3 Audio pieces with Video
Audio//
These audio pieces are made using various analog and digital tools, from analog modular synthesizers, to digital audio workstations. I contextualize this work in a space between academic electro-acoustic composition, and experimental electronic music practices that exist outside the academy.
One compositional current in these three pieces are issues of process and control. I use processes that balance my control as a creator with the systems and tools I use: Randomness, algorithms, and generative processes. For example, I might compose individual loops, then pair them with other loops, to be played simultaneously. These actions constitute creative choices and authorial control. I then initiate those loops and let them play against each other. I may create a logic system in a modular synthesizer: if X happens, then Y follows. I leave my studio to get coffee, return, and the music is still playing, slowly evolving, developing according to preset parameters that contain my creative agency, combined with the logic of the system. The boundary between the two becomes blurred.
Video//
The internet contains a vast archive of human stories and experience. I’m drawn to troves of ghostly, soundless 8mm home movies: Watching families take vacations; seeing a child age, in a single reel, from riding a tricycle to mowing the lawn; watching people, happy and free, mug for the camera in their finest summer outfits. The process is voyeurism, maybe even theft. Nonetheless, I am compelled to experience these films more tangibly, to engage with their images, lives, and stories firsthand.
I layer, merge, cut, distort, loop, and color the films. It is an act of collaging and quilting, patching together themes and narratives from the accumulation of moving images.
Audio//Video
The relationship of audio and video evolves over the course of a project. After completing an audio piece, I initially work intuitively, pairing image with sound. This process becomes intentional as the act of collaging begins to yield thematic parallels and relationships between audio and video. As I work with the material, it offers pathways forward.
Rendered West
Phases of simulacra: Car commercials selling the dream of the open road and the fantasy of the American west. Tourists experiencing those landscapes in reality, while simultaneously filming it, attempting to capture the experience to take home across space and time.
The music is a repeated 16 note pitch pattern whose rhythm is ever changing. The rhythm is the combination of 4 constant pulses of different speeds (generated by low frequency oscillators), summed to create a single near-random rhythmic pattern. This is a similar process as the infinite loops used in “the holy temple of nothing.” Here though, the melody stays the same, but its rhythm is nearly infinitely changing.
Video contains elements from:
“Car Commercials 1961-1965: 1961 Chevrolet” by unknown user. https://archive.org/details/Car_Commericals_1961-1965/Commercial_-_1961_Chevrolet.mpg
“Home Movie: 098442: Western states tour, 1940s” from the Prelinger Archives Home Movies. https://archive.org/details/098442
the holy temple of nothing
In the mid 80s, my brother and I played an Atari video game called Pitfall!. In the game, the player runs across the screen- screen after screen- trying to stay alive, with seemingly no purpose or end goal. There’s a timer on screen, and when the time runs out, the game is over. I’ve since come to realize that playing this game was the source of my first deeply existential thoughts as a person. Pitfall! created a deep sense of fascination and dread in me. Even still, I kept playing.
The video free associates outward, incorporating other sources of dread I found from watching too much TV as a young person.
The music is inspired by Brian Eno’s 1975 work “Music for Airports” using an infinite loop technique where, in this case, 4 loops of different lengths are played together creating an almost infinitely unique set of sound combinations before the loops reset and start together again. (Mathematically, this is akin to finding the least common multiple of 4.6 seconds, 7.2 seconds, 13.3 seconds, and 9.8 seconds.)
Video contains elements from:
“Atari 2600 Longplay [008] Pitfall” by user Armando 77. https://archive.org/details/atari2600longplay008pitfall
“Atari 2600 Longplay [027] Centipede” by user Armando 77. https://archive.org/details/atari2600longplay027centipede
“The Corvair in Action” by user Handy (Jam) Organization. https://archive.org/details/Corvairi1960
Unknown video from the Prelinger Archives Home Movies. https://archive.org/details/prelingerhomemovies
“Gap Swing Commercial 1998” by user 90s Commercials. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ735krOiPo
|iii|
In this piece, video loops are used to freeze moments, amplifying the photographer’s gaze. Similarly, a layer of the sound piece uses granular synthesis to freeze a single moment from the song “Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai,” stretching and slowing it to a near standstill.
Audio contains elements from:
“Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hai” (तुझ में रब दिखता है), by Jay Kadn and Roopkumar Rathod
Video contains elements from:
“Super 8mm Vacation Films 60s 70s part 1” by unknown user. https://archive.org/details/prelingerhomemovies