tracing moving circles

i've spent so many years and so many hours with the work of rolf julius in catalogs, video, and audio that i forgot for a moment yesterday that we'd never met in person. his passing is sad for how quietly it is happening, appropriate for his work but also oddly full of joy in finding in so many friends a shared love of the minutiae and detritus of his output.

rolf julius was the first artist i knew who worked with sound. i bought small music vol. 1 very soon after it came out in 1994 just after high school, not because i knew julius' work, but because it was called 'small music' and the drawings on the cover made a strange sort of sense to me. the sounds on the disk made me happy, gave me a sense of a kindred other somewhere who understood...and i've sought out every mounting of a show, recording, or documentation i could find since.

collecting sound art catalogs began by collecting his catalogs. i've posted some images below, since many of them are rare: http://www.onelonelypixel.org/rolf-julius-ephemera.html

sometimes a delicate mess, sometimes a simple bowl with pigment, the work he produced was always less about anything in particular for me and more about discovery. his floor constructions appeared like scenes, like someone had just stepped out for a moment, but at any moment they could return and finish up.  these pieces were done by being in a state of undone, unraveled, disheveled. his work is a constant reminder to me to let my own work go, to let the details breath.

i found small music in learning his work and it helped me find my own small music.

there is a lovely remembrance of julius by steve roden here: http://inbetweennoise.blogspot.com/2011/01/sad-day-for-small-music.html

i know that i'm prone to hyperbole, but if there were ever something to make me rant hyperbolic it is the inimitable 'house on the rock.'

first the tourism: jennifer and i, on our 'fake honeymoon' (read: post-wedding/picnic trip back from minnesota) drove through the heart of wisconsin's farmland, just south of the 'wisconsin dells' to frank lloyd wright's stomping ground (a town called spring green where wright's 'Taliesin' retreat is located). alex jordan built a house to spite wright on top of a high rock outcropping. well, it doesn't stop there. the parking lot was near full on a tuesday at mid-afternoon with license plates from alaska, missouri, michigan, new york, new jersey, arizona, and florida, and the age range was from about 25 to well over 70.

there are three major attractions here:

1) a house built in a japan-meets-james-bond style on the top of a mountain
2) the world's largest carousel
3) the world's largest musical automaton orchestra

this being a blog about audio-tourism, let it be said that the house is loaded soup-to-nuts with smaller automata and music boxes, and the carousel is flanked by a 100 foot ceiling 3 console organ-room.

there are no words for how crazy this place is. if the brother's quay had babies with the ringling brothers and joseph cornell oversaw the christening you might get close to the feel of the place. NONE OF THE PICTURES TELL THE TRUTH. but... as it's late, i'll post some pictures and audio soon. until then...

160 feet below the earth rests an organ whose delicate tones ring forth from 7 million year old stalactites. it does ring, as it is not a pipe organ in the traditional sense (courses of pipes, volumes of air). each of the 37 stalactites is struck by a solenoid (when a solenoid receives an electrical pulse, it fires a pin), these 37 notes were chosen out of all the thousands of ascending and descending formations because they ring equal-tempered pitches (a shame harry partch didn't get at it). since much like the equal tempered scale, nature didn't place tonotopically organized rocks in close proximity, they are spread throughout the cave, some at quite a distance and with wonderful results. the tour is close to 2 miles and the pipes are spread throughout: the resulting sound is beautifully spatialized.

now... as this is another example of audio tourism, and the pièce de résistance of the hour-long tour, it is not without human intervention. for the majority of the tour, the guide shows people what is beautiful about the cave, by offering (rather weak) mimetic references: "that rock is shaped like scooby-doo," "if you look closely you'll notice that that rock, besides being the largest and most perfectly formed 'geologic drapery' also looks like a piece of 'virginia bacon.'" However, when the organ is revealed, we are finally allowed silence in which to witness nature's seven million years of geologic progress set to work in a rousing rendition of "a mighty fortress is our god."

i will post an audio recording and pictures of the solenoid tappers after the sonic fragments conference ends this weekend.

perhaps the best audio tourism ever. well...for personal reasons. my girlfriend and i planned a trip to france bookended by a gig of mine at the blockhaus in nantes, and her 5 week research trip to the cinematheque in paris. we had some days to see france so we booked a hotel in the town of chinon in the loire valley. both of us being sound people (she writes about sound in the films of the nouvelle vague), chinon caught our eye because the rough guide to the loire valley had an insert about the Famous Echo of Chinon. the sign on the road behind the 15th century ruins of a chateau would read 'ici l'echo'...here is the echo.

well then, chinon it is. the guide book informed us that the townspeople would stand in this spot facing the castle walls to recite: 'les femmes de chinon sont-elles fidéles?' and the echo replies 'elles?' they they would confirm by saying 'oui, les femmes de Chinon!' and the echo replies 'non'.

just a tad misogynistic. but...being diligent audio tourists we had to check it out. after a lovely dinner of white wine, an omelet and a galette, topped off with 'une café', we started our climb. we reached the top and hunted but alas could not find the sign of which the guidebook spoke. instead, we found the 'clos de l'echo' of the couly-dutheil vignoble. it was sunset, there was a bench facing the view and my plan had worked better than expected. i proposed to her and she accepted! we ran screaming up the road and voilà! the echo...many happy returns indeed. many happy returns.

in philadephia, there is a wonderful subterranean room in which you can call people who would have been alive at Benjamin Franklin's time:




hard to see from my camera phone, but you can call Balzac and Kant for sure. the phones themselves are pushbutton but dial with a rotary sound when you've entered the number. the numbers are worn down to incomprehensibility. apparently ALOT of people call byron, lord.

there are also demonstrations on the franklin's wonderful invention, the glass harmonica every day at noon.

i've been to the ringing rocks state park three times now and have never managed to write anything about it. this is on par with the ear of dionysus cave in sicily that has for years unflinchingly held the top spot for great audio tourism.

in short...you bring a hammer, hit the rocks and they ring like bells. this seems pretty simple, right? well, when you have no less than 10 tourists with hammers at a time you can imagine the beautiful audio exploration that happens. people using hammers to explore geography for its sonic content! there is nothing like the average jane and joe out for a weekend jaunt (with a hammer) investigating with abandon the fine timbral nuance of a haptic interchange with glacial detritus.

On Sound

Ten thousand things are heard when born,
But the highest heaven's always still.
Yet everything must begin in silence,
And into silence it vanishes.

Wei Ying-wu (8th c. Chinese)



this will be old for people who have followed this blog before live journal...but as it seems the old entries went the way of the dodo along with server i thought a re-print wwould be warranted.

and since this one is timeless....

in a book of poems by hafiz that i've had for years...tonight i opened to this page...

CURFEWS

Noise
Is a cruel ruler

who is always imposing
Curfews,

While
Stillness and quiet
Break open the vintage
Bottles,

Awake the real
Band.

in daniel ladinsky's transalation of the poems of hafiz collected as "the gift"

by default: sound art openings are lousy before you step into the gallery (i go because you have to represent the home team in a world where galleries resist sound art - less so recently - )

3 rooms. well... 1 room, a hallway, and an office.

overall a beautiful turn for stephen's work. but i'll have to go back when i can hear it.

the office: 3 of vitiello's digital prints which i think were enlargements from the small run artist book he released 2 years ago featuring newspaper, magazine, and book cut outs relating to the experience of sound and silence. perhaps not as successful as the book version, if only because the book carries with it the obsession of its making and the prints of the book seem too directed. that said, they content is necessary and wonderful.

the front room: a 5.1 surround installation with the speakers mounted in a sort of pentagram on the wall, with the subwoofer resting like furniture in the corner. i'll reserve comment for now, as the room was much too noisy to hear the obviously delicate landscape-painting-like wall of aural images.

the hallway: 16 (perhaps more, i didn't count) framed 'drawings' made by vibrating pigment on paper or dropping ink on paper while its attached to a 10 or 12 inch speaker cone.

more than chladni images of sounds vibrations -



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more than hans jenny's cymatic studies -



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these drawings explore what sound does to paper, pigment, and ink. the particles render the invisible materiality of sound visible by locking down traces of action on a solid medium; they show in the same way as a photograph the horrible banality of life separated from its place in time. a snapshot of sound, more sad than a recording, becomes taxidermy. what was once vibrant and living is now still: we can imagine its movement, we can see in its muscles the power that once allowed it to jump, and for this we imagine all the stronger what is absent in the material which death robs from the living. vitiello has created a wonderful intimation of his hands, the way he sees sound captured in the moment of his choices. while the snapshot shows life through the "gaze" of the photographer, the use of sound vibrations for the manipulation of the material mediums of visual art is at once a capturing of the artist's specific reverence for an ephemerality which is out of the eye's grasp and a way of pulling out what might be seen and heard as its fleeting beauty. drawing with sound becomes for stephen a mirror capable of showing us slices of motion, memory, and idea, and above all, that these things should be respected but not held too precious.