Music for Glassblower’s Studio and Broken Toy Piano dissolves the idea of the field recording until it is almost nothing. Fields, Richard Kamerman seems to suggest, cannot be captured or reproduced without adding something to their capture and reproduction. Worse still (or maybe better still), fields and recordings can lie and deceive and create their own environments. Kamerman has been recording and releasing music since at least 2006, if not under his given name, then as Frederick Butler, Trace Being, or Extreme Light Infrastructure. He's collaborated with Anne Guthrie and Billy Gomberg in Delicate Sen, with Reed Evan Rosenberg in Tandem Electronics, and with Steve Flato and Corey Larkin in Fyxzis. He's also the person behind Copy For Your Records, which has released music by Manfred Werder, Jason Kahn, Howard Stelzer, Keroaän (that's Ian M. Fraser with Reed Evan Rosenberg), and, most recently, The New York Review of Cocksucking, Kamerman's collaboration with Brooklyn-based saxophonist and improviser Michael Foster. His approach to music and sound is all-inclusive, as open to noise and unintended consequences as it is to location, habitat, and biography, all of which make an appearance in his list for this week as well.
1. Door does impression of Miles Davis
2. Max Neuhaus – Times Square
Since 1977 (with the exception of one lost decade from '92 to '02 when it wasn't running here), this Neuhaus installation has been producing these harmonic bell-like tones from below a subway grate on a pedestrian island in the middle of Times Square almost continuously. It's a strange moment of peace in the middle of all of the midtown chaos, but if you don't know it's there you might easily walk across it without a second's thought. As fleeting as it is beautiful if you don't stop to listen. I hate passing through Times Square most of the time but since I work only about five blocks from this piece, I sometimes like to visit it late at night to clear my head.
3. Greg Kelley – Live in Ghent, Belgium 5/2007
4. Tamio Shiraishi & Sean Meehan – Summer Concert 2013
Sean and Tamio used to do these annual outdoor sets. Hopefully it's something they'll pick up again. They'd pick an obscure location with interesting acoustics that played into their unique approaches to their instruments. And with a certain limited notice, they'd set up to play. After the sets, I remember Sean cutting up a watermelon to share among the crowd. My friend Barney posted this footage of their 2013 show which took place in the Willets Point neighborhood in Queens right behind Citi Field where the Mets play. Known as "The Iron Triangle" for all the auto-repair junk shops. Back then it didn't even have paved roads, sidewalks, or sewers. It's all been cleaned up now. Everything's been demolished and they're busy building up a new housing development. Part of it seems to have already become part of the ballpark's parking lot.
5. M.I.A. – “Borders”
To be completely honest, I've been listening to nothing but M.I.A.'s new album AIM since it came out a couple weeks ago. So. Here's the opening track from the current soundtrack of my life.
6. Vagina Dentata Organ – Un Chien Catalan (”Chant Septième”)
Jordi Valls and his Vagina Dentata Organ project were definitely my introduction to the concept of "antimusic"—maybe even (or especially) before I'd heard his work. When it was all abstract concept to me. This was a guy who had released records consisting of the (supposed) last moments of everyone's lives at Jonestown or a recording made in the middle of some annual festival at a small Spanish village where people violently beat thousands of drums nonstop for two days. Or records of just a growling dog. Or this one which was nothing but a howling Harley Davidson motorcycle. For Valls it was all about some kind of metaphysical brutal eroticism. And I could get behind that.
7. Damion Romero – Idle
Nine years after a the above VDO album, Damion Romero decided to drop a little 3" CD-R of a car enginge recording. What I think makes this distinct though, and why it meant something very different to me when I stumbled on it, was that this time it clearly is about music. Not some erotic death drive or even engine roar as industrial noise. The deliberate long single take makes you focus on the fluctuating rhythmic patterns of the 1968 Plymouth Road Runner idling in the driveway. And even without layers of phasing patterns like a Steve Reich tape piece, it's totally hypnotic.
8. Lizzo – “Phone”
Before the current musical myopia that consists of listening to M.I.A. all the time, it was Lizzo and her album Big GRRRL Small World. But this new video just dropped more recently, and it reminded me I actually got to see her do this song live at a show at the Mercury Lounge a few months back. Just play it through and thank me later.
9. The Gerogerigegege – “1991年3月2日 川崎クラブチッタ”
Other people probably got into Gero for the short-track harsh guitar/drums/screaming grind-noise of most of the catalog. Seven-inches like Yellow Trash Bazuka. Five-second freakouts at a time. Then do it again. But I fell in love with the confusing ones. Like The Sexual Behavior in the Human Male EP where the titular centerpiece track is total dad rock overlaid with narration about Kinsey's research about male sexuality (followed by a recording of a prank call with Juntaro jerking off on the phone). Or the one this cut comes from: Live Greatest Hits. This track is almost nothing but one goofy drum machine preset speeding up or slowing down and a lot of orgasmic moaning that sometimes forms words I don't understand for 17 minutes followed by some equally cheesy Japanese pop song that blasts on and turns into a singalong. Or at least I assume it's probably actually a live set since there's audience cheering in the background. But they cut out a couple times too, so I don't even know that for sure.
10. Gilius van Bergeijk – Sonate (1970)
I first discovered this piece on a compilation disc called International Live Electronic Music Incorporated released by the label X-OR. So, although the Youtube video doesn't have as much info, I can tell you it's a recording from June 6, 1970, at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague featuring the composer Gilius van Bergeijk on Cor Angalis, Dick Raaijmakers on electronics, and Annelies Dieudonné on piano. I wish I could see how the score is written out. It's a really wacky piece. In three distinct movements. All honking and thumping and banging and scraping around. Then suddenly piano-led, quite traditional and, frankly, quite pretty. Until someone starts breaking things again or setting off firecrackers or something. And it sounds like a door has been opened to let in the hubbub of a crowd outside the concert hall. There's even mid-movement applause from the distance while they play. And I wonder whether all of these crowd sounds are really coming from nearby or if they are triggered samples as part of the "electronics" in the work (noticing themes in my list yet?). Then the third movement kicks off like a wind tunnel and we're off again into a hybrid world of lovely piano arpeggios and angry honking reeds that sound like they're being run through the dirtiest ring modulator.
I think the first time I heard this one, I had to listen to the whole thing all over again right away. And it's a 50 minute investment just to listen once. Like I knew I found something special but I hadn't been able to process it. It just overwhelmed my system. Needed to try again and understand why. But from the opening orchestral tune up into these rolling cinematic looping patterns (that my boyfriend referred to as my Philip Glass alarm clock when it woke us up in my stereo one morning) that's met with screaming wailing female vocals and the sounds of physical violence—objects being thrown around, something is slammed, a male voice declares, "pass the microphone!"—that just keeps getting increasingly ragged until its abrupt end. To the silence that follows (or near silence, as there's still someone shuffling around, breathing occasionally, in the dark) to the extended mysteries of repetitive off-sync looping of what sound like mostly human body noises and like comedy violence sound effects to the smashed piano chords that lead the listener to the album's final shotgun blasts. Younger me wanted to form a narrative; imagine a story being told. But I don't think there is any "understanding" this one. There's just letting it drag you through all the feels.
12. Vince Staples – “Lift Me Up”
I came to Vince Staples's Summertime '06 a little later than other people I think. Like I guess he'd been getting attention as a friend of Earl Sweatshirt's before this first album came out? So there was buzz and excitement. But I missed his prior mixtapes and the hubbub. So when this suddenly hit me, it hit me hard. This whole album is incredibly bleak. The lyrical content and its deadpan delivery as much as the beats. This is not a record that fills anyone with hope. It is a record that connects with your most repressed pain. And for that, I love it so much more.
Richard Kamerman — Music for Glassblower’s Studio and Broken Toy Piano (Organized Music from Thessaloniki)
L-R: Richard Kamerman, Steve Flato
<a href="http://thesorg.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-glassblowers-studio-and-broken-toy-piano">Music for glassblower's studio and broken toy piano by Richard Kamerman</a>
Richard Kamerman’s Music for Glassblower’s Studio and Broken Toy Piano pretends to be a composition for two unlikely and opposed instruments: one a space where tools for the production of glass are housed and the other a plaything for children: so, a space where adults labor and a busted product on which kids amuse themselves. Musically, it resists shape and purpose, its foundation resting on a contradiction.
If taken at face value, field recordings represent a part of the world in isolation. They are always raw and fragmentary, documentaries without narratives or images, and no amount of expensive equipment can remedy that limitation. They can be exciting or relaxing but only by accident. If they communicate intent or feeling, they do so as a byproduct of the recording process. The events they portray are dead, biopsied cells kept suspended in a tube, not living phenomena borrowed from the flow of time. Conventional wisdom dictates that everything about them depends on a material object either not present in the mix or transparent to it: the world in front of the microphone and the microphone itself.
This is an oversimplification, and not just because there is something behind the microphone too. Illusion, interpretation and creation accompany every field recording and should be more synonymous with them. The employment of such sounds in music magnifies those features in superficial and vital ways. For instance, how many people listening to Kamerman’s work would know what kind of sounds are emitted in a glassblower’s studio? How many could guess which parts of the studio he would choose to record? Digging into the music itself, could they confirm that the disembodied voices on side A came from the studio? Or did Kamerman amplify them in order to represent something about the place that the place could not communicate alone?
Even without a title like “For Any/One, Thing,” side A would be ambiguous. There are strong intimations of steam, heat and glass in the percussive and atmospheric noises Richard spotlights, so there’s no doubt that the running water and clanging metal bits could have come from the place he claims they did. But the illusion isn’t that, in reality, these sounds come from a subway or an airport. The illusion consists in Glassblower’s Studio representing a place at all. This is music for, not music from. It is a re-presentation of a place in a new mode, from a different perspective (or perspectives), with different emphases. Intent, feeling and meaning are not byproducts of the field, then, they are wrapped up in it the way potential energy is present in a stone at the edge of a hill. The composer does not compose so much as he or she selects and enlarges. In that way, field recordings refract the fields from which they are drawn and project numerous possible images of the same event.
Side B, “The Body Part,” clarifies this point of view by providing the audience with a musical instrument. The toy piano in the title appears only a few times and then only briefly, sounding more like an accompaniment to the white noise and air-duct-drone than a featured instrument. That’s all it takes, however, to lend the field recordings a sense of poetry. Field recording and toy piano are both expressed as sounds arranged in a particular order. They, to differing degrees, represent a nexus of possibilities, but they do not merely recreate a circumstance or a condition. The ominous tones and bass-heavy noises create the illusion of a place and simultaneously represent some aspect of the world from which they were pulled. In Richard’s case, two moods are evoked: one of a space sufficiently empty for the business of shaping, the other a shaped and tense duration drawn about the apparently innocent twinkle of a plastic keyboard. Something of an unseen field is present in both and both illuminate a field that will never be seen.
Billy Gomberg / Anne Guthrie / Richard Kamerman / Kawaguchi Takahiro - 4x4 [Winds Measure]
“New work from four of the best extreme minimalists active right now, 4x4 is a digital-only release that the artists have very graciously made as an unlimited download (with a very limited edition of 140 artwork prints). Don’t know how long the offer’s going to stand so get it while you can.”
Anterior Memory is launching a publication series in the form of printed and digital editions. I am pleased to announce that the inaugural edition comes care of intermedia artist Richard Kamerman, who presents, RCVD AT, a subtle, idiosyncratic collection of minimal digital abstraction.
RCVD AT (2014) explores the mechanical infrastructure of digital communication and image production, juxtaposing blackened digital scans, flittering white voids, and fragmented communications chatter resulting from misusing scanners, fax machines, and erroneously sidestepping telecommunications etiquette.
The compositions are culled together by Anterior Memory as a Xerox chapbook. Communication is thwarted -- but visual noise has never looked so good.
RCVD AT comes in an edition of 30 and is available for $4.
