cathedral

stressed out hasapi in a (digital) cathedral
dear god come and save me*
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/cathedral.mp3
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*checksum 'the ceilings are so very tall'

Thinking about last night, it's the noise in music that's the music. If you're playing makamat, you've got history on your side, you've got sequences, grace-notes, referencings, dynamics, everything that makes the music; what you don't have is automation. Or think of Casals' cello bow sounds, sax/flute breathing in; it's everywhere. It's the body among other things. The noise isn't noise per se; it's shaped, it's what creates the fractal, chaotic, and accumulative aspects of improvisation (forget the reference here, bit blurry at the moment). All of these things are connected, interwoven with culture, with cultures, and the interweaving is what made me quit for example 'playing the blues' early on; there's a kind of inertia in me that believes it's impossible to go there, wherever there might be, in a kind of fullness I'd find necessary to even make the initial steps.

So how do we listen to the dead? The dead have spoken over wires laid across long distances, the wires picking up the 'dawn chorus' of very low frequency (vlf) radio, that appears around 4 a.m. in the morning. I think WWI field telephones were susceptible. In NYC the problem is the power grid; we're contaminated by radiation from all directions (as Marko has pointed out). You might find a silent spot somewhere inside your apartment, but you'd need a Faraday cage to weed out the electromagnetic buzz - and then you'd have your dead zone, but no dead. So you want to record signals that are either on top of the 60 hz buzz, or that appear if and when the buzz is cancelled out. I picked up faint crackles at one point in Brooklyn with the magnetic field antenna at a particular orientation. There's also the possibility of going out somewhere on one of the piers - but the grid follows you there, follows you everywhere. 

The dead are drowned out.

http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/spruce.mp3

 

People: Alan Sondheim
Tags: sound, research

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