56. Sonic Reliquary (II)
So for this month’s newsletter, an embrace of dissonance, pursuits of harmony, and the sonic histories that have shaped the musicality of our culture.
Hello friends,
My fascination with sound didn’t end this month. If anything, as I wrapped up my summer job and am now preparing to go to camping at a music festival next month, the power of music and the influence of sonic influences on on our sensory experiences have been increasingly on my mind.
It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve spent the past 3 months in an open office plan where I became way too aware of the smallest of noises, like the shifting of chairs or accidentally overhearing a chat among coworkers or a Zoom call. We’re always trying to either tune into the world or tune out. No matter how many times we put on our noise-cancelling headphones, turn up or turn down our volume, or try to concentrate on slivers of sound amidst a chaos of noise, this process of attunement continuously adjusts, adapts, reacts to how we’re feeling within our current environment.
So for this month’s newsletter, an embrace of dissonance, pursuits of harmony, and the sonic histories that have shaped the musicality of our culture.
TOUCH
One of my favorite parts of this year so far has been joining Late Nites Book Club, a monthly meeting run by Kristin (known as DJ Voices). Each deftly-curated selection pulls from a different facet of music history, dancing between genres, theories, and styles of experimental storytelling generated from encounters with sound. Previous reads include The Underground is Massive, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity, Vurt, and, starting in September, Assembling A Black Counter Culture. My personal favorite was McKenzie Wark’s Raving, and our meeting (which she joined as a guest) balanced Kristin's thoughtful facilitation with our passion and curiosity as readers. As someone who's never made music, but always grateful for the listening experience as a dancer, I've appreciated joining these lively conversations about the sonic arts, how we connect with each other on a dancefloor, the relationship between DJ and audience, and how factors like political upheavals and socioeconomic changes have shaped the evolution of music culture in America and beyond. I feel like I’ve already learned so much, and each meeting always leaves me wanting more.
One of my resolutions for this year was to finally invest in a pair of custom earplugs. I usually keep a pair of Loop ones on my keychain for daytime situations, but I was looking for something much better since I have so many friends who DJ and make music and I also work in nightlife from time to time. I turned to one of New York City’s most trusted sources: Crystal Guardian. If you live in the city, keep an eye out on Instagram for pop-ups, or you can ship your own molds. The process was so fast, and you get a lot of options for different kinds of noise reduction filters for performing or dancing. Hearing loss is easy to ignore, especially as a young partygoer, so I’ve appreciated being able to leave venues without my ears ringing.
By the time I reached the Amant Foundation, the day had grown searingly hot. Yet despite the intense heat, I followed the noise from the street to find a crowd eagerly huddling under shaded canopies to try their hand at playing different models of synthesizers. Part of Amant’s annual Heat Waves series, which features activations by artists, musical groups, and acoustic practitioners, this iteration was led by Synth Lab NYC, the city’s only synthesizer lending library whose mission is make musical technologies accessible to all. Each synthesizer varied in age and components, but they all fed into Ash Arder’s solar-powered, sound amplification sculpture, Whoop House (2022). The result was a cacophonous drone of oscillating waves reflective of visitors’ musical curiosity and a collective desire to experiment.
Last week, I ended summer with a trip to MoMA PS1 for their final Warm-Up concert of the year. If you're not familiar, the museum opens up their courtyard for a night of DJ sets and live performances. Visitors can spend their evening dancing outside, or go into the galleries to check out their exhibitions. My partner and I opted for latter, and I got to experience a moving sound and video installation by Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton. Both talented musicians in their own right, their piece, Q'iwanakaxa/Q'iwsanakaxa Utjxiwa (Cacique apoderado Francisco Tancara & Rosa Quiñones confronted by the subprefecto, chief of police, corregidor, archbishop, Reid Shepard, & Adventist missionaries), centers their great-grandparents, Francisco and Rosa, who fought to assert their land and cultural rights as Aymara peoples in Bolivia. I took a seat in front of a massive collage of ancestral remains and symbols from the town they resided in and drowned out Warm-Up’s din by listening to a chorus of relatives recall their resistance to the violence of assimilation, tender stories of stubborn elders, and inherited intergenerational knowledges.
LOOK
Marie Watt's installation Sky Dances Light is equal parts visually arresting and sonically wonderous. Each biomorphic cloud comes alive with the twinkling silver of jingle cones, rolled pieces of metal that were once made from tobacco tins and have been used to adorn dresses in Indigenous dances since the 1800s. As Watt notes, the jingles gained in popularity during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic after a member of the Ojibwa nation used a jingle dance to help her sick granddaughter: "The idea was that the sound would be healing." Watt's artwork comes alive as visitors pass through it, creating a moment of tactile engagement between the viewer and the rich melodic Indigenous histories that imbue the jingle cones with their unique sonic beauty.
Back in 2018, photographer Piercarlo Quecchia embarked on a quest to capture 13 remaining sound mirrors leftover from World War I. These concrete structures were built in the 1920s to intercept planes by passively reflecting and concentrating sound waves. They were thoughtfully constructed, with each curvature and dish designed for a particular acoustic frequency. Long before modern radar and other surveillance technology, operators could tune into the mirrors' frequencies and track aviation movement with a microphone and earphones. Quecchia first learned about them from an album cover, and travelled along the English coast to document how these tools have weathered, been preserved, and integrated into the towns they were placed in.
Robert Morris’s 1961 artwork Box with the Sound of Its Own Making looks, at first glance, like an innocuous wooden box. From somewhere inside, however, you’ll catch snippets of sanding, sawing, and hammering that clash the plain orderliness of the finished product. Fascinated by the potentials of Minimalism, the ordinary, duration, and incompletion, Morris used this piece to emphasize the labor and process of art-making as the piece embodies the efforts of its maker.
LISTEN
There is one podcast episode that forever haunts me and it’s Busted Business Bureau’s one on the disastrous surveillance tech company ShotSpotter. Initially proposed as a way to allow city police like Chicago to detect gunshots and find the location of where firearms were discharged, it has proven to be far from successful, having no significant impact or, in some cases, aiding in police corruption and exacerbating pre-existing racial biases due to its inaccurate sound identification technology. This episode will have you laughing and fuming and cursing idiotic city governments.
While we know that sound can be an important indicator of healthy ecosystems, how to actually measure these acoustics has proved to be quite challenging. I listen to NPR’s Short Wave almost every morning, and I loved tuning into this episode about how scientists are using machine learning to identify animal sounds and potential human threats in soundscape recordings to better measure an area’s ecological health.
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton has dedicated his life to being a “sound tracker,” chasing down sounds from rare and endangered ecosystems all around the world. A couple of years ago, he did an interview for the brilliant show On Being and spoke about the role silence has played in his life of ongoing listening. It’s a beautiful conversation worth listening to in its entirety, but I love this keen observation from Hempton: “I hear the presence of everything…Nothing shouts importance.”
For the 12th episode of the podcast, Sound Matters, listeners got the chance to meet musical historian Barnaby Brown and Peter Holmes who are dedicated to recreating sounds from obsolete and extinct instruments. Their sonic endeavors are more than just about figuring out how these objects sounded like, however. As they remake these ancient melodies, they are able to get a deeper understanding into the role music has played in keeping communities together, how they enhanced religious encounters, and fostered deeper connections with the worlds around these civilizations.
LICK
earth.fm aims to use sound to aid in the fight to save and protect ecosystems around the world. To date, the platform has amassed a library of over 700 ecological soundscapes. You can follow a pack of coyotes through the Mexican Sierra, listen to a symphony of American toads during mating season, wade through a Colombian mangrove forest at low tide, or catch the moment when a jungle comes back to life after a heavy rainstorm. These recordings are a reminder of how diverse our planet's ecologies are, and how much sonic beauty we risk losing to manmade destruction.
When she was 7 years old, Rosemary Brown had a chance encounter with the ghost of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. Although she tried her hand at piano lessons as she grew older, the vision never materialized into any kind of musical acumen—until 40 years later when she began to transcribe compositions from Brahms, Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Debussy, Chopin, and other renowned (and long dead) composers. Brown’s musical mediumship became a sensation, particularly as the 1970s and 80s brought a renewed fascination with Spiritualism via psychedelia. Whether or not you believe Brown’s claim that each composer had their own style of dictation (Listz would control her hands, Beethoven and Bach simply told her the notes, Schubert sang, Chopin did a mix of both), her alleged experiences with the undead remind us that the art of making music lies in our ability to channel it through us. You can watch a 1976 documentary and hear about her experience firsthand here.
One of my all-time favorite music documentaries is less than an hour long and can be found on Youtube. The title? All My Homies Hate Skrillex | A story about what happened with dubstep. This phenomenal video looks at how dubstep evolved from small raves full of sweaty dudes in the UK to the screeching, laser light shows of packed EDM festivals. It’s a rabbit hole I was happy to go down on, and the entire video has a timestamped track list in the description if you want to immerse yourself further.
CLICK
Women In Sound is a publication that centers the experience of female musicians, producers, and those who have made a career out of working on live and recorded sound. Female musicians still rarely get their flowers (or end up getting celebrated more for their looks than the quality of their productions), so I love how Woman In Sound is committed to showcasing the professional experiences from artists you know and love and those who’s work behind the scenes often goes uncredited or un-noted. A couple of interview highlights include NASA audio engineer Alexandra Perryman, electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani, pop artist Yaeji, and Michelle Zauner.
For the 56th Venice Biennale, performance art duo Allora & Calzadilla and science fiction writer Ted Chiang co-authored “The Great Silence,” a journey of an essay that begins with the Fermi Paradox and ends with human-parrot communication. In the quest to make contact with life from other worlds, the authors wonder how we might better talk with our non-human compatriots here on earth and reflects on our drive to speak, heard, and be listened to. They write: “There’s a pleasure that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It’s so primal and visceral that throughout their history, humans have considered the activity a pathway to the divine.”
Harmony Holiday’s meditation on Black silence for Triple Canopy grapples with the unspeakable, the moments when language is not enough to articulate one’s feeling and musicality takes its place to bring voice to pain. Organized in a series of vignettes, Holiday reflects on her father’s catatonic states, the death of rapper Nipsey Hussle, Elizabeth Eckford’s stern expression in the photograph that captured her school desegregation as one of the Little Rock Nine, Miles Davis’s choice to scream after surgery and how it gave his voice is iconic strained form, and she, too, grapples with the weight of her own trauma, finding poetry as a way to channel her voice, and the ways silence can be used to hide trauma as much as it can be used a force for resistance. She writes, “This silence is not alone not aloneness not lonely.”
I’ll end with a poem, “A Message Comes In,” by South African writer Yvette Christiansë. It is a dance of a poem that describes growing swells of laughter in the face of continuous violence. I love the role the word “Say” plays in this. Through it, Christiansë punctuates the flutter of birds, the chorus of women, and invites us to speak with her: “Say, if you like, these are the wings / of birds who are the sky’s hinges / and this is the sound of a horizon held open / when a body is laid down.”
I really think you would like everynoise.com