Synesthetech

One of the projects I’m currently working on is a new sound composition for release on the excellent Wandering Ear netlabel. I’ve decided to post some in-progress work for it, which will most likely be used as source material in some form or other.

The release is tentatively titled Oculus, and is based on recordings I’ve been making of the sounds generated by image display or projection devices. I started making these recordings as part of my ongoing practice of recording the sounds inside art galleries and museums, but have recently started expanding to directly recording the devices themselves using an electromagnetic microphone traditionally used for recording analog phone conversations.

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This first track combines three untreated field recordings of projection devices in a gallery or museum setting, all recorded this summer during a trip to Toronto: first is a slide projector in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent installation of Michael Snow works, second is a film projector in the Power Plant Gallery’s Universal Code exhibition, and finally television picture tubes in an installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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24bps is a purely synthesized piece, combining several drones that oscillate at 24 beats per second, analogous to the standard 24 frames per second rate at which traditional film was projected.

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This last piece is a layering of several electromagnetic microphone recordings of a video projector in my studio space, made while both starting up the projector and projecting a video piece of mine.

Better late than never, my favorite (non-Stasisfield) albums and singles of 2009, in alphabetical order:

1. All Tiny Creatures - Segni
2. Glenn Bach - Iteral
3. James Blackshaw - The Glass Bead Game
4. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
5. Nels Cline - Coward
6. Cluster - Qua
7. Colorpulse/Carl Sagan - A Glorious Dawn
8. Das Racist - Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
9. Luc Ferrari - L’Œuvre électronique
10. William Fowler Collins - Perdition Hill Radio
11. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest
12. Tim Hecker - An Imaginary Country
13. Kid Sister - Ultraviolet
14. Mountains - Choral
15. Jon Mueller - Physical Changes
16. qqq - Sets
17. Eliane Radigue - Naldjorlak
18. Eliane Radigue - Triptych
19. Eliane Radigue - Vice Versa, Etc.
20. Speech Debelle - Speech Therapy
21. Supersilent - 9
22. David Sylvian - Manafon
23. Vladislav Delay - Tummaa
24. Volcano Choir - Unmap
25. The xx - xx

If you’re looking for a calendar for next year, look no further than this color-coded design by my friend Michael De Bonis. Michael is a DJ for Radio Hour, a radio journalist for NPR, a field recordist, and overall creative powerhouse. And now he’s designed a must-have calendar. Check out his blog after you pick up one of his posters!

This is the second video I premiered this week at a live performance, along with Ventus. Like the previous video, this new piece also explores territory related to syncing sound and image in both a pre-recorded and live performance context. I’m also experimenting with non-abstracted imagery, including footage of a river I shot in my old neighborhood in Chicago as well as waves shot off a ferry boat during a visit to Toronto this summer. Although the imagery isn’t abstracted, some manipulation has taken place, including image stabilization and color adjustment. Although the stabilization isn’t 100% successful (some of the footage retains little rhythmic jerks and jolts), I like how it adds an element of artificiality to the source material as well as creates tiny “accidents” which leave evidence that the material was worked rather than merely captured.

Flumen uses manipulated field recordings of water running below West Park in Ann Arbor, and the sound of a CTA telephone ringing on the Francisco El platform (next to my old apartment in Chicago), and the sound of a window spring captured at a friend’s house in Milwaukee.

This week I premiered two new video pieces at a performance event at the University of Michigan’s MFA Open Studios Night. For the performance, I projected the pre-edited videos and performed the soundtrack live, allowing the video to guide me in subtle improvisations and interactions with the visuals, unlike this “fixed” version, which combines a soundtrack recorded separately from the visuals. I’m interested in multiple methods of fitting sound to visuals, seeing how random collisions can cause new relationships which I never would have thought of had I actually composed the sound along to the video or vice versa.

This first piece, Ventus, uses field recordings of air vents and soft breezes as its source material. I’m also starting to experiment with several new things compared to my earlier video work, including the use of unaltered visual source material, rapid movement, and abrupt scene changes.

This is an interesting (and much needed, IMO) synthesis of classical music with contemporary visual art. If the classical music canon is going to survive, it needs to find ways to be presented in a way that has relevance to how audiences most want to receive and perceive creative work now, which is arguably a hybrid of sound and image.

What’s frustrating/humorous about the way this project is being presented (and this might be better illustrated in this BBC piece) is the attitude that this is somehow groundbreaking to pair music with visual representation. Maybe it might feel that way in the classical world, but this kind of thing has been going on for well over half a century. Projects like this which seek to mainstream this kind of hybrid are really just playing catch-up.

Last Friday, four new pieces of mine premiered in a group exhibition (photos here) at the Robbins Gallery on the University of Michigan campus. One of these is a sound piece entitled Monsters of Experimental Music Vol. 1, a remix project melding ideas about curation, parody, remix culture, repackaging, experimental music, and time. The notes about the piece (available inside an empty CD case in the show, as seen here) are reproduced below:

I’ve often thought that if experimental music didn’t take so long to listen to, more people might be willing to give it a try. It’s with that hope that I present to you the first installment of Monsters of Experimental Music, a
compilation consisting of the works of world famous, highly regarded experimental composers - the original hits by the original stars - but condensed (without alteration of pitch) to a more reasonable listening time: four minutes, which Apple, Inc. has determined is the average length of a “song” (you know how all their ads for iPods say they hold up to 10,000 songs? Read the fine print - that’s if all your songs last only four minutes). Most of the songs on this collection were originally nearly thirty minutes in length, some of them significantly longer. A few of them are only fifteen minutes long, but that’s still pretty long. So here you go, experimental music in an easy-to-digest format of four minute free mp3s. And if your favorite song by your favorite artist isn’t on here, you know, either wait for another installment or just deal with it, because that’s how these compilation things always work anyway, right? I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please seek out (and purchase) the works in their original format.

• Download Monsters of Experimental Music Vol. 1 (134MB zip file of mp3s)

Listen to three sample tracks…

Eliane Radigue’s Adnos 1 (in four minutes):

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Tony Conrad’s Joan of Arc (in four minutes):

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Gavin Bryars’ Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (in four minutes):

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Complete track listing:

1. John Cage’s Music of Changes 2 (in four minutes)
2. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops 1 (in four minutes)
3. Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (in four minutes)
4. Terry Riley’s In C (in four minutes)
5. Eliane Radigue’s Adnos 1 (in four minutes)
6. Tony Conrad’s Joan of Arc (in four minutes)
7. Gavin Bryars’ Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet (in four minutes)
8. Morton Feldman’s Why Patterns? (in four minutes)
9. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie 1 (in four minutes)
10. Christina Kubisch and Fabrizio Plessi’s Tempo Liquido 2 (in four minutes)
11. Pauline Oliveros’ Primordial / Lift (in four minutes)
12. Iannis Xenakis’ Persepolis (in four minutes)
13. Rhys Chatham’s Two Gongs (in four minutes)
14. Meredith Monk’s Three Heavens and Hells (in four minutes)
15. Francisco Lopez’s Live At 3feetofftheground (in four minutes)
16. Phil Niblock’s Ten Auras (in four minutes)

Monsters of Experimental Music Vol. 1 by John Kannenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

I’ve finally completed the final installment in my trilogy of graphic scores investigating the relationship between two dimensional visual representations of landscape and sonic performance. Landscape 3: Aerial Perspective includes a PDF of the complete score, as well as the first in a series of field recordings which will accompany the online documentation; anyone interested in performing the score will be able to choose which field recording they’d like to use to accompany their performance. The first field recording was made just last week, at an outdoor classroom (ie, a clearing in a forest filled with stumps on which to sit) at the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

If you’re interested in performing this or any of my other scores, please let me know!

• Read more about Landscape 3: Aerial Perspective