Jeph Jerman, Aram Yardumian — Listen — Jeph Jerman in Conversation With Aram Yardumian (Errant Bodies Press)
The new Errant Bodies Press publication, Listen — Jeph Jerman in Conversation With Aram Yardumian, aims at excavating the enigmatic work of American experimental musician Jeph Jerman. As an anthropologist, Aram Yarduminian would seem particularly well-suited to unearthing the 40-year history of Jerman's work and his thinking behind it, interviewing Jerman on everything from his early sound experiments to his lesser-known visual work. Extensive photo documentation of Jeph in concert with various projects or solo, his room installations, self-made sound objects and work with text add a welcome visual context to the interviews.
Born in 1959 while his father was stationed on a U.S. Air Force base in Guam, Jerman moved around a lot as a child and learned drums early on. After leaving home, he spent time living in various towns around The Four Corner states, all the while playing guitar, bass or drums in various outfits as diverse as reggae groups, cover bands, freak-out noise projects and free-improvising ensembles. Parallel to all this, Jerman delved into his own experiments with concrete sound, starting in 1981 with his Early Recordings that included, among other things, a recording of a swamp cooler and a fast food stand outside of Albuquerque.
Work of this sort would prove to be more of what Jerman would turn his focus to as the 1980's wore on. Not just environmental recordings themselves, but altering and processing these with reel-to-reel machines, samplers, four-track cassette recorders and various electronic treatments found their audience in the home taping and electronic music scenes, with Jerman releasing scores of cassettes through the 1980's and coming into contact with artists like John Hudak, Eric Lunde, G.X. Jupitter-Larsen and Dan Burke.
Much of the sound sources for Jerman's work involved detritus he'd find while out exploring in the field near places where he was living at the time. Sometimes this junk would be recorded as is, interacting with the natural environment, and other times Jerman would play the refuse he came across, trying to draw out the acoustical qualities of the most mundane, discarded objects. Jerman also spent much time recording the natural sound environments while he searched for these objects. With access to various radio stations where Jerman was working as a presenter in the early 1980s, he was able to use their studio facilities to make his first experiments composing with these different sounds, working with them as a kind of malleable concrete material.
With time Jerman became, in his words, more interested in the sounds themselves, than in trying to figure out what they 'mean' or how they fit in to some larger context. And this is perhaps where the interviews become most interesting, as Aram Yardumian probes into the thinking behind Jerman's approach to listening. It becomes apparent at some point in the course of the talks that Jerman himself cannot put a finger on what his approach is other than, The experience is essential. In a nutshell this distills Jerman's practice down to its very essence and what he's trying to bring to the listener —an awareness of their own focus (or lack thereof) through Jerman's use of sound as a point of departure towards a realm where all that matters is a way into the present moment, of being one with a particular sound.
In the end, aside from a brief rundown of Jerman's history and evolution as an artist, Listen — Jeph Jerman in Conversation With Aram Yardumian might not really bring the reader that much closer to understanding Jerman's work, which seems to be too elusive for any kind of formal anaylsis. It's kind of like saying, explain the wind, what does the sound of the running stream mean? But what does arise throughout the book is a fascinating look in to what it means to listen. How do we listen? Why do we listen? What is listening about? How can we approach the space of listening?
For Jerman, all these questions would most likely seem completely superfluous to the very act of listening itself, which should need no explanation. Anyone can pursue this, it's just a matter of focusing on the sounds around us. Jerman's insights throughout the book explain why this form of pure listening is today more important than ever, bombarded as we are with near-constant input from our phones and computers, a perpetual intrusion into a private space which has now somehow become completely public.
Listen — Jeph Jerman in Conversation With Aram Yardumian will prove useful as an introduction to Jerman's work. But like the Sonoran Desert — in Spanish, the sounding desert — not far from where Jerman now lives, we will need to go out and find our own sounds to truly understand what it means to listen.
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