Hello friends,
I spent July in a constant state of cacophony. That's the nature of summer, I suppose. I spent the end of June at a music festival in Tokyo and, when I got back, I threw myself into more days and nights of dance music, the screeching sound of the subway, and the roar of construction, traffic, and radios blasting along the way.
I didn’t want to use this newsletter to simply list off a bunch of music-related pieces and shows. I want to take this opportunity to reflect on sound and all the simple and complicated actions, patterns, and resonances that constitute it. So, for this month’s newsletter, sounds from the natural and built environment, music made by people, generated by machines, the noise generated by the movement of bodies, the rhythm of spoken language, and an invitation to listen deeply.
TOUCH
A couple of weeks ago, I squeezed myself into the back of 47 Canal, a small Lower East Side art gallery, to hear a collaborative live set by Ana Roxanne and Miho Hatori. Each musical powerhouses in their own right, their joint composition was a dreamy, ambient experience. Playing with layered echoes, electronic patterns, and unsettling vocal samples, I found myself sinking into a hypnotic landscape of sound.
One of the best experiences I had in Tokyo was attending a recording of one of Dommune’s livestreams for the festival. In order to get there, you had to take an elevator up to the top floor of a massive luxury mall in Shibuya which, by the time you arrive, has already closed for the day with an eerie silence. Once you step off the elevator, you walk through nondescript door shuddering from the muffled vibrations of the music playing on the other side into in the middle of a room with giant screens and video cameras recording for their online audience. I got to spend a night dancing among friends on the top of an empty mall, taking in views of the Tokyo skyline.
My favorite kind of musical encounters are the ones that happen by accident—such as catching an activation of Theaster Gates’s piece A Heavenly Chord (2022) by Shedrick Mitchell during Gates’s exhibition at the New Museum. The Hammond B3 organ sitting the gallery acts both as instrument and sculpture, connected to cables that amplify its melodies through a series of wooden Leslie speakers. Both sonic tools gained popularity in Black churches in the 1940s, and Gates elevates this vibrant musical history by bringing their exalted reverberations into the art gallery.
LOOK
In 2019, Simone Leigh decided to include a sound installation in her exhibition at the Guggenheim for their annual Hugo Boss Prize. I still remember experiencing that piece for the first time. I had been expecting sculpture, not sound, but I suddenly found myself listening to a collage of songs and chanting. Leigh described the work as an act of “sonic protection,” made visible by the screen at the back of the gallery. The work reimagines the true story of Debbie Africa who, after giving birth to her child in prison in 1978, was able to spend a few days with him because the other female inmates would distract the guards with singing and coughing to mask the baby’s sounds. The sound piece’s tapestry merges popular music from that year with recordings of the tragic MOVE Bombing and from a Brooklyn prison protest where male inmates made noise to bring attention to power failures during a snowstorm, uniting these intergenerational histories of oppression, resistance, and hope.
Conceptual artist and sculptor Cildo Meireles turned his fascination with the diversity of radio design into Babel, a monumental sculpture where analogue audio devices of all ages and from around the world are stacked up into layers from newest to oldest. An ode to the Biblical story of fractured communication, Babel’s radios are tuned to random stations and their audio kept at the lowest possible volume, creating a constant stream of spoken words, songs, and unintelligible noise. Listen to it here.
When I entered Jason Moran’s exhibition at the ICA Boston in 2018, I found myself in a room filled with empty stages and set pieces waiting for their instruments to be played. A trained pianist, Moran’s sculptural practice is profoundly influenced by jazz, both its compositional potentials and its theatrical legacy. The spaces he recreates are based on performance spaces, venues, and recording studios that played pivotal roles in American musical history, and his approach to incorporating sonic elements (like activations and recordings) tap into jazz’s key tenets of riff and improvisation.
In 2012, Kevin Beasley purchased a cotton gin off of eBay. Over the course of six years, he transformed the mundane piece of farming equipment into A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor which was eventually displayed at The Whitney. The cotton gin’s reconstructed motor spins furiously, although the sound of its machinations are muffled by the soundproof glass box that contains it. Only when visitors go into a neighboring room do they begin to hear the sounds of its engine, its vibrations and hums fed through a series of modular synthesizers and subwoofers that distort and amplify the gin’s orchestra of noises, causing visitors to literally feel its sonic pulses and mechanical exertions. It’s through this sonic dissonance that Beasley taps into the history of slavery and grapples with painful legacies of land use and exploitative labor.
LISTEN
Twenty Thousand Hertz is a podcast about sound (ironic, isn’t it?). I’ve listened to this show for years now, and I’m always amazed at each episode’s niche explorations of sound design, technical invention, and relationships to noise. This show has left me with a deeper appreciation for the sonic elements that make up our world, and all of the work that goes into creating noise that powers so much of our everyday life. Some personal favorites include an episode about a rare form of epilepsy that creates ‘musical auras,’ an adventure with an acoustic ecologist, and a guide to the art of foley.
I don’t always have the time or the patience to seek out new music or podcasts, but I do love to tune into a good radio show every once in a while for curated selections. Montez Press Radio satisfies that craving like nothing else. Each broadcast is a thoughtful exploration of some aspect of our culture in New York City and beyond, ranging from playlists of songs to interviews and performances with artists and activists. No matter what you choose to listen to, you’ll have a great time.
As humans and our activity spread across every corner of the planet, quiet spaces untouched by noise pollution are becoming increasingly difficult to find. This episode from KUOW’s The Wild takes us on a quest to locate the “One Square Inch of Silence” in Olympic National Park in order to understand the value of quiet in our noisy world.
While we’re on the topic of noise, something that’s fascinated me for a long time is the concept of “alarm fatigue,” where staff become de-sensitized to the constant chorus of alarms and machines in the workplace. In an episode on role of sound in hospitals, 99% Invisible’s team spoke with researchers and musicians who are tackling this cacophonous problem in order to improve safety and health outcomes.
LICK
The 2020 documentary Sisters With Transistors tells the stories of several women who were key innovators in the development of electronic music technology. Nowadays, we expect our music to be made, at least in some part, with machines and computers. Yet it was the early experiments of these pioneering musicians and inventors—Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Anderson, and Wendy Carlos—that opened up new possibilities of sound-making.
If you’ve ever caught a train on the Tokyo metro, you probably heard a short chime right before the doors closed. Jingles to alert passengers and pedestrians are commonplace in most cities but, the more you pay attention, you’ll start to realize that each station has its own unique melody. This is all thanks to the work of composer Minoru Mukaiya, who has designed 200 different chimes for Tokyo’s 110 stations. This short documentary introduces you to the man behind the transit music.
In 2019, researchers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center collaborated with Google to create Pattern Radio: Whale Songs, an interactive site where visitors can tune into underwater recordings of whale songs. The audio was collected over a year through microphones on the ocean floor off the coast of Hawaii. Machine learning helps identify each individual audio sample through a spectrogram and heat map, enabling researchers to track patterns in communication and organize their data by differentiating whale songs from noise produced by human marine activity. You can learn more about the project here.
Radio Garden is an ambitious audio project that lets you tune into live stations all around the world. If you ever find yourself in a sonic slump, you can either pick a random broadcast or select from a city’s list of stations and immerse yourself in a local music scene somewhere on this planet. This project is a wonderful reminder that music, and technology like radio, has the potential to keep us interconnected.
CLICK
With the return of summer, I’m once again thinking about an essay by Xochitl Gonzalez titled “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” When we talk about gentrification in New York, we know what it looks like (greedy rent increases, new ‘luxury’ buildings popping up in low income neighborhoods, tactics like artwashing). But Gonzalez invites us to consider what it sounds like, especially as long-time residents in the city’s predominantly working class communities of color become increasingly policed by their new neighbors, and opportunities for joy and camaraderie are silenced.
“I was ten years old when my father broke the world with the sweet notes of a steel pan.” So begins Michelle Julia John’s science fiction short story, “The Rhythm of the Soul.” In a world where one discovered the perfect frequency of the human soul, his son struggles to survive the aftermath, now living in a world where music can offer salvation or be wielded as a literal weapon.
Scientific documentation of the natural world usually means taking photos or videos and collecting physical specimens. But bioacoustics, the study of sounds produced by different species and ecosystems, offer another important way of analyzing potential harms and changes to different environments. This article by Alanna Mitchell is a great read on bioacoustics’ potential value as an ecological research tool.
In his poem, “Along the East River and in the Bronx Young Men Are Singing,” Ariel Francisco turns the streets of New York into an orchestra of urban life. I love how Francisco moves us through the city’s different sonic landscapes, from the trains and traffic and bustle of the street up into quiet night. “young men are singing and I hear them,” Francisco writes, “eastbound into eternity even / as morning destars the sky.”