The Sonic Unconscious brings together three artists whose work begins in the field: Jana Winderen, Yolande Harris and Gina Badger.

“When the fissures between mind and matter multiply into an infinity of gaps, the studio begins to crumble like the House of Usher, so that mind and matter get endlessly confounded.”

—Robert Smithson

Pierre Schaeffer’s term acousmatic music—recorded sounds, arranged on tape—produces the first audible interstice between sound and its source. By imagining the cut to be clean, the mechanisms of reproduction create a sonic fetish: the tape. The disembodied sounds of the tape or record, alienated from their sources, create a metaphysical field for exploration of pure sound isolated from the visible. This surgical move, meant to attack the opticentric nature of modernism, relegates the aural into the realm of representation and replicates the privileging of sight. But what is happening at the source? Is Pythagoras unaffected by his students?

Jana Winderen, a sound artist and acoustic researcher based in Oslo with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fine arts, begins her compositional process in any number of unpredictable locations: “in the boat or hanging on a rope in a crevasse.” Describing her work as blind field recording, Winderen often embarks on long treks to search for unique sonic environments to source sounds for her elaborate performances and installations. Using hydrophones to record biotic and abiotic sounds, she then mixes these recordings into her layered compositions—uncanny semblances of inaccessible places.

Winderen wants to bring “all the physical and emotional experiences [of the trip] in addition to the sounds in the mix,” to her work as a composer and installer. Intricate layers of reworked sound create a quality of underwater eco-realism, giving voice to living and non-living underwater forces. Winderen’s work is neither a purely objective representation of hidden worlds, nor purely subjective composition. At ISSUE (4/21), Winderen will continue her investigation into the sound of shrimp, exploring how the smallest creatures of the ocean use sound for communication, orientation, and feeding. Hydrophones—originally a military development—are repurposed, inadvertently producing unexpected qualities not informed by their original design. Here, the production of music and the study of cod are in excess of the technological thought.

One proposition of the Sonic Unconscious is that it supposes music to be a byproduct of another desire. Just as a bird song has nothing to do with human pleasure, it is still appropriated and aestheticized by humans. Bird songs are cultivated, but how do the birds take part in this?

Yolande Harris creates technological interventions in the gaps between phenomenal experience and mapped data. Her practice, fundamentally ecological in nature, takes sound as its primary material and subject and purports to unhinge anthropomorphic concepts through purposeful misuse of technology. Technologies produce machinic images—images or sounds not informed by human consciousness—as a byproduct of their intended purposes. Harris’ work explores this excess. Her project Sun Run Sun sonifies satellite signals through headphones, creating portable composition machines. These compositions are are always in flux, depending on the users’ physical relationships to the satellite.

Fishing for Sound, which Harris will present for The Sonic Unconscious, is a live composition incorporating sonified satellite signals and underwater recordings from hydrophones, grounded by clicking noises appropriated from psychotherapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). The composition weaves together recordings of sonic fields outside of human perception. Through the aid of technological devices, the listener navigates—a metaphor often employed by Harris—through these renderings by way of the EMDR clicking, linking bodily movement, like the blinking of an eye, to the navigation of virtual space in the memory. In Harris’s work, sound is the material and central metaphor for the transformation of space.

Navigation is perhaps an apt metaphor for thinking about the above practices because it relies less on presentation of an object through image or playback, and instead suggests provisional linkages between the non-place of the work and the site of the presentation. In order to navigate, you have to be somewhere.

Gina Badger works in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, encompassing new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. Her current thematic concerns deal with urban ecologies and environmental histories, while her projects tend to blur the line between artistic production and reception of the work. Using what she terms critical prosthetics—prosthetic devices that carry out a non-normalizing or hegemonic function—Badger often works in small groups at site specific locations with these tools, creating embodied interventions and explorations in the field.

Transmissions: A Botany of Decolonization creates a critical prosthetic via a scored performance and tape manipulation. During a ferry ride from Boston to Georges Island (selected because of Boston shore’s historic relationship to colonial and military power), a performer listens to a recording of Badger reading excerpts from Winona LaDuke’s The Ethics of Collecting. This performer then recites a section, from memory, to a second performer. The second repeats the text to a third, who is reading a copy of Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. The third then recites a passage that she has been reading, which the second performer repeats, recording it over the initial tape of Badger’s reading. Badger records this performative action on video and plays it back, manipulating the cut-up tape in performance. The transmission of text is the material manifestation of colonialism, manipulating the reception through failures in the mneumonic and machinic function, a kind of de-performance of colonialization.

For The Sonic Unconscious, Badger will lead two afternoon plant walks (4/16 & 4/17) through the Gowanus Canal area with specially developed critical prosthetics exploring the place of edible and medicinal weeds, followed by a reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.

Experimentation here is concretely linked to being in the field, to an active exploration of heterotopic space. Expression is a conscious function of the symbolic realm; The Sonic Unconscious brings together artists working on site, working through a wide spectrum in order to elicit material change.

Mongrels, a short film

Chased around by the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh and equipped with perverted botanists’ tools, voices of divination and herbal elixirs, we will explore the neighborhood of Gowanus on foot and onscreen.

Badger’s work for The Sonic Unconscious will conclude with a free reception and screening of a video that builds around an interview with herbalist and social justice activist Dori Midnight.

Gina Badger: I am an artist and writer currently working between Toronto, Montreal, and various locations south of the 49th parallel. Working in the expanded field of sculpture and installation, my practice encompasses new media and post-studio elements such as gardening, workshops, and meals. My most recent body of work, Rates of Accumulation, encompasses a sound installation, a pirate radio broadcast, a four-channel video installation, a large scale drawing, and a series of performances. Diverse in form, this work is characterized equally by the stylistic influences of historical conceptualism, land art, and experimental radio.

Much of my recent work has investigated the time and politics of contemporary ecologies. With a tone both poetic and critical, I aim to sidestep the frustrations marring current debates around ecology. Projects such as Scatter and The Sound of Things That Are Too Big and Too Old initiate encounters with the city’s marginal landscapes and flora, abandoning received histories of North America in favor of abstract postcolonial narratives. Operating on an entirely different scale, Plants In Your Pants is a hands-on intervention into the politics of vaginal ecologies in patriarchal times.

I cherish the moment when it is no longer possible to distinguish a work of art from its reception—when some aspect of the work comes to new life because it seeps out of its bounds, intermingling with its viewers. This is the phase change through which art ceases to be purely representative or reflective and becomes political. Through all of my pursuits, it is the desire for this transformation that keeps me going.

Gina Badger is grateful to Dori Midnight, Eymund Diegel, Issue Project Room, Proteus Gowanus, Halo Halo, Nika Khanjani and Adam Rosadiuk for their support and insight.

Support for The Sonic Unconscious is provided, in part, by mediaThe foundation.

What is share?

What is share?

A collage of sights and sounds from the eternal never-ending collage that is INDIA. A trip through the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu featuring Hindu trance ceremonies, nagaswaram improvisations, impossibly loud cities, processions, devotion, blessings, color, abstractions, detail, music and more. India is impossible to know: it is too vast, too rich and too much of a dream. Offered here is one perspective, one dream, subjective and flawed, hanging by a thread. Robert Millis is a musician and artist, a founding member of Climax Golden Twins and AFCGT and a frequent contributor to the Sublime Frequencies and Dust-to-Digital record labels. His previous films include Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan and My Friend Rain and was the co-author of Victrola Favorites released on Dust to Digital in 2008.

Darmstadt Institute in collaboration with David Grubbs Presents:

Luc Ferrari, Two Works for Ensemble with Memorized Sounds

Tautologos III (1969; Chicago version, 2001)

Et tournent les sons dans la garrigue (1977)

PLUS A RARE SCREENING OF: “Luc Ferrari facing his tautology – 2 days before the end”, a film by Guy Marc Hinant and Dominique Lohlé”

NEW YORK PREMIERES

Performed by Ensemble Pamplemousse with David Grubbs

French composer Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) was one of the progenitors of musique concrète and a pioneer of and resonantly idiosyncratic voice within electroacoustic music. Following upon studies with Alfred Cortot, Olivier Messiaen, and Arthur Honegger, Ferrari was an early participant in the Groupe de Musique Concrète and, with Pierre Schaeffer and François-Bernard Mâche, co-founded the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in 1958. In the early 1960s, largely unaltered environmental recordings began to work their way into his compositions. This process culminated in the tremendously influential Presque rien No. 1 (Le Lever du Jour au bord de la mer) (1970), a work whose source material was comprised exclusively of recordings made from a point overlooking a beach on the Dalmation coast. Throughout his career, Ferrari worked in multiple forms: instrumental works, vocal music, text scores, electronic and electroacoustic music, and Hoerspiele. Together with Gérard Patris he realized a series of documentary films about musicians in rehearsal, entitled Les Grands Répétitions, which will be released on DVD later in 2010.

Tautologos III is a text score for unspecified types of performers; it could as easily be realized by actors or dancers as by musicians. In this performance, Ensemble Pamplemousse and David Grubbs will be joined by the “memorized sounds” that Luc Ferrari created for a revised version of Tautologos III that was first performed in Chicago in 2001. Et tournent les sons dans la garrigue also presents live performers in combination with electroacoustic sonds prepared by Ferrari, but to altogether different ends.

Somewhat astonishingly, these are New York premieres of these two works. Shame on you, New York!

ABOUT THE PERFORMERS

Founded in 2002 as a vehicle for musical exploration, Ensemble Pamplemousse (Natacha Diels, Andrew Greenwald, Kiku Enomoto, Rama Gottfried, David Broome, and Jessie Marino) presents concerts of extraordinary focus and clarity. Comprised of virtuosic musicians trained in classical, electronic, and improvisational realms, the group consistently delivers fresh, exhilarating new concepts in sound. The members’ eagerness for aural discovery has allowed for ample experimentation processes, where boundaries are non-existent, and from which a strong dialogue has emerged. Among the group’s vernacular resides formerly unfathomable sound landscapes formed by the acute relationships the performers have forged with each other, and with the composers who are an intrinsic part of the ensemble.

David Grubbs is assistant professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College and director of the graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). He has released eleven solo albums, the most recent of which is Hybrid Song Box.4 (Blue Chopsticks), and is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with writers such as Susan Howe and Rick Moody, and with visual artists such as Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, and Stephen Prina.

This event is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Fund. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported through mediaThe Foundation and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Gregg Bordowitz

Volition

For one year, every day, from August 2007 to June 2008, Gregg Bordowitz wrote questions, one line after the other. On May 2nd, the author will read aloud all the collected questions recently published by Printed Matter in a book titled Volition—

Consisting entirely of questions, Volition is 142 pages of active, mind-bending engagement with the reader, who is led down paths of inquiry involving art, meaning, philosophy, choice, happiness, and identity. Bordowitz organizes his questions into lists, paragraphs, and stanzas, which are themselves organized into five chapters: Questions, Topics, Aesthetics, Beliefs, and Morals. The resulting text is something like a spiritual guide crossed with an epic poem crossed with a transcription of the meandering thoughts of a philosophic insomniac, kept awake by such questions as “How can I touch creation as a principle without reproach?” and “How does gratitude unfold from virtue?” *

Suspending any responsibility to answers, Volition presents all the ways questions approach their objects—seducing, beseeching, mocking, taking, giving, shining, withdrawing. Reading his questions aloud over the course of an afternoon, Bordowitz will exhaust the will to know through a kind of public liquidation.

Starting at 2PM and continuing (with breaks) until approximately 7PM, the performance will be segmented into four sections. Food, beer, wine and tea will be served.

2:00 PM Welcome

2:15PM—3:00PM

Book I: Questions

Book II: Topics

3:15PM—3:45PM

Book III: Aesthetics

4:00PM—4:30PM

Book IV: Beliefs

4:45PM—6:45PM

Book V: Morals

Appendix: On Why

* Volition is published and distributed by Printed Matter; description taken from catalog

http://printedmatter.org 195 10th Avenue New York, NY 10011 (212) 925-0325

Gregg Bordowitz (Born August 14, 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y.} is a writer, film and video maker and teacher. A collection of his essays, titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this collection, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. Recently, his writings have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Fence, Casco, and Texte Zur Kunst. A long poem titled Admissions was included in the book Considering Forgiveness, edited by Aleksandra Wagner and Carin Cuoni (Vera List Center, 2009). His most recent book consisting entirely of questions, titled Volition, was published by Printed Matter (2009). His films, including Habit (2001), The Suicide (1996), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), and Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters and broadcast internationally. In addition, he has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards. Bordowitz is Chair of the Film, Video, and New Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

ISSUE’s Littoral Series is supported, in part, by The Casement Fund and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet

Hans Grüsel’s Krankenkabinet is an ever-changing woodgrain diorama of dark forest characters. Started in 1999 in San Francisco, California, by Hans Grüsel, the ensemble uses electronics, concrète recording, and acoustic instruments to explore the lost Teutonic rites of the past while stumbling into the failure of the future.

Hans Grusel’s “sound” might best be described as the sounds of a Bavarian music box designed by an artist who had been bonked on the head with a brass cuckoo clock chime and left in a dark room for three years with only the music of Scriabin, Wagner, and Prokofiev mixed with off-speed 1960s sci-fi soundtracks and folkloric anthems pumping through the slightly clogged vents. HGKK audio combines numerous divergent elements—rigid structures and sweeping washes of plucky improvisation; classic violin sounds twisting in a mobius strip of clashing yet beautiful sounds and tones; flitting marches and delicate traipsing at the bottom of the sea—to create dense and blissful audio rainstorms.

There are very few bands who truly baffle. Who confuse and confound, both musically and conceptually. Sure, plenty of bands are weird, or strange, or hard to describe, some might even be described as fucked up or damaged, but very very few truly baffle. Hans Grusel’s Krankenkabinet is most definitely one of those bafflingly confusional elite. . . Hans Grusel and his Krankenkabinet create a bizarre cacophony of sound, theatrical, dramatic, noisy for sure, but weirdly melodic and playful and more than anything, confounding.

Occasional Detroit

My NAME IS Towondo”Beyababa”Clayborn I am a part of the abstrakt hip-hop duo Occasional Detroit (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..

We are an abstrakt hip-hop duo CONSISTING OF MYSELF Towondo’Beyababa’Clayborn”

AND DEMETRISA L. ANDERSON

we will kill it on may 1st the best in ABSTRAKT ENT.

It is not an understatement. We like too show what it feels like in our own words, on how it feels after recovering from taking a piss under scrutiny. So, that is A SYNOPSIS ON how we roll.

Come see us (O-D) THE BEST IN ABSTRAKT ENT..

MY FRIEND RAIN
Sublime Frequencies, 2007.
(36 minutes)
Filmed on various trips through Southeast Asia by Robert Millis and Alan Bishop from 2002 to 2007, My Friend Rain is an impressionistic collage of musical segments and tropical ambiance. Decay and rebirth through the endless Asian monsoon cycle. Locations include: Myanmar (Burma), Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Indonesia.

INDIA AT 78rpm

Excerpt from a work in progress, 2009
(19 minutes)
An excerpt from a project about 78rpm records and the intersection of folk and classical musical traditions in India. Mostly filmed in 2008 in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, including processions, street musicians and an interview with a slightly nutty Indian 78 collector.
PHI TA KHON: GHOSTS OF ISAN
Sublime Frequencies, 2006
(47 minutes)
Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan documents a traditional Buddhist “ghost festival” held yearly in Thailand’s Isan province that features beautiful handmade masks, outrageous wooden phalluses, ceremony, ritual, dancing, and endless live Thai mo lam music. The film has almost no narration (some titles set the scene and provide a little background), the idea being to create a sense of trance and to throw the viewer into the middle of the celebrations to just enjoy the colors and sounds. Music is what led me to explore this festival and sound is one of its key elements: there were live bands, bells, loudspeakers and boom boxes co-mingling all over town, creating an amazing soundscape. The live bands progressed from traditional acoustic ensembles to overlapping electrified bands with hybrid Western instrumentation and back again. Phi Ta Khon appears at once to be deviant and holy, pagan and Buddhist, Thai and Lao; it is full of incongruent characters and situations.  But the Thai are master assimilators: everything falls into place and works together for the participants, coming back to Buddhist merit-making for future lives and for a good harvest and monsoon season, while living in the moment with family and friends. This is a 45 minute edit of Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan.  The  DVD is 75 minutes but in reality there is no way to accurately present the full 3 day festival in all its ridiculous, drunken glory.

Intermission ambiance provided by DJ Victrola Favorites, playing scratchy old and mysterious music from the early days of recording, as well as field recordings and music from Asia and beyond.

Climax Golden Twins is a Seattle, WA based experimental collage outfit originally consisting of Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor, then picking up Scott Colburn in 1996. The group’s earliest material was recorded in 1993 but wasn’t released until their 1996 album Imperial Household Orchestra. In 1994 they started Fire Breathing Turtle to distribute their work along with audio exotica, especially their ongoing “Victrola Favorites,” complations of rare 78s from around the world. With numerous tapes, CDRs, mini-CDs, singles, side and solo projects, audiophile records and other aural collectables, being a CGT fan is no simple, or inexpensive, task.

Early CGT albums Climax Golden Hiss (1995) and Imperial Houshold Orchestra (1996) offer a glimpse into their unique world of lo-fi collage — organic, acoustic instruments mix with found sounds, electronics, and clips of sampled exotica. Their fascination with bygone days of phonography begins here, and their quirky sense of humor is already present as well. Locations (1998) focuses on voice and found sound. Dream Cut Short In The Mysterious Clouds (Anomalous, 2000), is a studio album that returns to their earlier formula with random noise-punk interludes, dreamy scapes and acoustics mixed with field recordings.

Also in 2000 was the album known as “TheRock Album” (Fire Breathing Turtle), a critically acclaimed tongue and cheek foray into the rock mindset, with a nod to prog rock and the math rockers who loved it.

Session 9 arrived in 2001 and is one of CGT’s many music for film projects, a weird, haunted mix of non-objective soundscaping. Lovely (Anomalous, 2002) reworked older material. Highly Bred and Sweetly Tempered appeared in 2004 and contains a collection of samples from eerie 78s, found speech, excellent Godspeed You Black Emperor style apocalyptic post-rock and shimmery guitar tracks. Member Rob Millis put out Leaf Music Drunks Distant Drums – Recordings from Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar also in 2004. Scott Colburn owns and engineers at Seattle’s Gravelvoice Studios and Jeffery Taylor owns and runs Seattle’s Wall of Sound record store. The band shares a special kinship with one of the city’s most famous cult bands — The Sun City Girls and have worked since their inception to support the American experimental music underground.