Aug. 16, 2023
After more than five years of patient and persistent effort in the face of many obstacles, I am thrilled to announce that my complete Chamber Music series has finally been released by the ANTS label in Italy. The CD/download/streaming version has remixed and remastered excerpts of all ten pieces in the series and a 16-page booklet. There's also a limited edition (50 copies) box set that includes the CD + 80-page booklet + a USB stick with WAV files of the full-length versions of all of the pieces on the CD, as well as several other related works – over 12 hours of music. All of this has been beautifully designed by Giovanni Antognazzi, whose commitment to this project through many setbacks is much appreciated. The CD version ($14.95) and box version ($69.95) are currently available in the US from Squidco.
The Chamber Music pieces were a series of sound installations created using recordings of room tone made in the empty spaces in which they were later presented. The process is fairly simple: I usually set up a mic in the middle of the room, turn on the recorder, and leave for an hour or so. (On a few occasions I had other people do this for me and send me the recording.) It's tempting to think I'm recording "silence," but there is inevitably some sound that leaks in from outside, or that is generated by the building's mechanical systems, though they are often subtle. These recordings are then heavily filtered to extract drones derived from the room's resonant frequencies, which are the only materials used to create the work. No musical instruments or other electronic devices are used.
If you've ever sung in the shower, you may have noticed how a certain note will suddenly jump out and sound much louder than the rest. That's a resonant frequency – a tone with a wavelength that corresponds to the size of the shower, causing it to resonate and become louder than other tones. Every space tends to favor certain frequencies based on its architecture, materials, and furnishings. I use a computer to find those frequencies on my recordings, isolating some of the strongest ones and filtering out the rest. It's similar to using a prism to filter white light and make the rainbow spectrum visible. But in this case, my sonic palate is much broader than the seven colors of the rainbow; the tones I extract are not limited to the twelve notes of the Western equal-tempered musical scale but can include many pitches in between.
A very famous and wonderful piece that makes use of resonant frequencies is Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room, in which he plays a recording of his speaking voice back into the room many times, re-recording it each time so that the resonant frequencies are gradually reinforced and eventually obliterate his voice completely. I came to work with this phenomenon from a somewhat different angle, approaching it from the notion of absence rather than presence: I am NOT sitting in a room!
In the early 1990s I visited the poets Jackson Mac Low and Anne Tardos at their loft in New York City to record them for a compilation CD I was assembling. When I arrived I realized I had forgotten to bring the power adapter for my recorder, and had very little battery power left. We tried to make some recordings, but were continuously interrupted by their cat jumping on the table and meowing, the phone ringing, etc. The battery in my recorder soon expired, bringing the whole fiasco to a merciful end.
I kept that tape, imagining that I might eventually be able to salvage something from it. When Jackson died in 2004, I thought perhaps I could finally use it to create an homage to him, some kind of sound collage of his words. That idea turned out to be a bad one, but it occurred to me that, rather than trying to resurrect the dead, I should explicitly acknowledge Jackson's absence. I began editing him out of the recordings entirely, leaving only the sounds of the "empty" loft: the refrigerator, the cat, the traffic and jet noise in the background. It felt like the right idea, but the many small fragments of room tone sounded too choppy and disjointed when strung together. I began looking for ways to smooth them out, much as Alvin Lucier had used his process to smooth out the irregularities in his own speech. That led me to try extreme equalization, which led to turning those background sounds into a series of drones. I never did finish that piece – someday! – but I got interested in using that process to find unexpected sounds hidden in the “silence” of empty rooms.
In 2005 my wife and I bought a house, and before we moved in I set up a mic in the empty living room and left it to record while I was out. It took me a while to actually get around to working with that recording. In the meantime, my friend Christine Wallers was working on an installation at Suyama Space, a gallery in Seattle that I greatly admired. I wanted to pitch the empty room idea to them, and thought it might be easier if I had something they could hear. Christine let me in one night while she was working, and I set up my gear to record the empty gallery while we went out to dinner. I used that recording to make what would become the first piece in the series and submitted a proposal to Suyama. It was turned down, but it started me on this path. (I was eventually able to use that piece at Suyama in a collaboration with visual artist Rick Araluce in 2012.)
Throughout the eight years when I was making these pieces, I tried to approach the same basic process in many different ways, to devise new formal approaches and give each iteration its own personality. Some are lush and melodic, others much more sparse and fragmented. Some are linear, but most were made of multiple sections that randomly recombine. They were made for art galleries, public places, and a private home, using speaker configurations ranging from four channels to twenty-four. I could have easily continued the series, but ten seemed like a good place to stop. Although, I might not say no to an invitation!