Artist Spotlight: Zach Barr
Photo courtesy of Zach Barr.
Zach Barr is a designer that focuses on music and space. He does a bit of everything else too, but his main interests lie in that.
During The Feast Conference 2013 he created the freight elevator music and what was played as speakers entered and exited the stage. After the conference we caught up with him to learn a little more about what went into making it.
The Feast: You have a lot of different things on your website—poems, interior design, photography, music —you seem to be a jack of all trades…
Zach: I find them all to be interesting and all to be mutual. One idea of one thing feeds into another. They all inform one another.
The Feast: What’s your favorite song or piece you've created to date?
Zach: I had a great time this past April working on an installation as a member of the Brooklyn-based design collective Salty Labs. A live string quartet played Beethoven's Op. 59, No. 1 in an abandoned house in Providence, RI. Using special microphones that slip down into the instruments (in order to isolate the sound of each instrument from that of the others), we sent the sound of the instruments into separate rooms of the house. Audience members, instead of staying seated to watch and listen to the performance, were invited to move around the house and listen from a variety of angles...
Pulling the sounds of the instruments apart across space like this allowed these musical conversations to really come to life. A number of audience members commented that it was as if the house had been singing the music. The experience changed from something that would have otherwise been front-loaded and flat, like looking at a picture on the wall, to something really immersive and physical.
The Feast: What is your creative process like?
Zach: It definitely involves a lot of drawing and writing. I like to look to the physical world to find musical ideas and to the musical world to find ideas about design. I might see something like a gear turning in a machine, and it will spur some idea about how two instruments could work together in a piece of music. I find it helpful to not only write about these observations and ideas, but to draw them as well. Drawing is an incredibly powerful tool and often much more efficient than using words.
Collecting is also a big part of the process. I've been working on building a library of sounds for a number of years. Recently I've been doing the same with photographs, videos, and words. These days we're lucky to have very high quality archival tools -- field recorders, cameras, etc -- that are small, portable, and relatively inexpensive. This makes it easy to bring a field recorder along to capture the sound of any object or environment I might encounter on the day-to-day, which is great because I never know when I might find a great sound in a particular cabinet door or in a person dragging a trash bin across the sidewalk in the early morning.
I bring these recordings home and chop them up in the computer, organizing the bits into folders with labels like 'Pop,' 'Scratch,' 'Swish,' and 'Shuffle.' I pull from this library of raw sound to make percussive instruments or build long textures of sound that can accompany other instruments. It's nice to be able to use these sounds like globs of paint, each with its own color and texture and way of blending with other colors. As many musicians like to sample the music of other artists, I really enjoy sampling the music of materials and the physical world,
The Feast: What goes into making music that people wouldn’t normally think about? Do you get your own songs stuck in your head?
Zach: Totally. For the thesis project I was recording sounds of everyday life at home. I was cleaning the top of the stove and recorded that. The rhythms that came out of that act of simply scrubbing the stove were incredible; it was like really great drum beats, like something in hip hop, but you don’t hear that normally because they’re not repeated. It was super catchy.
The Feast: What do you enjoy most about what you do?
Zach: A lot of times I think about taking something I don’t like and making it into something I do like. You think you know yourself, but you can be surprised. I take things that you wouldn’t normally put together. That constant discovering of what you can do with limited means is always surprising. It’s always thought provoking.
The Feast: What do enjoy least about what you do?
Zach: That’s a good question. I guess there are certain times when you have to sit at the computer for long time and be alone. So it’s hard to have friends over while you’re trying to make music.
__
When Zach isn't out and about recording eveyday sounds he's designing at the design and construction firm Hecho Inc. in Brooklyn. See more of his work at his site ztbarr.com.
Photo courtesy of Zach Barr.
