhabitant wants a connection to public space, but interacts with it at arm's length, and only insofar as he can get what he needs from it as wallpaper for his cocoon.

Seen in this light, Sanders's constructions might be providing apt metaphors for certain facets of the way we live now. At the same time that the Mix House offers new artistic opportunities, it achieves them at the expense of the owner's participation in a public space. It is a suitable solution for an age when social interactions and politics are no longer practiced in the streets but on the Web, when friendships happen via corporate-backed networking sites, or when sprawling, gated suburban communities are planned in ways that minimize interaction between families. This is suburban architecture for the age of terror, the age of illegal wiretaps, the age of Megan's Law, when any neighbor could be a threat, or where everyone has something to hide.

Review: Leaderless

By dint of some pre-holiday goodwill on the part of my employer I managed to catch a fantastic show at Printed Matter on Friday afternoon.  Arranged at the back of their new space on 10th Ave. (conveniently located across the street from the meticulously curated 192 Books), Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Now focused on some recent iterations of a community of musicians who for decades has released their music on home-recorded cassette tapes. Before MySpace, and even before indie rockers discovered the virtues of the four-track in the lo-fi '90s, a largely unnoticed, loose affiliation of artists created music in their bedrooms and traded tapes in networks that continue to exist outside the typical systems of music distribution. Years ago, Autonomedia published a landmark project called Cassette Mythos documenting the early years of this movement. The show at Printed Matter concentrated on recent artists and labels working in the thriving noise, psychedelic, and experimental music scenes, such as those showcased in the now annual NoFun Fest. Labels represented included Hanson Records, American Tapes, Drone Disco, Fag Tapes, Tone Filth, Heavy Tapes, RRRecords, and Animal Disguise, among others.

We're currently in an age when anyone can have a band and, at least according to the New York Times, can attract an audience and become famous through the Internet. Initially, cassette culture arose out of necessity because it was the easiest and cheapest way to create and distribute idiosyncratic music to a small audience of like-minded enthusiasts. Today, digital recording tools have made it easier than ever to make music, and the Internet now enables anyone with a decent connection to upload music and reach the masses. Web sites like AudioStreet and CD Baby have massified the phenomenon that the earliest cassette traders pioneered, taking advantage of the democratizing possibilities of electronic media and circumventing the traditional model for music distribution.. for better or worse. Whereas a couple of decades ago, there was a virtue in obscurity, the post-Nirvana age gave birth to a suffocating exhibitionism in "alternative" music. If it is possible for anyone to be a star, many are answering the call and trying to become one, which does not necessarily make for an innovative environment. In such a context, what does a willfully obscure cassette culture tell us, and why does it still need to exist?

Visiting Leaderless, I was struck by the sense that these artists use the cassette not only as a recording medium, but perhaps more importantly as an aesthetic artifact. From austere and even elegant packages by Prurient to cheaply photocopied cards containing cassettes covered with melted goop, the tapes included in Leaderless have an often slapdash but refreshing physicality that is disappearing in music in the digital age. In many of the pieces on display, the packaging becomes an integral part of the artistic statement, echoing the alienating sound coated onto the ribbon inside. The cassettes are often seductive in their crypticness, and off-putting in their sheer juvenile delinquency, sometimes simultaneously. (Skull Erection, anyone?) Many contain only a few minutes worth of tape. There is little information about the artists, making each cassette a practically anonymous missive. Most are priced cheaply, and available only through mailorder. The average listener would be very reluctant to call the sound on many of them music.

For the cassette audience, enjoyment of these tapes is not only enjoyment of the sound that comes through one's speakers, but also the awareness that one is privy to something willfully marginal. Difficult to find, the underground cassette is a talisman of one's belonging to an arcane sect, even as "noise" has morphed into a genre with its own stars. (Check out Wolf Eyes, who have recorded for American Tapes, for example.) For the artists represented in Leaderless who have gained some notoriety through more conventional releases, the fact that they continue to operate in this parallel universe suggests that the tactile immediacy of this obsolete medium offers other unique opportunities.

Crushed by Big Blue

I got the news yesterday that the much-loved Tonic is closing its doors for the last time because there’s no room for it anymore in Bernard Tschumi’s Lower East Side. I know many in New York City will miss the club as a homegrown, relaxing venue run by true supporters of great music. It filled a critical niche when the Knitting Factory abandoned its role as the home of the Downtown music scene, and built its daring schedule with the help of musicians who were invited to curate its programming. I will carry with me memories of many challenging and moving performances by artists like Sir Richard Bishop, John Fahey, Carsten Nicolai, Thomas Fehlmann, Akron/Family, Arto Lindsay/John Zorn/Anton Fier, Masada, Fennesz, Derek Bailey, Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio, Voice Crack, Ikue Mori, Jim O'Rourke/Pita, and Slavic Soul Party, among many others I am surely forgetting. Tonic’s closing doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise; they’ve been struggling for years. It is a depressing turn of events, though, to see something so optimistic, innovative, and culturally important be driven from a city whose fame relies in no small part on its being a bellwether of edgy cultural trends. Apparently the future is luxury condos for all. Hurrah.