Keni
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
occasionally subtle
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Phantogram Three
One Nice Bug Per Day
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Kiana Khansmith
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Cosimo Galluzzi
Color Me Curious
The Bowery Presents
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if i look back, i am lost
Noah Kahan
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@danielclay-blog-blog
Hippie Priest
I'm excited to be debuting a new multichannel sound installation in this show, opening next Friday, December 5th. If you're in Bushwick next weekend stop by the Honey Ramka Gallery and check out the show. Lots of very talented artists in this exhibit. Curated by Nikita Vishnevskiy.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Here’s an excerpt from a book that has temporarily ruined fiction for me – or rather, ruined me for fiction – sci-fi or otherwise; it will be a while before the spell of The Dispossessed wears off and I can devote attention to any other writing. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
"Long after Takver had fallen asleep that night Shevek lay awake, his hands under his head, looking into darkness, hearing silence. He thought of his long trip out of the Dust, remembering the levels and mirages of the desert, the train driver with the bald, brown head and candid eyes, who had said that one must work with time and not against it. Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years. In its frustration he had learned its strength. No social or ethical imperative equaled it. Not even hunger could repress it. The less he had, the more absolute became his need to be. He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his “cellular function,” the analogic term for the individual’s individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo’s Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind. All this Shevek had thought out, in these terms, for his conscience was a completely Odonian one. He was therefore certain, by now, that his radical and unqualified will to create was, in Odonian terms, its own justification. His sense of primary responsibility towards his work did not cut him off from his fellows, from his society, as he had thought. It engaged him with them absolutely. He also felt that a man who had this sense of responsibility about one thing was obliged to carry it through in all things. It was a mistake to see himself as its vehicle and nothing else, to sacrifice any other obligation to it. That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration. So his mutual commitment with Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years’ separation. They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment. For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takver’s sleep, it was joy they were both after—the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home. Takver sighed softly in her sleep, as if agreeing with him, and turned over, pursuing some quiet dream. Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”
Friday Night Road Work
Recorded and edited Friday, September 26, 2014 in Decatur, GA.
Salt Marsh, Folly Beach, South Carolina
A binaural recording of morning in the salt marsh on the Folly Beach peninsula. Bivalves of some kind, I think, popping in the pluff mud (oysters? clams? mussels?) and marsh birds calling.
South Congress Avenue Bridge Bat Colony, Austin TX
The Congress Avenue bridge spans the Colorado River in the center of Austin and is home to a colony of roughly 1.5 million bats, making it the world’s largest urban bat colony. Crowds gather at sunset on the bridge and on the riverbank below to witness the colony setting out on its nightly search of food – the bats eat an estimated ten to twenty thousand pounds of insects on any given night. It takes about an hour for all the bats to vacate their roost in the hollow of one of the bridge abutments and it happens in one seemingly-endless plume of fluttering and squeaking. An impressive sight, to say the least, and an impressive sound.
The thing that struck me the most about the sound was the gap between the frequency range occupied by human vocalizations and the range occupied by the audible sounds produced by the bats (which is to say nothing of the ultrasonic sounds they emit that we can't hear at all without specialized equipment); Two populations, carrying on loudly about themselves and the world in parallel but discrete spectra.
With this sublime scenario in mind I took the recordings I made at the bridge and did some extreme post-processing in order to better hear what's going on in the humanly-audible range of the bats’ sonic territory as they set out for an evening on the town.
Tunnel Hill
The town of Tunnel Hill, Georgia is home to a defunct Civil War-era Western & Atlantic train tunnel that passes through Chatoogeta Mountain. For five dollars you can walk through the tunnel, nearly 1500 ft long, and spend as much time as you like inside.
As I was nearing the center of the tunnel I began to hear and feel the familiar rumble of an approaching train; The train I was hearing was coming down an adjacent, live freight track operated by CSX. I happened to be recording binaural audio at the time and captured the sound of the freight train passing, with the tunnel acting as resonator and filter.
The magic begins around 1:20. Binaural recordings tend to lose their 3D quality when played over stereo speakers but if you have some speakers with decent bass, and especially if you have a subwoofer, I recommend checking out the rumble between 1:40-2:05 through your stereo. For the full binaural experience use your best headphones.
Intonarumori
Sometimes in Knoxville, Tennessee you find an Italian Futurist instrument.
Tiananmen Square April, 23 2014
While working in Asia this spring recording sound for a film project, jet lag resulted in many wakeful early mornings which I took as opportunities to explore on foot and make binaural recordings of the cities we visited. This very short montage is composed of a couple binaural recordings I made in Beijing the first morning of the trip, April 23, 2014. I left the hotel around 6:00AM and one of the first things I found was a subway station. Looking at the map of the transit system I realized we were staying only about one mile from Tiananmen Square. You will hear the subway train, the multi-lane thoroughfare bordering the eastern side of the square, a security check point and finally the square, filled with Chinese tour groups, tour guides with megaphones, birds, people hawking souvenirs and plenty of wind, which I did my best to avoid or edit out.
Binaural recordings are best experienced via headphones and will lose much of their depth and realism when heard over standard stereo speaker systems.
Frogs, in the pond at Candler Park Golf Course, shamelessly proclaiming their desire to have sex with other frogs.
Megan discovered this nice drone coming from a large electrical cable box on the side of Dekalb Avenue a few nights ago. Last night we went back with an audio recorder . . .
31 Places Revisited
In October 2003 I collaborated with my friend, composer Brian Parks, on a series of consecutive nightly public performances in the city of Atlanta; one performance every night of the month, and each in a different place. The series was titled, appropriately, 31 Places.
The majority of the performances happened out of doors, in city parks, in parking lots, on loading docks, on bridges, on the sides of major roadways, in or on abandoned structures, on the escalator of a subway station, in the bed of a moving pickup truck, and in other such marginal public spaces. The performances were site specific, and the geographical and physical particulars of each location were integral to and often directly responsible for the content and form.
While we often played our instruments – harpsichord and guitar – in standard fashion, we frequently devised techniques to expand the sonic palette of the instruments. The majority of the performances were musical and consisted of improvised material, but some were decidedly non-musical, being composed instead of prepared or spontaneous dialogue. Others were pseudo-musical; we used our instruments to create sonic representations of our surroundings. We imposed temporal constraints upon some pieces, for instance, predetermining the length or specific rhythmic patterns.
Documentation was part of our nightly process, though our approach to documentation was as spontaneous and discursive as the rest of the series. We primarily created audio recordings using the Sony MiniDisc format and a small, consumer-grade stereo microphone. Very little attention was given to the placement and operation of the audio gear- it sometimes sat on top of the harpsichord or guitar case, on nearby objects or structures, or on the ground in front of us. As a result, the range in recording quality from night to night is commensurate with the other salient elements of the series, which is to say, all over the map. Some nights were additionally documented with handheld digital video cameras, handheld audio cassette recorders and Polaroid photographs. As best I can tell from the surviving archive two nights were not documented at all.
The extant documentation has been graciously stored for the better part of ten years by our good friend, the artist, curator and archivist Andy Ditzler. Reviewing this material now, ten years later, I see a kind of zealotry in our choices, a devotion to a handful of themes and personal idols of the time: a pseudo-Cage-ian rejection of the distinction between musical and non-musical sounds; enthusiasm for the site-specific serialism of mid-20th-century conceptual art such as that of Fluxus, John Baldessari, Vito Acconci and others; an aesthetic crush on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and the way he portrayed industrial landscapes- to name a few.
But I think more so than any aesthetic influences we were motivated by a healthy streak of contrarianism, feeling discontent with standard musical and artistic outlets, and deeply ambivalent and mistrustful of most of the art and music culture around us. It’s evident to me how seriously we took ourselves and what we were doing, and how much we wanted others to take us seriously. In hindsight that attitude seems very naive, but I also find it endearing. I respect what we did, messy and selfish as it was.
I’ve spent the last month or so combing through the material and making digital copies of what I think are some of the best examples, or at least my favorite examples, of what 31 Places sounded and looked like. Throughout the month of October 2013 I’ll post a daily selection from the corresponding performance in October 2003, on a blog I’ve dedicated to the project. I feel it is important to note that although we have corresponded about it, Brian Parks is not involved in this selecting and re-presenting, and that essentially I’m doing this on my own to satisfy my fondness and nostalgia for the project. I look forward to sharing it.
Anyone know what kind of bird this is?
Take a listen to the winning entries (including mine) in the Hiss and a Roar sound design field recording competition. The link goes to the Apple category but you can find the other categories on the blog as well. There were some very unique sounds captured by people in lots of surprising ways. Very impressive overall.
A montage of my field recording of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, June 22, 2013. This is a binaural recording: it's best experienced through your favorite pair of headphones or earbuds.
Tweet
I changed my Twitter username - the old account (@daniel_clay), which I hardly ever used, has been shut down. Now you can receive virtually no tweets whatsoever from @danielclaymusic. That is all. Thank you.
#shitunclesamsays
