Synesthetech

Artists Philip von Zweck and Kevin Jennings are holding their third annual Fryvalry, a contest between vegetarian and meatetarian deep fat fryers, this Saturday at the Hyde Park Arts Center in Chicago. Kevin and Philip appeared on Chicago’s WGN morning news program yesterday in full Fryvalry regalia for a pre-contest demonstration. Alex and I went to last year’s Fryvalry and it was quite an experience, especially the deep-fried Pringles.

Quite possibly the best food-based piece of conceptual art since Alison Knowles’ iconic “Make a Salad”. Excellent.

Spring-loaded minute hand, Union Station, Chicago, June 1, 2009.

Here it is, the final installment of this series (see also part 1, part 2, and part 3)…this last set of recordings focuses even more on modes of transportation than the previous sets, mainly because the last few days of life in Chicago consisted of running errands and packing. But I managed to squeeze in some public spaces and even a tussle with a security guard, a nicely symbolic eviction from the city of Chicago to round out this sonic overview of the past few weeks. ;)

Next up: the beginning of my collection of the sounds of Ann Arbor…

1. Amtrak Hiawatha Line from Chicago to Milwaukee (5:29, 11.7MB mp3)
   Our last weekend in Chicago was actually spent visiting friends in Milwaukee (and seeing Collections of Colonies of Bees live at Milwaukee’s Cactus Club). Alex and I took the train up, and I recorded our departure in the hopes of capturing the train conductor making the routine welcome announcements. Unfortunately the speakers in our car never turned on, but I got some nice rumbles and clacking.
2. Last Train to Western (7:52, 15.8MB mp3)
   A recording of the last time I took the El train by myself from our apartment to the Western stop in Lincoln Square. A really nice piece as a whole, this starts while I’m on the platform listening to a neighbor use a table saw in his backyard, with planes flying overhead (we used to live on a busy flight path). Once the train arrives the whole sound field changes dramatically for a few minutes, then it’s just two short stops until the sound of disembarking turns into the clanging of the vertical turnstile leading to the alley under the train tracks, then ultimately onto Lincoln Ave.
3. Conrad Sulzer Library Air Vent and Traffic 2:08, 4.3MB mp3)
   On that same trip to Lincoln Square, I finally took the time to record the massive air vent outside the Lincoln Square library that I’d been meaning to record for the last four years. A nice hum mixed with traffic.
4. Metra to Ogilvie Transportation Center (12:35, 26.9MB mp3)
   We rented a minivan for the day of our move, and it was actually cheaper to rent it round trip back to Chicago and pay for a train ticket back to Ann Arbor (and keep the car for a week!) than it was to do a one-way compact car rental for just the day of our move. So after being in Ann Arbor for a few days, I got to drive all the way back to Chicago, drop off the car, and take the Metra to the downtown Chicago transportation center, commiserating with the rain-soaked commuters one last time. A few good safety announcements interrupt the “don’t talk to me” crowd silence of the early morning commuters, until the train makes its last stop and I step out onto the platform and then into the building. It’s amazing how quiet this recording is since I was shoulder-to-shoulder with a massive crowd of people, almost none of whom spoke.
5. Oscillating Air Vent Near the Chagall Wall (0:56, 2MB mp3)
   While killing time before the train back to Ann Arbor, I passed this air vent on the street which was making a strange, almost 1950s-ish sci-fi soundtrack whistling noise. It blends in when you keep walking past it, but standing next to it for awhile became almost unnerving. I wonder if it actually functions as low-level crowd control?
6. Chicago River ambience (1:10, 2.5MB mp3)
   Boats, seagulls and traffic while I sat on the river and ate lunch.
7. Chicago Public Library Reference Room (2:08, 4.5MB mp3)
   Rather than sit in a Starbucks to read while avoiding the rain, I headed to the Harold Washington Library and spent some time reading in the Reference Room, in a corner far enough away from the action that I avoided conversations and could make a halfway decent recording of some typical library sounds.
8. Grinding Outside of and Dismissal from the Chicago Public Library (1:01, 2.1MB mp3)
   A fitting end to my Chicago field recording series: on my way out of the library before heading to Union Station (and filming its spring-loaded clock), I paused inside the library entrance to record the sound of a construction worker using a power grinder outside. I was temporarily fascinated by the variations in the grinder’s buzz whenever someone would open the library doors and close them again; apparently this wasn’t cool with the library’s security guard, who promptly ejected me after less than a minute of recording time. Goodbye, Chicago!

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I’ve opened up a new Stasisfield Imagekind print store with a gallery of six images to start with. I’ve had a lot of requests for prints of my digital image compositions that are larger than the ones I’ve been selling at Stasisfield’s own shop, and Imagekind will also custom frame the prints they produce which is a real bonus. Every print I’ve seen Imagekind create has been excellent, and I’ve used them several times for work I’ve been showing in the past couple years — so the prints on sale here are the same quality as my recent gallery work. I hope you’ll check out the new print store, and maybe even buy something! ;)

• Stasisfield Imagekind Print Store

Mixing board on the Bluhm Family Terrace, Modern Wing, Art Institute of Chicago, during grand opening festivities on May 16, 2009. (More photos here.)

In the previous installment of this field recording series, I included some recordings of the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Modern Wing while it was still under construction. Here’s the payoff, when Alex and I visited the Modern Wing on the day of its grand opening. Also, the next day I visited the MCA and made some recordings at Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your TIme” solo show.

1. Renzo Piano Speech at SAIC Commencement, Millennium Park (9:04, 19MB mp3)
   On our way to the Modern Wing, we stumbled upon the commencement ceremony for the School of the Art Institute which was going on in Millennium Park. A friend of ours, Alicia Chester, was graduating so we hoped we’d bump into her, but the crowd was too big. Instead, we managed to stick around for a speech by Renzo Piano, architect of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing. We also got to hear a redwing blackbird, a young boy fascinated by the sound of stepping on a drainage grating, and a Japanese family sitting down in front of us with several bouquets of flowers wrapped in crinkly paper.
2. Photography Gallery, Griffin Court and Pritzker Garden, AIC Modern Wing (6:16, 12.5MB mp3)
   Interior and exterior sounds of the new Modern Wing, starting inside the ground floor photography gallery, then out into the Griffin Court entrance hall, and finally out a side door and into the Pritzker Garden, a gorgeous space which envelops you in the building’s architecture while still affording you a wonderful acoustic vantage point of downtown Chicago. Lots of traffic sounds echo around the space in a way that feels tranquil rather than bustling.
3. AIC Modern Wing Galleries 182-184, Cy Twombly, “The Natural World” 4:02, 8.1MB mp3)
   Recorded during my second walkthrough of the Twombly show, when I went back in to take pictures on the (bad) advice of the security guard in the photography gallery. I got busted immediately (but not until I was able to take this picture), so I immediately switched my camera with my Zoom H2.
4. Olafur Eliasson, “Ventilator”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (3:07, 5.9MB mp3)
   On to the MCA’s installation of Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your Time” retrospective…one of my favorite pieces was “Ventilator”, a room containing an electric fan hanging from the ceiling which whips around the room at a height of about six inches above the top of my head. Fun, scary, and sonically blissful. I thought I was being pretty slick by holding the exhibition program in front of my Zoom to hide it from the gallery guard (and help cut down on the wind noise); she probably just shook her head and kept walking.
5. Olafur Eliasson, “Beauty”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1:39, 3.2MB mp3)
   Another Eliasson installation, “Beauty” is a dark room containing a dim spotlight and a hose on the ceiling which spouts a wall of fine mist that you can walk around. A gorgeous bit of white noise in a black space.

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Last night I played my final set as a Chicago resident on Philip von Zweck’s Something Else radio program on WLUW. It was a great time as always, and Philip let me (or should I say made me) fill up the entire four hours with my live set, material from Stasisfield, and my own back catalog.

Pictures from last night are here, and below is the playlist for the night. I haven’t had a chance to check the recordings of my live set yet, but if I’ve got a good recording I’ll be posting that here as well.

Playlist, Something Else, 05/17/2009

(artist - song title - release title - label)

I Heart Lung with John Kannenberg - Deluge Ex Machina - The Kannenberg Sessions - Sounds Are Active

Archive (Mike Hallenbeck) - 2 Turntables and a Microwave - The Secret History of Karaoke - Stasisfield

John Kannenberg - Live performance

steve roden - bookshelf (the titles of visibile books) - The Audible Still-Life - Stasisfield

My Fun - Test Site in the Turbine Hall (Carsten Höller) - The Sonics of Art Spaces - Stasisfield

Ethan Koehler - Ziggurat - Sonic Planar Analysis 01 - Stasisfield

John Kannenberg - Fluorescent Tube Hum: Dan Flavin’s “The Diagonal of May 25, 1963 (to Constantin Brancusi)” - The Sonics of Art Spaces - Stasisfield

Drawn (Glenn Bach, John Kannenberg, Jon Mueller, Jim Schoenecker, Jim Warchol) - Set 2 - Unreleased performance at KSE studios, Milwaukee

Mise en Scene - Intermittent #1-#3 - Intermittent - Stasisfield

Anne Guthrie - Conservatoire/Conservatorie  - Conservatoire - Stasisfield

John Kannenberg - Drawing the Abbey’s Defenses/A Tense Dinner - A Canticle For Leibowitz - Nishi

John Kannenberg - For Agnes Martin - Four Painters - Stasisfield

John Kannenberg - brise [ miles ahead ] - miles. - Stasisfield

Recording traffic passing over metal construction plates, 111 West Jackson St, Chicago, April 29, 2009 (photo by Alessandra Gillen)

Picking up where I left off, here’s my second batch of recent Chicago field recordings, my sonic farewell before Alex and I move to Ann Arbor…

1. Rain outside apartment sunporch (9:35, 20.7MB mp3)
   Almost ten minutes of a lovely evening rain from the acoustically rich interior of our apartment’s sunporch, facing north.
2. Purple Line CTA train arriving at Howard (4:47, 10.5MB mp3)
   A healthy portion of the second half of my morning commute (Brown line to Belmont Purple line, then Purple line to Davis). This is actually a Purple line only to Howard, so occasionally my commute has had three parts instead of two. I was lucky to get a recording of the train interior without anyone speaking.
3. Traffic over metal construction plates, 111 West Jackson St. (5:56, 12.3MB mp3)
   Recorded at the same time the picture above was taken. A block-long stretch of Jackson Street down in the Loop has had a series of large, square metal plates on it for some time, and when the traffic runs over them they make a great booming sound which echoes amazingly off all the skyscrapers nearby.
4. Fountain, Art Institute of Chicago garden (4:00, 8.2MB mp3)
   Public fountain season’s upon us, so this is a recording of this fountain now that it actually has water in it again.
5. Modern Wing of Art Insitute of Chicago under construction (3:20, 6.9MB mp3)
   A compact little field recording symphony. I love the way the drone of the equipment and the traffic interplay at first, followed by the construction worker’s whistling and the woman’s footsteps in the gravel. A great beginning, middle and end. Can’t wait to finally see the inside of the new Modern Wing in person this coming weekend!
6. Walking to Sox-35th CTA station after White Sox victory (1:37, 3.3MB mp3)
   A nice moment of public euphoria, saxophone and changing acoustic spaces as we walk across a bridge over the freeway and into the Sox-35th CTA Red Line station.
7. Birds, cars and El trains, 5:15am (8:47, 17.3MB mp3)
   Since I have the sleeping habits of a 70 year old man, I usually wake up around 4:30am. When spring starts, the morning birds go crazy. This was the first really riotous bird morning of the season, and i recorded this out the windows of our living room.
8. Chicago River bridge raising alarm bells from Merchandise Mart CTA train platform (1:32, 3.1MB mp3)
   I’ve rarely seen the bridges over the Chicago River down in the Loop raise up to let boats pass underneath. I’d never seen the bridge raise up in front of the Merchandise Mart CTA train platform while I was actually on the train until this past weekend. With the bridge up, the train couldn’t pass, so we disembarked and stood on the platform so I could get a recording of the bridge’s warning bells as it lowered back down into place, mixing nicely with the walkie talkie communications of a CTA employee standing next to me.
9. Hissing air vent above Chicago Union Station Amtrak track, National Train Day (2:25, 4.6MB mp3)
   After touring an Amtrak Superliner train during the free National Train Day event at Union Station last weekend, we stepped back onto the track and walked right under an air vent with an amazing hiss. That wall of white noise has a few cracks in it which expose some of the other sounds in the station at the time.

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Recording birds in a Lincoln Square apartment window, April 18, 2009 (photo by Alessandra Gillen)

Later this month, Alex and I will be moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I’ll be entering the MFA program in Art & Design at the University of Michigan this fall. Although I’m really excited about what lies ahead there, it means not only leaving a lot of great friends, but also leaving a sonically-rich world-class city for a much smaller college town.

With that in mind, I’ve been trying to document even more of the sounds around me as I make my final rounds throughout Chicago. I’ll be posting them here in batches over the next few weeks. I’ll also be doing a going-away performance on WLUW’s Something Else program on Sunday, May 17, and I’m planning on one of my sets being a mix of untreated field recordings of Chicago which will use many of the recordings here among others I’ve made over the years.

1. Automated voices in Union Station (3:31, 7.1MB mp3)
   One of my favorite sound spots in all of Chicago. I could listen to the Amtrak track identifiers all day.
2. Event setup, The Great Hall, Union Station (2:20, 4.6MB mp3)
   While I was waiting to pick up some friends, I recorded an event that was being set up in Union Station’s Great Hall, a wonderfully reverb-heavy space.
3. John Hancock Tower open-air observatory (1:05, 2.4MB mp3)
   A great place to stand and listen, but difficult to make a recording without the sound of other people on the observation deck!
4. Birds in Lincoln Square apartment window (1:09, 2.7MB mp3)
   Heading to the Metra on the morning of Alex’s birthday, we stumbled across this ground-floor apartment window with a birdcage and a very talkative bird. I didn’t realize at the time that there are also lots of other birds inside the apartment, which you can hear in this recording.
5. Morning weekday traffic, 143 E. Chicago Ave. (10:47, 22.2MB mp3)
   Downtown rush-hour on a fairly quiet stretch of Chicago Avenue, a block away from the Museum of Contemporary Art.
6. Michigan Avenue construction (5:11, 10.8MB mp3)
   Standing in front of the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue, I recorded the work being done at the recently-demolished building across the street. Lots of great traffic sounds, too.
7. Afternoon traffic on Lake Shore Drive (9:28, 18.9MB mp3)
   Nice stretch of droning traffic sound, recorded while sitting at a bus shelter right on Lake Shore Drive (while not actually waiting for a bus). Nice mix of foot and vehicle traffic.

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Courtesy BBC News. More info on the find here.

Alex and I took a trip to Kenosha last weekend and road their downtown streetcar, a single car loop track about two miles long. Alex took some photos and I took some video (above, here and here). I made some field recordings too…

• Kenosha streetcar arrival (1:31, 3.4MB mp3)
• Kenosha streetcar interior (3:31, 7.8MB mp3)
• Kenosha streetcar interior with windshiled wipers (1:20, 3.2MB mp3)

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