Unusual Circumstances – Anomaly Index

V.V. and A.C. – Plastic Memory Value cassette (Throat, 1999)

“We were asking listeners to destroy the cassette afterward, making that playback more ephemeral.”

From one highly obscure corner of the sound art world, I bring you a cassette that uses the sound of breaking tapes as its source.

In 1998, Ven Voisey and Andrew Campbell were studying together at San Francisco State University’s Conceptual Information Arts Program, which the school charmingly refers to as the CIA Program. Both Voisey and Campbell were experimental composers and artists. “We were both in very exploratory points of developing artwork/sound/music,” Voisey tells me via email.

Around this time, Voisey ran a record label called Throat in partnership with several creative friends. “Throat came together as a means for myself and a few friends to release sound projects and collaborate on compilations, and to occasionally perform in different ensembles.”

He explains that Throat had three “eras.” The first one was the t-series, which started with a compilation called errorCycle, allocated catalog number t0000. Another release from that era was 8L, a collection of “ambient recordings taken from living spaces as source material, then modified by the inhabitant,” by Voisey recording under the mysterious handle iot.

Throat’s second era saw the creation of a net-label named throat hz, while its third and final incarnation involved the production of a handful of 3″ CD-Rs. At that point, Voisey was also working with Chico MacMurtrie’s Amorphic Robot Works project, a collaboration between engineers and artists to create robotic sculptures.

Voisey remembers Plastic Memory Value starting life as a project for a class that he and Campbell were taking. “I’m a little fuzzy on some of these details,” he admits. “Which is just about perfect for the content of this project.”

He recalls the creation process as being relatively simple. “A microphone was used to capture the cracking of the tape case and unravelling and breaking of the tape,” he explains. “That recording was then used by both Andrew [Campbell] and myself as source material to create two distinct compositions : one was side A and one was side B of Plastic Memory Value“

As I ask him about the significance of a recording about destroying physical media, Voisey explains that I’ve got it wrong. “I think the inspiration for Plastic Memory Value had less to do with destruction of media and more to do with ephemerality of memory,” he reflects.

Voisey points out that Campbell, at the time, was reading the work of two authors. One was the economist Jacques Attali, author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music, which examines the history of music to show how capitalist forces are constantly turning music into a commodity — though Attali ultimately predicts that people are destined to reclaim the process of music production. The other author was the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose major work, Simulacra and Simulation, argues that society has replaced all meaning with symbols and signs, leading to our experience being a simulation of reality.

“In general Andrew was and is a hell of a lot smarter and more well read than I am,” Voisey says. “Both of us were pretty into exploring the idea of disembodied memory. I was deeply into Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape, which basically consists of a man rummaging through a pile of tapes to play back passionate rambling bits of his life to himself in circular poetic language… and lots of space and tape manipulation (moving back and forth through speech). Still love that play.”

Two other releases on Throat: A self-titled CD-R by Nehineh on the left (t0002) and a 3″ CD-R called *oid* by Ven Voisey and Wolfgang Röttger.

The idea behind Plastic Memory Value was that customers were supposed to listen to the tape once, then destroy it. “And listeners were invited to continue the process of recording and re-compose the sound of that tape breaking,” Voisey points out. As Voisey points out, the goal is to create a chain of artistic action, from one person to the next. “We were both interested in taking a medium used to hold a memory of sound — in this case, the cassette tape — and creating a circumstance in which a disembodied memory could be passed to another person, or group of people and experienced; [they then partake] in the same action which originally generated the source sounds, which makes that transference of experience/memory have a sort of visceral finality.”

Voisey tells me they staged one performance of Plastic Memory Value as part of their class, playing the cassette and the breaking it after it played. “I think we got an A on the project,” he laughs. “The audience appreciated it, but the critique didn’t go too deep.”

He isn’t sure how many of the customers who received a copy of Plastic Memory Value chose to destroy their copy after playing it. From a collector’s perspective, it can be hard to justify ruining a tape. “We did an initial very limited release with a handmade cardboard sleeve and bits of the tape wound around the cardboard, then did the slightly later Throat release with the plastic shell and vellum cover in 1999. It had a pretty limited release and I mostly gave copies to friends and a handful of people around the globe that somehow found us. It’s possible I gave copies to folks over at Vital Weekly, which ended up being one of the main reviewers of throat releases, grateful for those folks.

Recent image of two Throat releases: the errorCycle compilation and Voisey’s *things collapse in on themselves* 3″ CD-R. Note the chunk of a circuit board glued to the cover. (Photograph was taken by Ven Voisey of releases in Forest Graham’s collection).

“I was pretty terrible at running a label, but regardless, some of the things we put out were nice, so glad a few people got their hands and ears on them. And my own take? I liked it, it was an idea worth exploring and I enjoyed sharing ideas and sounds with Andrew. It was a visceral percussive satisfying texture to work with, and that aspect of it certainly stays with me.”

The ideas raised by Plastic Memory Value have been through lines in Voisey’s artistic career, in particular the way it encourages active listening. “We were asking listeners to destroy the cassette afterward, making that playback more ephemeral, and consequently, perhaps more valuable; a way of situating a listener into a circumstance of active listening — albeit through an act of violence/destruction which I might approach differently now … Active listening as a means of entering the present moment remains a practice of mine, and it still functions as a primary tool for creating work. My work now involves a lot of call and response: listening to environmental sounds, responding/mimicking with voice, recording, layering, playback, using the recording as an instrument.

A recent Ven Voisey work which embraces analogous active listening principles to Plastic Memory Value.

Voisey isn’t sure if he still has a copy of Plastic Memory Value. There aren’t many in existence. But if he does have it, he can’t get it now. “I have a copy of most of the Throat releases in storage in the basement of a building in Massachusetts,” he says. “I am, however, currently in California.”

Thanks to Ven Voisey for the interview. Ven Voisey’s recent happenings are documented on his website. All images are taken from archived versions of the throat website (formerly throat.org), except where otherwise credited.

Felix Kubin – Coughs & Sneezes lathe-cut 8″ (Hasenbart, 2016)

“I love sounds that are meant to be edited out.”

Felix Kubin is no stranger to unusual music. With Tim Buhre, he formed Klangkrieg, which produced noisy experimental music from 1987 to 2003. One tape they put out, covered in Anomaly Index‘s earlier article about the inventive Cling Film-Records label, came in a sealed tin can. He also released a record with René Heid’s iconoclastic record label, Rund um den Watzmann, that functioned as a zoetrope; as the record spun, an animation was produced on its surface.

In contact via email, Kubin enthusiastically described a project that recently materialized, a seven-inch record called Bücher Scannen that was created for a special jukebox designed by Ilija Lazarevic and Felix Boekamp. “It’s a jukebox full of theme-oriented seven-inches with mostly noisy recordings,” he says. “Their topic here was ‘Schaben’ (Scratching) and you can hear me rubbing microphones on books — my understanding of tactile reading.”

Kubin’s career certainly hasn’t been short on ideas. The reason I contacted him was to learn about an obscure limited-edition record he put out in 2016. It was a lathe-cut record that collected the sounds of different people sneezing.

Collage produced by Renate Nikolaus

Over email, Kubin explained that 2016 was a busy year. He composed what he calls both “the biggest music piece of my life” and his “Stockhausen moment,” a 70 minute opus called “Falling Still” that was was performed by a boys’ choir and string orchestra, accompanied by extended percussion and quadrophonic electronics. He also played concerts across Europe, “invented a synthesizer orchestra for 20 vintage KORG MS 20 synths played by students during a 5-day workshop in Gent, Belgium,” put out two records, and served as a jury member for an experimental film festival in Berlin. Perhaps best of all: “In October, my brother and I took our mother to New York for her eightieth birthday. She had never been in overseas before.

“That was 2016. A really busy year.”

Amid this frenetic schedule, he hatched the idea for Coughs & Sneezes. “The idea came during a train ride in Italy,” he tells me. “A friend and I were thinking about the different sounds of sneezes, even certain characteristics of countries.” Kubin reflects on the curious cultural specificity of this physiological process, pointing out that a sneeze sounds like “a-choo!” in France but “hatchi!” in Germany.

“[We considered] how nice it would be to have a selection of those on a record. When Renate Nikolaus of the Hasenbart label approached me for one of her handmade lathe-cut editions, [I thought] the sneezing could fit very well, especially in winter.

Images from Renate Nikolaus’ production process for creating lathe records like *Coughs & Sneezes*. (Photos courtesy of Renate Nikolaus)

“So I started asking many friends of mine to send me recordings. That’s actually not so easy because most of the time you don’t have a recorder at hand when you are sneezing. So, I recorded a tutorial video. A kind of indecent little film, I can tell you.”

That “indecent” film demonstrated the use of a long Q-tip to tickle the upper interior of one’s nose. Not everyone implemented that method. “Some tried to use dodgy methods like sucking water into their nose or doing a handstand. The lucky ones had hay fever, they could go on sneezing forever … Some just stood in the sun waiting, as Wilhelm Busch, the famous inventor of Max & Moritz, suggested in a comic.”

The back of *Coughs & Sneezes* demonstrates one way of provoking a sneeze. (Image credit: Felix Kubin)

This collection of sneezes was not entirely unprecedented. When Kubin was sixteen, he used to “archive” sounds from around his home. “I was always into sound archives, that’s true. On my release Chromdioxidgedächtnis (chrome dioxide memory), which is more a study of the history of the cassette tape than a regular album, there is a part where you can hear my brother and me doing the ‘counting in’ for noises that I wanted to record for sampling. That was back in 1985. My sampler was a Boss Digital Delay with a sample function of 0.8 sec.”

Another precedent comes from one of Kubin’s main gigs, creating radio plays — a very popular entertainment format in Germany. I reflect to Kubin that the typical process of editing audio might involve editing out the coughs and sneezes, rather than isolating them. “For sure, I love sounds that are meant to be edited out,” he says. “That’s what strikes me also with documentary recordings, you get a lot of redundancies, breathing, searching for words… the human being out of control. Already in 2004 I started to combine documentary with fiction, implant one into the other, play with the different forms of language and context. I have always been interested in the context where things happen. That’s why I love to create for very different, if not contradicting, forums and contexts. I examine the rituals (of speaking, acting, listening and moving) of different contexts and societies.

Close-up images of various components of the lathe-cutting process, including the needle, the grooves, and the thin ribbons of polycarbonate that come off the record’s surface as the grooves are cut. (Courtesy of *Renate Nikolaus*.)

“I also love sounds that happen to me, instead of me looking for them. I often carry a little recorder with me and when I encounter a good sound, I quickly record it. I have a huge archive of these ‘one shot recordings” that I’ve collected over the years. In 2010, I made a radio play out of them called ‘Säugling, Duschkopf, Damenschritte‘ (‘Infant, Shower Head, Female Steps’) which is constructed like one of those sound archive records for Super 8 film enthusiasts in the 1960s. All the sounds are announced, then the descriptions get more and more poetic (and obviously wrong), until the play sublimates into a piece of musique concrète.”

Looking back, Kubin is fond of Coughs & Sneezes. “I love this record because it has a humorous and unique concept. It didn’t sell fast, if you consider the small handmade edition of 93 copies. I think it’s one of those records that people will appreciate more when it gets older, as with most of the things I do. That seems to be my destiny. The early four-track teenage music that I made in the 1980s was first released in 2002, and became quite popular then. I’m lucky that I started so early. I still have lots of sneezes.”

Thanks to Felix Kubin for the interview, and Renate Nikolaus for her images of the lathe-cutting process. Kubin’s many projects are outlined in detail on his website. The Hasenbart Records website is here.

Kathy McGinty – Kathy McGinty Collectors Edition CD (Hamburger Records, 2005)

“I had to be fast with the buttons to make the conversation seem natural, but then I’d realize there would be a guy, you know, going at it on the other end.”

When I was in high school, one of my favourite albums was Kathy McGinty, which quickly became a hit among my friends. A cult phenomenon that first spread via the Aquarius Records shop and mail order, it had an irresistible concept. The ever-excitable Kathy McGinty prowled for love-hungry men in chat rooms, luring them with sexy talk and asking them to call her on the phone. When they did, they met “Kathy,” who was nothing more than a Yamaha sampler that rotated through a handful of phrases, sexy and not. The sampler was manned by Derek Erdman, and featured the vocal talents of his friend, Julia Rickert. Kathy’s treasury of expressions ranged from the mundane (“This is Kathy,” “So, what’s up?”) to the outrageous (“Your dick tastes like bacon,” “Taco Bell tastes so good,” “I think I might be having a miscarriage”), with not much in between. The men would eventually figure out the gambit, but not before a few minutes of awkward back-and-forth.

Derek Erdman’s personal copy of *Kathy*.

I speak with Derek Erdman by email to learn more about this legendary disc.

“Julia and I were roommates, living in a neighborhood that was a utopia at the time,” he tells me. “It was slightly desolate on the outskirts of downtown Chicago, and a lot of our friends were living nearby, so it was a fertile time for doing things. I can’t really think of a reason that Kathy happened other than boredom. I was into the internet then — 2002 or so — so I spent a lot of time on it. Julia didn’t care so much about it, she watched a lot of Passions and Family Feud. I clearly remember her being very critical that the first two rounds of Feud didn’t matter at all; if they won only the third round, that family would take it all.”

Erdman’s first forays into the exploitation of male desperation were low-tech. “I used to place local ads for people to show up to have sex, but I’d give them the address to the house across the street,” he remembers. “I’d tell them to honk their car horn and yell for Tammy because the doorbell was broken. I’d ask them to bring eggs or a gallon of milk as a nice gesture. Dudes would show up in groups with milk yelling for Tammy, and see others doing the same. Truly awful stuff.”

At the time, he was spending a lot of time in chat rooms, “pretending to be somebody that I wasn’t, probably acting like a jerk.” Since he also was a lifelong enthusiast of prank calls, it was only a matter of time before he merged the two interests. At first, this involved pretending to be a woman and instructing men to call the house to leave sexy messages on an answering machine – promising to call them back if they were “sexy enough.” (Some of these voicemails ended up on the CD).

Erdman says that, when these calls started coming through to their answering machine, they were impossible for Rickert to ignore. “It was her idea to interact with them in a way that we wouldn’t actually have to, and Kathy was born. I had a Yahama SU-10 sampler (still do!), and we programmed the sayings into it, spliced some wires to a phone, and away we went.”

Schematic of the Kathy McGinty apparatus, drawn up by Derek Erdman.

Some of those samples are classics, including lines like “You sound like a child molester!” and “I think you might be racist.” Erdman says they were the result of inspired improvisation. “Julia and I came up with them on the fly, going for whatever would be the most jarring while callers were all worked up. It’s funny, ‘You sound like a child molester’ elicited a vague response, but when you’d call somebody racist, they didn’t like that at all. ‘I think you might be racist’ is such a funny thing to say, like the sex talk gave Kathy some clues to their racism.”

Finding men was hardly a challenge. “I’m sure we went for whatever chat rooms seemed the most explicit, ‘creeps for teens’ or whatever. There was no nuance to it whatsoever. We’d get right in a room and say something like, ‘Who wants to phone bang?’ and we’d get five takers right away. I have no idea what we called ourselves. Probably teen_for_creeps or something similar.”

Erdman says he was at a place in his life where he wasn’t worried about giving away his phone number or being traced. “What were people going to do, come to our apartment and admit to being a sex joke?” he pontificates. “This was right around the time when I first got a cell phone, so the landline was treated as a castoff. I hardly ever answered it seriously. The prefix was 666, I still remember the whole number.”

The tape recorder used to commit Kathy’s calls on tape. (Source: Derek Erdman)

I asked Erdman to paint a picture of what it was like handling those calls. “[It was] usually late at night, usually just the two of us huddled around a beige 1980s Bell Systems phone on a red dining room table. I was usually the one to control the sampler, because it was a hassle to cycle through four banks of samples. There are 12 buttons on that sampler, so you’d use them up pretty fast. Especially with time buying responses. We figured out pretty early that we’d need something like, ‘Sorry, I’m on speaker phone so I can touch myself’ or ‘Hold on a second.’ I needed that just to catch up sometimes. I had to be fast with the buttons to make the conversation seem natural, but then I’d realize there would be a guy, you know, going at it on the other end.”

On one occasion, one of those men “finished” before giving up on the call, something that apparently left Erdman with a bit of a stomach ache.

Sometimes, callers “finished” before Erdman and Rickert had a chance to alienate them.

One of Erdman’s favourite calls is “Very Large Hands.” On that track, the caller is immediately suspicious about Kathy’s phone, then cracks up and asks if the audio clips are being transmitted via computer or a keyboard. He then can’t stop laughing as Kathy commands him to “suck the shit out of my ass” and “drink my cum, fuckface!” Another Erdman fave is “I Have Somebody Else in the House,” in which a whispering caller stays on the line for over six minutes, persisting through Kathy’s cycle of absurdities (“I wanna jam my thumb in your dick hole,” “I can’t feel your dick, it must be teeny”), even when she starts speaking in reverse and a man’s voice blurts out “Kathy Robot version 2.1.”

These calls have left an indelible impression on Erdman. “I can still hear their voices echoing in my head,” he says. “They’re kind of like boyfriends of mine, in a way!”

The physical Kathy McGinty release started off life as a homemade CD-R. Erdman says that this disc was first championed by the San Franscico shop Aquarius Records, whom he commends for their honest business ethic and commitment to promoting Kathy. As that CD-R was selling like hotcakes, he learned that Kathy had been bootlegged and was being peddled at stores in Los Angeles. Michael Sheppard, who also put out the infamous Celebrities at their Worst on the Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God label, was responsible. “What a stupid thing to bootleg,” Erdman says. “But, also, he probably thought it was just an impossibly obscure thing that nobody would find out about. Also, the first versions we made were so homemade looking, why not just make your own? I guess that sort of makes sense.

“I think we had a phone conversation with Michael and he agreed to stop selling them and also send us money, but he never did. I really liked those other CDs that he did, I can see the connection to what he was selling with those and what McGinty was, so really, it makes sense. That Van Morrison CD is a revelation to listen to. ‘Want a Danish’ especially!”

Erdman also mentions setting a modem to call Sheppard’s 1-800 number on repeat “for a week straight,” but it’s hard to know if he’s being serious.

We discovered, in conducting this interview and browsing through Discogs, that someone also did a cassette bootleg at one point. Erdman also mentioned that an indie record compilation used one of the calls between songs without permission. And a band called Bell sampled it without permission on an album that came out on Soul Jazz Records. “We asked them to give us some money and went to Haiti with it,” he tells me, possibly joking. “Ethically questionable on our part, because we didn’t have permission from the callers.”

Erdman eventually pressed Kathy in an edition of 2000 professional CDs. He put it out on his own label, Hamburger Records, which was named after his “lofty house” at the time, which he dubbed Gallery Hamburger.

There were actually two releases on Hamburger Records; in addition to Kathy, there was a disc called 75 Voicemail Messages, by Simone Waters. “Simone Waters (not her real name) was a girl I dated briefly, I really liked her and she was waaaaay out of my league,” he says. “She used to call me way too much and leave messages, and they all sounded EXACTLY the same. So that CD is that. Probably so dumb that it shouldn’t exist. Very disappointing for fans of McGinty.” (He says now that he thinks this was a mean thing to do.)

Yet Kathy and Simone were hardly Erdman’s only forays into telephony. “I was a MAJOR prank caller as a kid — and, uh, adult,” he says. “Calling strangers screaming, anything non-sequitur, etc. I’m a huge fan of Longmont Potion Castle, Tube Bar, & the Screamer.” There are some other prank calls up on his website. He also ran a 24/7 psychic hotline for ten years:

“Derek Erdman’s FREE PSYCHIC HOTLINE, call 24/7 (206) 324 6276 for a pre-recorded message or a live psychic. Pre-recorded message changes weekly and includes upcoming celebrity news, impending disasters, lucky lottery numbers & other information. Talk to a live psychic about any subject that you desire. ABSOLUTELY FREE.”

Erdman learned, through Aquarius Records, that both Dan the Automator and Matt Groening had bought copies of Kathy and liked them – something he is rightly proud of.

The Yamaha sampler used to give life to Kathy. (Source: Derek Erdman)

Today, Kathy is a fond memory, although not one that he returns to often. “I don’t think about it much, but it is a funny thing we made a long time ago. It seems kind of early internet to me. Kathy is definitely more of a character, not a reflection of us, and she said some stuff that there’s no way we’d say now. I guess that comes with age, self censorship or empathy for other people in the world. It’s unfortunate in a way that I wouldn’t make something like these days, but I guess that’s a part of growing up. And Taco Bell does taste ‘sooooo good.’”

He does offer a teaser for passionate Kathy McGinty fans, however. He still has the old tapes in a box in the basement, and he estimates that there are about 30 minutes of calls that weren’t included on the original CD. He figures that the best calls are all included on the CD, thanks to Rickert’s curatorial discretion. But he’s happy to send the rest of the tapes to anyone who wants to digitize them…

—

Thanks to Derek Erdman for the interview. Visit Derek’s website, where you can learn about his paintings and various other exploits.

Costanza – George (2017)

“He is truly the embodiment of the insecurity, shallowness, and self-deprecation that we all feel at one time or another.”

How did we end up here? George is an entire album dedicated to Seinfeld, part of a genre called seinwave, which is also dedicated to the show.

George compiles tracks from three previously released mixtapes that were recorded between 2015 and 2017. Its producer is a somewhat mysterious figure named Costanza, who took nearly four months to respond to my pestering emails, but who then readily agreed to tell me about this perplexing artifact. It was my opportunity to try to understand this highly specific digital release, which has become so legendary that it spawned an LP edition pressed on 160-gram, clear vinyl, along with a deluxe cassette boxset edition.

A novelty to some, George comes off as more than that when chatting with Costanza. “Seinfeld has always been a part of my life; in a way, it’s the epitome of nostalgia for me, personally,” he says. “The home video footage of my first steps as a child takes place amid the glow of a rerun episode of Seinfeld.

“Growing up watching the show, I found humor in the slapstick moments with Kramer, but it wasn’t until later on that I (like many) found myself relating to the character of George Costanza. He is truly the embodiment of the insecurity, shallowness, and self-deprecation that we all feel at one time or another; at the same time, there is an air of hope surrounding him, oftentimes seen in small victories in unexpected places.”

Costanza explains that he became interested in vaporwave in 2014, when he was only fifteen years old, a freshman in high school. His interest in convention-breaking music dates back further than that, though. “As early as middle school I was constantly searching for the ‘next big thing’ in music,” he tells me. “I have always been interested in the evolution of music as a whole and found myself growing tired of the same conventions that made up 95% of music that I came across. I got excited when dubstep started to become popular, because I had never heard anything like it before. I participated in that scene for a couple years before eventually growing tired of it and continuing my search, which eventually led me to vaporwave.”

His enthusiasm for vaporwave was catalyzed by artists like 18 Carat Affair (an early vaporwave and hypnagogic pop producer) and bbrainz. Very soon after, he started producing his own music. In junior high, after his family moved to Chicago for his dad’s job, he conceived Costanza.

“Costanza was developed in an afternoon with little to no planning prior to its conception,” he says. “That afternoon in particular, I thought it would be funny to make a vaporwave song based on Seinfeld that utilized a quote from the show. I had put together the debut song in a little under a half hour and threw together a sloppily photoshopped ‘album cover’ to accompany it. After uploading the song to SoundCloud and posting a quick self-promo on Reddit, I went to sleep. I woke up to more than 50 upvotes in just a few short hours followed by an entire day of my track being in the #1 spot on the subreddit.”

That Reddit post is now long gone, along with his Reddit username at the time, which was notvandelay, a reference to George’s fictional company, Vandelay Industries. But Costanza’s music has lived on, albeit not without hiccups. “I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, which oftentimes shows itself through the music,” he explains. “There is a lot of perfectionism surrounding the metadata of the songs, in addition to the layout and timing of many of my releases. In the first couple years of Costanza, I would sporadically delete and reupload songs, much to the dismay of my listeners; this is the reason why.” Indeed, a few years ago, several Reddit users feared Costanza was gone for good when after his Bandcamp disappeared — though he subsequently reappeared.

Part of growing artistically has involved accepting imperfection. “Thankfully I have learned to cope with it effectively over the past several years and continue to work through it with regard to how it affects my creativity.”

Costanza assembles his tracks in Ableton Live. He tells me he will typically begin his process with a “sample hunt,” seeking a clip that will serve as a good base for a track. “I oftentimes opt for ‘proven’ samples that I know were used in other well-known tracks, but I challenge myself to approach them from a unique standpoint.”

He often draws from his favourite vaporwave artists. As an example, he cites his debut track, “Costanza,” in which he used a sample from a song called “Daylight” by the band Ramp. “Daylight” is an album track from the lone LP by this jazzy funk group, which was founded by the legendary vibraphonist Roy Ayers. Costanza tells me he chose this sample after hearing it used by 18 Carat Affair on the track “Sunrise,” off the 2009 EP N. Cruise Blvd. To make it his own, Costanza altered the way the sample was used. “I opted to take a unique, more upbeat approach than the 18 Carat Affair track by adding a drum track and chopping it up, which eventually became standard for most of my future tracks.”

The hyperspecific realm of Seinfeld-related vaporwave actually dates back to January 2015, when the vaporwave producer Abelard put out a single entitled “☆ＳＥＩＮＷＡＶＥ☆２０００☆,” which transformed the TV show’s slap bass theme song into a funky vaporwave epic. Costanza points out that simpsonswave, another pop-culture-specific genre of vaporwave – usually involving discoloured, slowed-down, and hazy Simpsons clips set to vaporwave music – actually came after seinwave.

I ask Costanza about these source-specific varieties of vaporwave, wondering why the genre serves as such fertile ground for these hyperspecific strains of recycled pop-culture. He explains that vaporwave is “innately nostalgic,” linking in with memories of “early experiences, typically rather insignificant ones like a certain commercial or jingle that has been pushed to one’s subconscious until it rushes back as the result of a certain trigger years later. I believe vaporwave is all about triggering that feeling.”

While nostalgia is often person-specific, he notes that phenomena like Seinfeld and The Simpsons have impacted many people. For Costanza, tapping into that “collective nostalgia” is the key to the wide appeal of these highly-specific genres.

Costanza has recorded under a variety of other monikers, including producing less-specific vaporwave/future funk music under the name Color Television. But today, his sound production impulses are evolving. He is dabbling in industrial music and dream pop, and is currently working on a noise project that he considers entirely separate from his vaporwave exploits.

A photograph of Costanza’s noise rig. (Source: Costanza)

“I believe that noise is the final frontier in terms of music,” he tells me. “The music that comes out of that scene is jarring, extreme, and completely independent of the conventions of music. The performance aspect is also by far the most entertaining you can find across any genre.”

Miles away from the funky and melodic tones of seinwave, noise seems to offer a rawer emotional outlet for Costanza, something less self-consciously post-modern and more purgative. “Noise appeals to me personally because it functions as the most cathartic genre possible in my opinion,” he says. “Many noise pieces are built on the rawest form of human emotions, frequently sidestepping established conventions of music in service of emotional expression.”

Thanks to Costanza for the interview. His Bandcamp page is here.

Nils Quak ‎– Tanger At Night (Luv Sound, 2009)

luvsound was a netlabel administrated by Erik Schoster that specialized in sound art. Between 2004 and 2010, it made a number of digital releases available, most of them single mp3 files. One of luvsound’s more curious artifacts was a four minute mp3 called “Tanger At Night,” produced by Nils Quak under the abbreviation NQ. What makes this sound file interesting is that it takes a short bit of audio and degrades it over and over again until it is nearly unrecognizable.

I contacted Quak to fill me in on the background behind this notable bit of sound art, and he was happy to furnish me with details. “In 2007 my father-in-law died and when we emptied out the house, I also checked the record collection — which had some nice records, such as a first pressing of Neu 2,” he tells me. “There were also a couple of seven-inch records with ‘world music’ recordings: Turkish, Chinese, Greek records and a lot of other stuff. There was also this flexi disc with klezmer music. Due to its age, the recording was already pretty worn out and sounded eerily beautiful.”

He explains that he recorded a couple of parts of that record to his computer and played around with them digitally, adjusting the pitch and speed, and adding effects like reverb and delay. “But even though they sounded gorgeous, I wasn’t able to arrange them into something coherent,” he explains.

“During that time, my commute was about one and a half hours each way. Since the largest part of the commute was by train, I often used the time to make music or to play with some ideas.” He explains that he was using a piece of audio production software called Max. That program provides producers with a visual interface to customize their music, which is much easier than having to program audio manually using text commands. Max is also highly modular, allowing independent programmers to create patches (or “externals”) which are custom methods of producing sound. When “Tanger At Night” came about, Quak was experimenting with a set of externals created by a programmer named André Sier. He tells me he was “quite into chaotic systems at that time,” and therefore gravitated towards Sier’s A-Chaos Lib –a set of patches designed to produce chaos using non-linear equations, through a mathematical concept known as “strange attractors.”

On one commute, he subjected the flexi disc’s klezmer loops to one of Sier’s A-Chaos externals called Lorenz. That external was named after a set of equations developed by a mathematician named Edward Lorenz; these equations, which generate chaotic results, are responsible for the concept of the butterfly effect.

A screenshot of the Max patch that Quak was working with. (Source: Nils Quak)

“This led to a nice patchwork of loops fading in and out,” Quak recalls. “I remember finalizing the export of the audio file just seconds before I arrived at my home station.”

Yet he was unsatisfied with the results. “The recording still sounded way too clean and detailed for my taste and dirtying it up afterwards with distortion and waveshapers didn’t lead to the desired results.”

So he decided to go lo-fi. He thought of Alvin Lucier’s famous “I Am Sitting In A Room” experiment. Lucier’s concept was to record himself saying “I am sitting in a room,” then to play it back and record the playback, then to play that recording back and record it again, and so on. With each successive version, the resonant frequencies of the room, amplified relative to the rest of the audio, monopolize more and more of the sound field. Repeated enough times, the words themselves become inaudible, and all that’s heard are the resonant frequencies as tones.

Quak adapted this concept, using the tools at his disposal. “The lack of proper recording equipment led me to play this over my speakers and record it via my phone. I repeated this step various times in different locations around the apartment and outside on the street and the garden. So in this way the method differs from Lucier’s version, since I was not focusing on the room’s resonances, but always introduced new sounds and reverberations with each iteration. But since I always did at least a couple of recordings in each location, the resonances got superimposed on each other nevertheless, but not as much as in ‘I am sitting in a room.’”

He deliberately used cheap recording software and the sub-par microphone on his cell phone, adding to the sonic limitations and sense of degradation. “The speakers and microphones of the phone and dictaphone I used probably played a larger role here. Their strange frequency response definitively left a big mark on the recording. [My equipment was especially lacking] towards the extremes of the audio spectrum, so the lows and highs vanished more and more with each step.”

Indeed, listening to “Tanger At Night,” you would never know it started off life as klezmer. Instead it’s a tinny, foggy drone that seems to drift in and out of frame. It sounds a little like an early Emeralds tape.

In a sense, “Tanger” serves as a microcosm of Quak’s approach to sound art. “Chance and generative systems often play a role in my music,” he explains. “I like working with feedback systems, where the final result influences the starting point. But more often than not, this is not a deliberate decision, but comes with working with modular synthesizers.” He credits these highly customizable instruments with enabling him to design feedback systems, to tilt the balance towards randomness.

Quak’s modular synth rig. (Source: Nils Quak)

Interestingly, despite Quak’s technical knowhow and familiarity with sound art concepts, audio production is a hobby, not a career. “I never considered my music making as something that could have a career,” he says. “My relation to making music was formed in punk and hardcore bands and the related scenes. Making music was just a personal and social practice I enjoyed. I never wanted to turn this into a profession. I like playing small shows, releasing some records here and there, meeting people, and getting the chance to hang out with them for an evening. That’s all I ever wanted and that’s still what I do at 43.”

When “Tanger At Night” came out, it was the same story. “I was working at a regular job, trying to get the most out of my spare time, making music, hanging out with friends.”

Eleven years down the line, he is happy with how “Tanger” turned out. “I really liked how it all came together after struggling with the initial sounds,” he explains. “It’s weird that sometimes you can’t fit all the pieces together for ages and then at some point it just clicks and it comes together super easily and you already know what to do with the next step. The recording had that vibe, even though it was quite a long process. I still enjoy it today, but I haven’t listened to it for years until you contacted me. It has this weird familiarity: On the one hand listening to it brings back fragments of memories and at the same time it feels like listening to somebody else’s work, because it’s been so long since I listened to it closely.”

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Thanks to Nils Quak for the interview and images. “Tanger At Night” is still available via luvsound’s archive.org page. Nils Quak’s Bandcamp page features many of his sound experiments.

Éric La Casa – AIR.ratio CD (Sirr, 2006)

“I sincerely believe that every ventilation system becomes, or is, a wind instrument.”

In 2006, Éric La Casa put out a collection of recordings with an unusual concept. Fascinated by the ventilation systems that circulate air through modern buildings, he set about collecting audio from air ducts around town. He recorded thirty different samples, adjusted their volume levels to keep their loudness standard, and collected them on this CD in two minute intervals.

In the process of producing AIR.ratio, La Casa became an expert in the very contemporary phenomenon of mechanical air circulation. Via email, he tells me about how he developed his obsession with ventilation — and what went into creating AIR.ratio, which I suspect is the first album made entirely out of air duct recordings.

“Since my arrival in Paris in the early nineties, I lived in a Haussman-style building,” La Casa explains, referring to the big, cut-stone edifices created in the mid-19th century. “My daily life was that of a Parisian citizen whose indoors life was not governed by the standards of the end of the 20th century. The insulation in my apartment was as uncertain as the ventilation. The window was my only access to outside light and air. But the walls themselves seemed to breathe.”

But one day in 1994, he found himself in a friend’s modern bathroom, where his attention shifted to the air vent above the bathtub. “One of my friends had just rented an apartment in a building built in the eighties,” he tells me. While visiting that friend, he realized how much of everyday life is governed by industrial design. “The door code, the elevator, and even mechanical ventilation had become germane to life in Paris. All of this had become the standard of living,” he says.

“The elevator and the ventilation caught my attention very quickly. I have always appreciated the relationship between sound and space: how sound is diffused and how it informs me about the design of the environment. My awareness of mechanical ventilation in someone’s home was like a brutal shock. I was discovering that architecture could allow rooms to exist that don’t have windows. And in my friend’s bathroom, when I closed the door for the first time, I’m in the dark, with a constant sound that I don’t immediately think of as mechanical ventilation.

“And then, I rapidly became interested in all those Parisian rooms, public or private, without windows, which owe their survival to ventilation. And I was struck by the fact that each room has its own sonic identity due to the sound of the air extractor and the aeraulic system.”

That was in 1994. In the year 2000, he decided to start recording these vents. At the time, he didn’t have a final project in mind. “By dint of recording, and constantly being drawn to these air devices, I ended up with my final project. For over a year I did nothing more than that.” Today, he figures he created AIR.ratio to expunge himself of his air duct obsession; he figures he could have become pigeonholed as an artists who focused exclusively on ventilation systems. “But this is not my artistic endeavor,” he reflects.

La Casa’s boom and two condenser microphones, capturing the sound of an air vent. (Source: Éric La Casa)

Making the recordings in public spaces posed its own challenge. He attached two condenser microphones to a boom and held them up to vents and air conditioning conduits. They had to be suspended in the air, not quite touching the vents.

It turns out that it wasn’t easy to convince everyone about the goals of his recording, though many did seem receptive. “I often received a warm welcome when I explained the importance of the sound dimension in their interiors,” La Casa recalls. “But most of the time, I didn’t have permission to record, and had to sneak in with my equipment. Fortunately, the world was not as safe as it is today… I often arrived with my equipment completely dismantled and had to put everything back together quickly without attracting outside attention. And when you are in a toilet, installing equipment, quietly, it creates a bit of a weird situation with ordinary public toilet users. I often found myself in a washroom listening to a ventilator that sounded astonishing but but barely perceptible, while people waited to get in… before giving up.”

The disc collects two minute samples of each recording, each one identified by its specific location. Locations include a hospital, library, art gallery, and apartment. La Casa explains that bathrooms were often the easiest places to record to avoid drawing too much attention.

La Casa has thought deeply about ventilation systems. At one point, he hosted a radio show where he met professionals in the interior design industry, including architects, engineers, acousticians, and a sociologist. He worked with an organist, Jean-Luc Guionnet, which led him to draw a connection between the organ’s pipes and the air conduits in buildings. “I sincerely believe that every ventilation system becomes, or is, a wind instrument,” he tells me. “A continuous breathing system. As with an instrument, what happens in an air network is linked to the complexity of its architecture.”

Schematic of a ventilation system, demonstrating its complexity. (Source: Éric La Casa)

The curves and twists in a building’s air ducts are analogous to the turns and valves in a musical instrument. This is why the vents he recorded all sound different. And much of the differences and sound have to do with imperfections in the system, which can occur for many reasons.

La Casa explains that, when buildings are being designed, the ventilation ducts need to be planned via sets of complex calculations. If those calculations are off, you’ll get turbulence — which produces noise.

Then there’s wear and tear. These networks of ducts must be kept in good, clean order. “A system that plays with forced air always ends up producing unforeseen effects if you didn’t have any maintenance,” he warns.

Diagram of air currents within a vent — highly susceptible to turbulence! (Source: Éric La Casa)

And lastly, there is basic user error. Since few people know why ventilation systems exist, many will unwittingly disrupt the system’s flow, for example by putting furniture in front of a vent. This one indiscretion can throw off the entire building’s ventilation network as a whole, causing turbulence and noise.

La Casa explains that mechanical ventilation was developed by engineers to solve a technical problem — circulating air in rooms that don’t have direct access to the outdoors via windows. But those engineers didn’t consider how users were adopt their system; those answers, instead, would have lain within the fields of anthropology and sociology. For example, cultural beliefs about the purpose of ventilation — and its adverse effects — have emerged over time. “Depending on the period, theories have spread in our societies to make mechanical ventilation responsible for benefits (filtration of fine particles …) or, on the contrary, for problems (mainly on health, instead of sound).”

La Casa explains that engineers are keen to develop technical solutions to human problems. And, La Casa points out, “mechanical ventilation technically meets new interior standards for human habitation while preserving the building.” As a consequence, it has been implemented universally.

Air conditioning conduit in a hospital. (Source: Éric La Casa)

“Living in southern Italy and northern Scandinavia is not at all the same. But in the end, it becomes the same in terms of normalizing indoor comfort. Architects seized on the fact that one can use the mechanization of the air in a building to expand their vocabulary. Thus, the interior space today is more and more equipped and governed by increasingly sophisticated techniques to guarantee and meet the standards of comfort of human life.”

The architects and engineers who design air conduits do take their sonic properties into account, but in a highly technical way. “Each object is defined by its sound level, which now meets strict specifications and noise standards. I went to a building measurement center to understand how these exhaust air measurements were made. In an empty building of typical dimensions, measurement microphones record the sound level. Here, no one cares whether the permanence of this noise in a space is desirable, or whether the user really wants it. The technical obviousness of a mechanical air system is something everyone now has to accept. In fact, the issue of noise is completely peripheral, even secondary. Engineers are more concerned with the flow of air in space. They don’t like people asking about noise.

“For AIR.ratio I put them face-to-face with this question while inviting them to be creative in their way of arranging their systems: why not call on musicians from the design stage to get out of the strictly technical culture and try to instead deal with the ‘musical’ question beyond noise? Let’s get out of this noise culture to see that we live in a complex sound world that could also have hidden musical goals.”

Cover for original Sirr edition of *AIR.ratio*. Image depicts close-up of a dusty surface. (Source: Discogs)

La Casa, who has produced an extensive discography, still looks back on AIR.ratio fondly. “I find that what ventilation tells us — about contemporary architecture, our relationship to the exterior, our need for control, our society, its relationship also to noise, and to the continuous, therefore to time, etc. — is particularly rich in teaching and expressiveness, and therefore artistic potential. I could continue to work on ventilation to this day. But because I don’t want to become an expert on this at all, I’m not sure I should. It seems to me that AIR.ratio allows us to enter into this topic of ventilation through our listening – which is quite an original way to address this question.”

Since creating AIR.ratio, La Casa hasn’t stopped thinking about ventilation systems. “Ventilation is at the center of our new strategy of living indoors, bringing to us the vital elements of our survival: water, air, electricity, and now food… This is the gradual establishment of an internalization of our society. The inside has now taken on more importance in our lives than the outside. Everything seems to indicate that we are spending more and more time indoors, and that goes through the elevation of indoor comfort. Ventilation is clearly one of the essential components of this strategy. Air is now an important building issue.

“To sum up: we have moved from the fields to the offices, and for that we had to increase the comfort of life and accentuate our technical and even technological efforts. And this is a process that accelerated at the end of the 20th century. It is a constant thought of engineers, and an increasingly growing demand from residents, to meet the new challenges facing the city.”

Thanks to Éric La Casa for the interview. Visit his website here, and his Bandcamp here.

Norbert Möslang – Capture CD (Cut, 2004)

“How does a bicycle light sound?”

It’s a question that Norbert Möslang, a Swiss sound artist who specializes in “cracking” everyday electronics to unleash their sonic properties, posed in a short 2004 article in the Leonardo Music Journal, a peer reviewed journal published by MIT Press.

It’s also a question that reflects the aesthetic of Capture, a peculiar CD he put out on the Cut label in 2004.

A great profile in Paris Transatlantic magazine summarizes Möslang’s development as an artist. Born in 1952 in St. Gallen, he apparently taught himself how to play soprano saxophone, performing improvised sets through the 1970s. At that time, he also began his long-standing collaboration with Andy Guhl. Together, they would form the pioneering experimental act Voice Crack, though their first release, a 1978 improv LP titled Deep Voices, was credited to their own names, and today commands over a hundred dollars per copy. That LP, as pointed out in the Paris Transatlantic article, is noteworthy because of some subtle credits on the back cover. The instruments involved include “home made instruments” and a “tape recorder,” hinting at a move beyond traditional instrumentation, and towards repurposing electronic technology.

The name Voice Crack appears in the eighties as the title of their 1984 album, which was still credited to their names. That record came out on their own Uhlang Produktion label, and is a live recording where each artist is credited with playing only one instrument: “Geknackte Alltagselektronik,” German for “cracked everyday electronics.” Images of those performances reveal the innards of various electronic appliances and doo-dads laid out on a wooden floor. The audio itself is a tract of whirs, creaks, and sundry abrasives, all reverberating against the surfaces of the room.

Their cracked everyday electronics aesthetic would be carried forward through the eighties and nineties. Their 2001 installation, sound_shifting, was one of their most impressive feats. Using an underwater microphone called a hydrophone, they broadcast the sounds of Venice’s Grand Channel into a nearby cathedral. It was documented in a CD and book.

In the early- to mid-2000s, Möslang and Guhl stopped recording together as Voice Crack, and since then Möslang has been involved with a number of solo exhibitions and recordings. In 2002 he exhibited glass_speaker for the first time. He took a gallery space, and connected contact microphones to the windows, then running the results through loudspeakers inside. As a result, every subtle vibration of the window from the goings-on outside led to big sounds inside. The. In a sense, this was similar to laser microphones, the technology that intelligence agencies use to hear conversations inside a building by measuring the subtle vibrations of a window pane.

By email, Möslang tells me about a unique release he put out in 2004, Capture. It was released on Jason Kahn’s seminal Cut label, known for a number of experimental albums. Möslang knew Kahn for years; in fact, they played together in the Signal Quintet, “In 2004, I was invited to be part of the group show, ‘Nachschub,’ in Feldkirch, Austria, in an old factory building. I developed Capture as a light-sound installation for this occasion.”

“Nachschub” is the German word for “replenishment.” According to the exhibition’s program, which Möslang generously shared with me, the warehouse used for the exhibition was the material depot that supplied parts to the Austrian national railway system, or the ÖBB. When the Feldkirch train station expanded, that warehouse lost is original function, and it was scheduled for demolition. The warehouse’s role was originally to “replenish” materials for the railway; as a result, this exhibition took this concept and extended it to art.

The idea was to create a work that fit inside the room and that had both a visual and acoustic element. “For the visual intensity, I chose 10 fluorescent lamps and placed them on the floor as a cluster. The sound sources, an infrared receiver and a guitar pickup, were placed on the fluorescent lamps. Each of the two different, more or less stable, sounds were processed individually by a parametric equalizer. The sound is always changing.”

The fluorescent lights with associated equipment for sound generation. From the exhibition program, *edition artCore 01.*

Capture is a documentary of the acoustic side of the installation. It’s a classic case of cracking everyday electronics, and fits the exhibition’s theme of “replenishment.” As the program outlines, Möslang himself found the unused fluorescent bulbs in the old factory building, then repurposed them for their sound-generating potential. Those lights were intended to replenish bulbs that had burned out, and here they are replenishing a condemned building with purpose and life.

A close-up shot of the fluorescent lights and pick-up. *From the exhibition program, edition artCore 01.* Thanks to Norbert Möslang for sharing.

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Thanks to Norbert Möslang for the interview and for sharing the exhibition program.

The Rita – Thousands of Dead Gods CD (Troniks/PACrec, 2006)

“I spent many hours down there staring into the abyss.”

Sam McKinlay likes sharks. He also likes ballet. And when Sam McKinlay — who is better known as the harsh noise artist The Rita — likes something, he gets deeply into it.

The Rita’s 2006 CD, Thousands of Dead Gods, is one of McKinlay’s most well-known records. And that’s for good reason. It combines recordings of actual cage dives, in which people submerge themselves underwater in a cage to get close to sharks, with McKinlay’s signature layers of harsh noise.

“Sharks are easily my longest life obsession,” McKinlay tells me via email. “I got a large rubber shark from my parents when I was a toddler. I still actually have the shark. I think the key manifestation of the interest was the media around me at a very young age in the mid seventies. Grocery store magazine racks had sharksploitation magazines like Killer Sharks and Jaws of Death, articles about Jaws and eventually Jaws 2 were everywhere… As a kid, I used to repeatedly draw long comic books about shark attacks. To this day I have been collecting rare book editions about killer sharks, mostly from the sixties and seventies, as the Great White Shark was garnering more and more media attention as cage diving became more common.”

McKinlay’s obsessive qualities often get incorporated into his art; unlike some enthusiasts, he doesn’t get off on, say, just collecting shark memorabilia. For him, it seems to be a more dynamic process. “I really like to immerse myself in the material, actually live it in most cases. I love the idea of the life obsessions being translated directly into the creative processes – the material then has a real sense of sincerity to it. So when I have life interests such as sharks, it means a lot to me personally that I can use it directly for sound.”

The genesis of Thousands can be traced back to a trip McKinlay took to go cage diving. “My girlfriend at the time and I made plans to go on a week long — never leaving the boat — trip to the Isla Guadalupe to cage dive with great white sharks. Obviously a life long dream of mine, so it was amazing that we had the opportunity to make it happen. My brother who is a videographer and nature film documentary-maker lent me one of his cameras to document everything. The footage that I managed to get from the deck of the boat had resulting audio that was perfect for processing.”

McKinlay’s description of time in the cage seems like the physical embodiment of harsh noise. “Being in the cage was surreal. We had onboard air supply with hoses going through the top door of the cages. You couldn’t see the bottom, so you were constantly anticipating something appearing out of the darkness.”

He explains that the source audio for Thousands was a combination of recordings of his own dives (taken from the surface), as well as recordings of other people’s dives. “My personal recordings with the video camera were from the deck — the shark’s approach to the cages, taking the bait, the reactions from the people on the deck, the splashing of the cage floats on the surface. There’s also documentation of myself coming in and out of the cages. I spent many hours down there staring into the abyss.

“The rest of the sounds were from my personal collection of vintage late sixties and early- to mid-seventies shark cage footage gathered through the years.” These include old VHS tapes of shark documentaries from the seventies and eighties. Among those tapes is footage of great white sharks done by classic divers like Rodney Fox and Valerie and Ron Taylor. “I have a great grey market copy of the masterpiece Blue Water White Death that was transferred directly from a rough 16mm print, years before the DVD eventually came out,” he tells me.

Using those VHS tapes, McKinlay carefully selected the portions of the footage with audio he wanted, then processed it “directly to taste from the various audio sources via various analog distortions and custom fuzz effects.”

At the time this record came out, The Rita was an established name on the noise scene. His earliest releases date back to the late nineties, though most of his music came out in 2004 and after. “I had gotten back into recording harsh noise after my BFA at the University of British Columbia. One of my more significant releases post-2000 was Bodies Bare Traces of Carnal Violence for Troniks which made full use of Giallo film murder sequence samples from various rare Giallo films. For my second CD on Troniks, I wanted to dig even deeper into the idea of life long interests, hence the great white shark as source.”

Thousands has since resonated with many noise heads, and McKinlay considers this an honour. He points out that a prominent Brooklyn noise store has adopted the name of the album for their storefront. “They reached out for my approval to use the name and I was honored to say the least. They still regularly stock merch from me and I got to finally visit the store in March of this year when they put on the Brooklyn show with myself, Black Leather Jesus, Vomir and JSH.”

I ask him how he feels about this often-discussed release, fourteen years later. “I still think it makes a strong harsh sound statement in terms of my lifelong obsession with sharks,” he modestly concludes.

Cover of *The Voyage Of The Decima MAS* (Source: Discogs)

Since Thousands, McKinlay has explored nautical themes in other releases. One such release was The Voyage Of The Decima MAS, a 2009 CD released on Troniks that references an Italian flotilla from the 1940s, active during the Fascist regime. On this album McKinlay combines noise with recordings of him snorkeling. To capture this audio, he used a custom contact mic designed to be used underwater, which was built for him by Traumatone, a.k.a. Ryan Bloomer. “The mic had a heavy-duty plastic and resin enclosure so I could rub it against rock, coral, the deep underwater cliffs where I snorkeled for the recording. The mic was still also sensitive enough to pick up the surface splashing when I came up for air.”

McKinlay snorkeling while wearing his vintage italian full face mask — and contact mic. (Source: Sam McKinlay).

The noise artist Crank Sturgeon later designed a similar contact mic for McKinlay to use during live shows, which he adapted to simulate the Decima MAS experience. At live shows in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Dayton, he filled a large water basin and submerged the upper half of his body underwater while wearing a vintage Italian full-face diving mask. He put some rocks in the bottom of the basin and scraped the contact mic around among the rough surfaces to generate the performance’s audio.

Images from McKinlay’s first live performance with the basin, at the Western Front in Vancouver, BC. (Source: Sam McKinlay)

The nautical story continued in 2017, when McKinlay released a seven-inch record called Journey Of The K-Verband (Throat Lure) — an audio document with an even more unusual premise. For this record, he rigged another Traumatone contact mic to a fishing lure, running its cable along the fishing line. “I have lots of experience fishing in the Pender Harbour area for lingcod, rock cod and dogfish, so I knew that it was inevitable one would take the lure in their mouth and catch some sort of sounds.”

His first catch was a rock cod, and he was overjoyed to discover that the microphone had caught it all: both the underwater “take” sounds and the sound of the ocean’s surface splashing as the fish was pulled up onto the deck. “I knew that when a large lingcod finally took the lure and mic I’d get even more aggressive sounds,” he says. “The plan went perfectly — large Lingcod, lines of underwater thrashing sounds, the surface splashing, and the eventual flopping on the deck before release. The mic held up beautifully.”

Original color photo of the mic being pulled out one of the lingcod’s mouths as it surfaced. (Source: Sam McKinlay)

Those sounds — the sounds of the ocean resonating from the inside of a fish’s mouth — made it onto the eventual record, mixed in with McKinlay’s noise.

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Thanks to Sam McKinlay for the interview, and for sharing his photos. McKinlay’s website is bakurita.blogspot.com. His latest release is a split C30 between The Rita and fellow noise artist Bacillus, on McKinlay’s own Lake Shark HN label.

The Beige Channel ‎- The Nail House Of Yang Wu (Stasisfield, 2011)

“The hum of a refrigerator, the whirring of a ceiling fan, the clicking sounds of a cat eating dry food from a metal bowl, or acorns falling from a tree.”

In 2011, a curious digital release popped up on the digital archives of Stasisfield, an online sound art label run by John Kannenberg, who now runs the Museum of Portable Sound — a mobile “museum of sounds” that are contained in digital form on his cellphone. (You can visit the museum by emailing him and and arranging to meet somewhere in London). Though Stasisfield has since been shut down — and all its digital releases lost to the annals of time — it was, at the time, a highly-regarded label, considered by some the gold standard of avant-garde net labels.

The interesting release in question was entitled The Nail House of Yang Wu, and was advertised as being “sourced from a field recording of the artist pulling up carpet tacks.” It was by The Beige Channel, the project of Michael Farley, a sound artist from a hamlet outside Albany, New York, called Delmar. Besides his audio work, Farley has worked full-time as a librarian for the past 37 years.

The cover of *The Nail House of Yang Wu*. (Source: Stasisfield website via archive.org.)

In touch with me via email, Farley tells me he hasn’t revisited this piece for years. “I listened to it tonight for the first time in nine years, since I never listen to anything again once it’s been released, because by that time I’m already well into my next project. But it was pretty obvious to me what I was getting at.

“I actually started it in July of 2008. It was a summer weekend, and I was involved in a particularly tedious task one Sunday afternoon — removing old shag wall-to-wall carpeting from the master bedroom of our house. The house was built in 1966. Apparently, the custom in those days was to put in beautiful hardwood floors, and then completely cover them in hideous shag carpeting, in this case they had chosen a vomit-y pink orange carpet. The upside was, when I was finished, we suddenly had pristine hardwood floors in our bedroom, virtually untouched since it was built! But it was a lot of work, pulling up the carpet, ripping it apart by hand, and pulling out all the nails with pliers.”

Farley explains that one of his philosophies as a sound artist is to find beauty in “ordinary” sounds that are often taken for granted. It’s an idea he described in a brief 2007 interview for the Some Assembly Required blog:

I like to deal with disenfranchised sounds, that is, sounds never meant or expected to accumulate significance with repetition or diffusion. By recontextualizing fragments of recuperated audio, I hope to reveal unexpected meanings inherent to the originals. I believe the listener makes the music into art, not the composer. My intention is to present discoveries for individual contemplation, not to express my feelings, nor to symbolically represent ideas that would be better voiced with words.
Michael Farley, interview with Some Assembly Required

“As I was making all this ugly, mundane racket, pulling up nails and dropping tools, I noticed the noise I was making in the room was fairly consistent, with a degree of slight variation, but always the same kind of texture of incidence. I quickly got my Minidisc recorder, and let it record this sound world, thinking I would listen to it later to see if there was anything of interest there.”

The mini-disc recorder used to record the source audio for *The House of Yang Wu*. Image supplied by Michael Farley (The Beige Channel).

“Ordinary sound out of context often presents a fascinating aural document, and it was the case in this instance. The recording came out well (Minidisc recorders were truly an incredible invention) and I was really excited by the potential of using the sounds for a composition.”

I ask Farley to tell me more about his idea of “disenfranchised sounds,” and he is quick to point out that he is not the only sound artist to think this way. He cites the phonography movement, and the scene surrounding the phonography.org collective in the early 2000s, as embracing the same concept.

In order to contextualize the idea, he separates sounds into three categories. There are sounds that most people find pleasant. “Birdsong, babbling brooks, wind through leaves,” he provides as examples. And then there is noise, a judgmental term. “Noise is thought to be an annoying nuisance, chaotic, an interference, unnecessary, and barely tolerable.” Apart from those extremes, he identifies a third category of sound — the everyday sound that we take for granted, that exists on the fringe of consciousness. “It’s not confrontational enough to demand attention, or pretty enough for anyone to make an effort to enjoy. It’s just kind of ‘there’ in the background, easy to ignore, if it’s even noticed at all. Those are the disenfranchised sounds I found I was attracted to, like the hum of a refrigerator, the whirring of a ceiling fan, the clicking sounds of a cat eating dry food from a metal bowl, or acorns falling from a tree. I call them disenfranchised because they’re too mundane to be considered worthwhile, and not aggressive enough to demand attention.” He points to other recordings he has done in this vein, including compositions that incorporate the sound of acorns falling, or the audio from a tennis match.

The EP’s title, The Nail House of Yang Wu, is a reference to the Chinese phenomenon of “nail houses.” These are buildings whose owners refuse to move when property developers are razing an area. Yang Wu, one famous example, was someone who refused the money of a developer for many years, even after all his neighbours had sold their properties. As a result, Wu’s entire neighbourhood was demolished, leaving just his house alone on a mound of dirt, surrounded by a trench. Even the electricity and plumbing were disconnected.

Yang Wu’s nail house, as pictured in the EP’s liner notes. *(Source: Stasisfield website* via archive.org.)

“Between the beginning of recording, and its release on Stasisfield, I had been to China a second time. China was certainly on my mind a lot in those years, and I think it was natural to relate my creative work to the intriguing and mystifying culture of China. Somehow I found nails referenced in a news story from China about the ‘nail house, the house that Yang Wu and his family refused to leave, even as developers dug deep trenches around it, leaving it stranded almost in mid-air. I was so impressed with the tenacity, confidence, and defiance demonstrated by these homeowners against the greed of corporate business, that I was inspired to dedicate this EP to their cause.”

To listen to this recording is a treat. You can check it out yourself; though the Stasisfield website is long-gone, the old site — and zip file — are miraculously still alive here thanks to archive.org!

Over email, Farley outlines the record for me, providing insight into the largely abstract sounds. “Part One” showcases the carpet sound in largely unprocessed form. “The first half of ‘Part One’ is basically the exposition,” Farley says. “About halfway, some of the sound is buffered and filtered, resulting in an echoing drone.” Thereafter, the source recordings are subjected to digital processing to alter the sound.

“Part Two” uses a processed loop, then adds some guitar and synthesizer to lush effect. “In ‘Part Three’ the original sound is now fragmented and manipulated to resonate at inherent frequencies using granular synthesis. I probably used the Pluggo plugins from Cycling ’74.”

“The ultimate transformation” is how Farley describes “Part Four,” the final piece. “From the drudgery of weekend chores comes this thing, which is almost ‘music.'” Farley points out a review on Disquiet.com, which likens the piece to the minimal techno put out on Chain Reaction. It’s a very apt comparison. “The only thing missing is the kick drum,” Farley says.

Farley wraps up by updating me on what has happened since The Nail House came out. “After The Nail House of Yang Wu came out in 2011, I did one more album, Evening In Paris, in 2012, a few videos, and a few live performances under the name The Beige Channel. After that, I completely switched gears and abandoned field recording and sound art. I had already begun pursuing a shoegaze/indie pop/dream pop project called Caramel Snow at the end of 2009. Since then, on the average, I’ve written and recorded one new song a month. Even now, I’m working on about three or four new songs at various stages of completion. I spent most of my life just trying to write a convincing rock & roll pop song and I could never figure out how to do it. Once I learned how, it was like I flipped a switch, and I can’t turn it off!”

—

Thanks to Michael Farley for the interview.

Brent Gutzeit / Bill Groot ‎– Deselm CD-R (BOXmedia, 2003)

“I guess it takes a special person to be excited about a CD of tractor sounds.”

Deselm, Illinois is a place. When you look it up on Google Maps, this is what you get:

The Wikipedia article for Deselm is three sentences long. It will tell you that Deselm is an unincorporated community in Illinois’s Kankakee County, that it was home to a post office from 1867 to 1902, and that it was named after its first postmaster, John B. Deselm.

Deselm is also the name of a peculiar CD-R by Brent Gutzeit and Bill Groot, two woodworkers who ran the BOXmedia record label out of their woodshop, Claremont Woodworking. In touch with me via email, Gutzeit tells me about the origins of this unique release. “Groot was the owner and I was the only employee. We ran BOXmedia on the side — out of the same office. BOXmedia was releasing a lot of CDrs at the time and I was also touring and playing a lot of shows at the time.”

Deselm is named so because it collects three recordings made at a place near Deselm called Burn’s Woods, which are so obscure they cannot be found on Google Maps. “It was in the middle of nowhere,” Gutzeit says. “I remember driving down many two-lane roads through endless corn fields.” Groot and Gutzeit were there to attend the annual Antique Tractor and Threshing Reunion, hosted by the Will County Threshermen’s Association. (That event has since been moved, and 2020’s rendition — the 58th! — was cancelled due to COVID.)

Groot and Gutzeit attended the Reunion in 2000 and 2002, making recordings of some of the engines. “Bill and I were both interested in field recordings. And we were both interested in machine sounds and noise. We had recorded a bunch of ‘sessions’ in the woodshop using the tools and large machinery as sound sources — some real Luigi Russolo kind of stuff,” he laughs. “Bill came across an ad in a trades magazine for the tractor fair and we decided to go and record it. Both of us being woodworkers, we enjoyed a trip into the past of motors, engines, tools and large machinery. To us it just sounded like a fun and interesting trip. We packed up the recording gear and headed downstate to Deselm.”

Gutzeit remembers the reunion. “There was a small engines section that was similar to an outdoor flea market but just had different people set up in booths running different motors. So as you walked through it was a weird sound collage of motors.

“Then there was a parade showing off all the old antique tractors. And the most interesting thing for Bill and I, being woodworkers, was the saw mill. It was incredible. Imagine a full-sized steam engine train, but without the wheels and without the cab. Now this giant steam engine has a huge pulley wheel on the side that is connected via 100 ft belt to a 10 ft saw blade. The saw blade is set up vertical and is ripping through 4 ft wide whole trees like butter. The steam engine is wailing like a train powering up a steep hill. Pretty massive. Pretty impressive. Oh, and the big thing for everyone was the noon whistle blow where all the tractors blew their steam whistles. I have to say it was way more interesting than we had expected. We ended going back a few years later to record more.”

Tractors were familiar to Gutzeit. “I grew up in a little town east of Flint, Michigan called Davison. And we weren’t even in Davison, we were in Richfield Township. The road we lived on was dirt until I was eight. We were surrounded by corn fields. So tractors were a normal everyday sight for me growing up.”

The CD collects two tracks by Groot and one by Gutzeit. “Bill and I both had different recorders and recorded our own sources,” Gutzeit says. “I basically did a more straight forward collage mix. Bill decided to do a more ‘DJ style’ mix where he took a lot of smaller samples and looped them.

When they made the recordings, they already had in mind a release on their label. “It was going to be in the fourth BOXmedia CD-R series (Hence the catalog code BOXCDR403), which was all field recordings.” Others that series include Todd Carter (collecting sounds from Chicago), Michael Hartman (sounds from Japan), Yannick Dauby (sounds from India) and a compilation called Vacation for Hourly Employees, which features sounds from all over the world.

When I ask Gutzeit what the response was like from listeners, he tells me that he sold very few copies, and that he wasn’t aware of anyone writing a review of Deselm. “The second year we went back (to the tractor reunion) we had burned off a stack of CD-Rs to hand out to people from the previous year. Most people were confused but some were really excited about it. I don’t know — I guess it takes a special person to be excited about a CD of tractor sounds,” he laughs.

Yet today, Gutzeit carries only fond memories of this unique release. “I thought it was wonderful. I’d recommend it to anybody – farmer or not.”

—

Thanks to Brent Gutzeit for this interview. He currently lives in Milwaukee and recently put out a split album with Mike Shiflet, entitled Welcome to Cleveland. Via his JMY label, he just put out a massive 106-track entitled Building a Better Future, whose proceeds all go to Black Lives Matter, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Greater Chicago Food Depository.