Make Beautiful Music
Sound Matters, issue 06 — p 4. Tuning your soundscape / p 6. Design Matters? Yes it does / p 18. Teknival! Outlaw sound systems / p 24. Aya Sato in the Anthropocene
Sound Matters Issue 06
Editor’s letter
Welcome to the sixth issue of B&O PLAY’s Sound Matters (the publication formerly known as The Journal). This is where we look at, and listen to artists, designers, musicians and creatives who inspire us, challenge us and drive us forward. B&O PLAY has gone through a lot of changes since it started in 2012, and there are yet more changes to come – exciting, unexpected and thrilling. And so it’s important to stand back from the everyday rush and reflect on those changes: how do they affect our creative processes? What do we want to keep and what do we want to change? Where should we experiment with pushing the boundaries? This reflection helps us return to our core values and mission – at 90+ years going strong, this is a considerable legacy to take into account. Here at PLAY, this history is important to keep in mind and use as an inspiration and reminder of tradition, but never to keep us from changing with our world, as well as changing that world through our creative actions. B&O PLAY is more than headphones and speakers: it is a conduit of global contemporary culture. And that’s our mission in this publication – And that’s our mission in this publication – to take a breath and take stock, celebrate what moves us in this world as well as to locate the things we want to celebrate, challenge, change and improve.
Sound Matters Issue 06
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Truly Portable: 1990s outlaw techno sound systems / p 8
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Photographers face to face: Søren Solkær meets Jan Grarup / p 26
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The power of sound: British field recordist and artist Chris Watson / p 18
Find out more about us here beoplay.com Listen to our Sound Matters podcast here beoplay. com/podcast Watch our Design Matters videos here beoplay.com/designmatters Sign up here for updates beoplay.com/culture
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The unchanging states of NYC: MoMA PS1’s Taja Cheek / p 22
Contents Anthropocene: Aya Sato and Butoh dancers ritualise the industrial wastelands outside Tokyo / p 12
John Mollanger Head of B&O PLAY
Head of B&O PLAY — John Mollanger / Editor-in-chief — Nathaniel Budzinski, NRB@bang-olufsen.dk / Design and art direction — Studio C, studioc.dk / Contributors — Rob St John, Matthew Collin, Adrian Fisk, Alan Lodge, Lasse Kusk, Aya Sato, Taka Arakawa, Norihito Ishii & Makoto Takase, Luke Turner, Søren Solkær, Jan Grarup, Marianne Christensen, René Christoffer, and everyone at PLAY HQ.
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Songs of experience: Lil B The Basedgod gets introspective in LA / p 24
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ˈtjuːnɪŋ jɔː wɜːld (Tuning your world)
Tutorial
Sound Matters Issue 06
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Sound Matters Issue 06
From noisy city to peaceful countryside, our natural and built environments have been teeming with sound for millennia – but it’s only recently experts have paid much attention to how we actually listen to our world, and just how profoundly it affects us: Your soundscape matters. Words Rob St John
Stop and listen We live in a world of sound: from birdsong to car alarms, from road noise to the rumble of our stomachs, the bark of a dog to a clap of thunder. Stop for a second and listen, really listen: what do you hear? In 1977, a Canadian composer called R Murray Schafer published Our Sonic Environment And The Soundscape: The Tuning Of The World, introducing his concept of the soundscape: the acoustic structure of an environment – whether urban or rural; manmadeor wild – and all its audible elements. For Schafer, the soundscape allowed us to actively hear the character, complexity and the changes of the world around us through sound. The combination of sounds made by humans, animals and the prevailing weather, amplified and modified by the acoustic properties of the wider landscape, result in a particular acoustic signature, or soundscape. Schafer’s interest in the soundscape could be seen as the product of a “technological moment” in the mid-1970s: urban development was causing unprecedented change to land and soundscapes, while at the same time advances in recording technology allowed for these changes to be documented in the field and closely analysed, as Schafer did with the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in Canada.
Future Explorations
Acoustic Ecology Schafer proposed that acoustic ecology – the study of the relationships between sound and society – had the radical potential to bring people (“anyone with good ears”) together to design and improve the orchestration of soundscapes. Schafer posed two ques tions – “how should the soundscapes around us sound?” and “what can we do to improve them?” – framing noise pollution as an environmental issue which could be addressed like water pollution. Schafer proposed that urban planning should encompass elements of acoustic design to make city soundscapes more harmonious.
Clean your ears In order to tune into soundscapes, Schafer proposed two exercises: ear cleaning and the soundwalk. Ear cleaning is also known as “active listening”, where the listener remains silent and focuses in on the sound around them: those which may be taken for granted, for example. If ear cleaning encourages attentiveness to your soundscape, then soundwalks take it for a wander, prompting the listener to explore the changing soundscapes of an area through walking and listening.
Archaeoacoustics
Audible ecosystems
While Schafer is often attributed to have coined the term soundscape, the idea itself has a longer history. In 1969, MIT researcher Michael Southworth used the term while examining how Boston’s urban soundscapes affected the way communities navigated the city. And the influence of the soundscape on our daily lives and creative activities had long been acknowledged: the composer Olivier Messiaen wove notations of birdsong into orchestral compositions, while many Gaelic folk songs are closely linked to the sound of birds, wind and waves. Reaching back further, “archaeoacoustics” research by Rupert Till has shown how prehistoric cave paintings in Spain were made in spaces with specific soundscapes.
When an ecosystem is disturbed by human development – such as the clear-cutting of a forest – its soundscape is similarly altered, as vocalising species are lost or drowned out by machinery noise. For example, in 2006, Dutch ecologists Hans Slabbekoorn and Ardie den Boer-Visser found that birds living in urban areas sing shorter, faster songs compared to their forest-dwelling equivalents, as a means of communicating among the low frequencies of city environments. More recently, the field of ‘soundscape ecology’ has been developed by American ecologist Bryan C. Pijanowski and colleagues, who seek to understand the scientific links between ecosystem health and soundscape character.
Affordable microphones that allow the recordist to hear the sounds of underwater life, the vibrations of fences, walls and other elements of the built environment, and of sounds beyond human hearing such as bat calls, have extended the boundaries of our soundscapes. Echoing these technological explorations, musicians and artists are increasingly toying with the creative possibilities of the soundscape: the subtle shifts of atmospheres in Burial’s evocations of nocturnal London; or the fluid boundaries between human and non-humansounds in Richard Skelton’s tracings of the northern moors. This survey outlines a diverse range of soundscapes, as the concept continues to yield rich potential for better understanding the world in which we live. Stop for a second and listen, really listen: what do you hear?
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DESIGN MATTERS Six films exploring the elements of design FUNCTION COMMUNICATION SOUND MATERIAL CONTACT & FORM Sound Matters Issue 06
Sound Matters Issue 06
All designers – whether they are producing everyday, practical tools or bespoke, high-end products – work with the same basic elements and needs. What do they need to communicate? What materials are they going to use? How is their design going to look, feel, and function? For a new six-part film series, Design matters: The Elements, frieze magazine – Europe’s leading contemporary art and culture magazine, in collaboration with B&O PLAY – visits leading practitioners in the fields of architecture, products, sound, fashion, and graphics, to discover how they think about the fundamental pillars of design. Participants include David Adjaye, Barber & Osgerby, Gail Bircher and Martino Gamper. frieze.com/design-matters 6
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Sound Matters Issue 06
Photo / Adrian Fisk
Sound Matters Issue 06
Portable Sound System / No, we’re not talking about a new speaker setup, but rather the 1990s outlaw techno sound systems that fused party hedonism and political dissidence. Author Matthew Collin hits the road to explore. The anarchic sound-system collectives that took to the roads of rural Britain in the early 1990s staged a series of spectacular outlaw raves before the authorities launched a crackdown. But some of them relocated to mainland Europe and established a whole new anti-establishment party culture that is still flourishing all over the continent, with a soundtrack that they created for themselves.
Essay
Stay up forever Acid house and the rave scene inspired a spectacular outbreak of chemically-enhanced hedonism across Britain in the late 1980s, but it also attracted people who saw it as a countercultural way of life, not just a bit of weekend lunacy. They drew inspiration from the do-it-yourself ethos of rave, post-punk and hip-hop, but became disillusioned with the venal and unscrupulous promoters who came to dominate the rave circuit. When the early house and techno sound system collectives started to throw parties at the Glastonbury festival, on hippie travellers’ sites and in the inner-city squatlands of Britain’s major cities, they began to make common cause with an older generation of non-conformists who had been politicised by years of police suppression, and a new renegade alliance was forged. Sound-system crews like Nottingham’s DiY, who started to stage free raves in fields and forests across the English countryside, and Tonka, who went from throwing par ties in a disused bicycle shop in Cambridge to organising post-club revelries on Brighton beach, began to map out new and subversive possibilities for dance culture.
A Desert Storm sound system sortie in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.
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Breach the peace The most notoriously seditious of the techno sound systems was Spiral Tribe. With their uniform shaven heads, black combat fatigues and mutinous makesome-fucking-noise attitude, they looked and sounded like techno insurgents. While DiY and Tonka preferred a more funkily hypnotic style of house music, Spiral Tribe’s sound could be described by one of their slogans – “on top, non-stop”. They also believed in absolute commitment: “The unspoken rule or initiation with Spiral Tribe was that you had to live it, 24 hours a day,” said their charismatic ideologue Mark Harrison. In the summer of 1991, they trucked their rig around rural England, playing non-stop for days and nights on end at free parties that attracted increasing numbers of ravers who were similarly disenchanted with the commercialisation of rave culture. The free-party scene peaked at Castlemorton Common in Worcestershire in May 1992, when more than 25,000 people converged for a monumental week-long illegal extravaganza soundtracked around the clock by sound systems like Spiral Tribe, DiY, Bedlam and Circus Warp. The marathon party sparked a nationwide moral panic, with outraged MPs
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asking questions in parliament and ministers promising to legislate to ensure that it never happened again. As the last ravers left the common, the police swooped to seize what they thought were the ringleaders, and several Spiral Tribe members were charged with conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
Sound Matters Issue 06
Matthew Collin is the author of ‘Pop Grenade: From Public Enemy to Pussy Riot — Dispatches from Musical Frontlines’ (Zero Books). zero-books.net/books/pop-grenade
Photo / Alan Lodge
Sound Matters Issue 06
Reclaim the streets Britain’s Conservative government first adopted legislation intended to thwart the illegal rave scene in 1990, but the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 – partly inspired by the cacophonous festivities at Castlemorton Common – went further, targeting the music played at outdoor parties. It prohibited, when played in certain circumstances, “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. Tens of thousands joined mass demonstrations against the legislation, with sound-system trucks dodging police cordons to turn London’s Trafalgar Square into an impromptu rave, but failed to stop it. This provoked the increasing politicisation of the scene, with crews like Desert Storm providing the entertainment for demonstrations like Reclaim the Streets, a series of anti-roadbuilding protest-parties that occupied stretches of motorway and major traffic intersections. Although the era of large-scale festival-raves was effectively ended by the Criminal Justice Act, crews like DiY and Smokescreen continued to do illegal events, although they maintained a lower profile, while the likes of Liberator and Virus kept the grungey acid-techno spirit alive in squatted warehouses around London. On top, non-stop Spiral Tribe were ultimately acquitted of the Castlemorton conspiracy charges, but they had already left the country, believing it was no longer possible to operate freely in Britain any more. They organised their first Teknival, as they called it, in France in 1993, then moved on to the Czech Republic the following year, where hundreds came to dance in a remote field against an apocalyptic sculptural backdrop of decommissioned Soviet MiG fighters and other discarded Red Army hardware. As the Spirals moved on through Europe, staging Teknivals as they went, hardcore sound-system crews started to emerge all over the continent, emulating the British crew’s style and attitude. “Wherever we went, we left a little scene,” Tribe member Sebastian Vaughan recalled. But the Teknivals’ popularity brought the sonic anarchists back into conflict with the law. In France, which became the heartland of the outlaw scene, legislation was adopted in 2002 to give the authorities more powers to stop illegal raves, while in the Czech Republic in 2005, a Teknival was raided by hundreds of police armed with tear gas and water cannon, causing a riot which left scores of people injured. Crystal distortion The sound systems also started to make their own music to soundtrack their parties. DiY’s record label Strictly 4 Groovers offered a fluid British reinterpretation of underground American house and garage, while London squat collective Liberator produced hardline acid tracks for their defiantly-named Stay Up Forever label. The Teknival crews developed their own musical style – grimy, low-tech productions which took influences from dystopian hardcore classics like 4Hero’s “Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare” and Aphex Twin’s “Didgeridoo”, from the belligerent 180BPM sonic assault of Dutch gabba, and from the ascetic starkness of techno labels like Underground Resistance. This harsh, jittery and sometimes sinister sound with its punishing martial kickdrum was calibrated for maximum disorientation of the senses amid the intoxicated frenzy of a Teknival. Some of the releases from Spiral Tribe’s Network 23 label, made by crew members under aliases like SP23, 69db and Crystal Distortion, were even recorded on the road, in a mobile studio mounted in a circus showman’s trailer. There were also crews that specialised in live improvisation with relentlessly savage acid-techno sets running from day into night and all the way back into the light again.
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Pictures from the Free party scene/Castlemorton and Desert Storm sound system.
Storming sarajevo The most audacious and riskiest sound system missions in the 1990s were Desert Storm’s multiple sorties to Bosnia and Herzegovina, when they transported humanitarian aid supplies and threw parties in war-ravaged towns like Sarajevo, Tuzla and Mostar before and after the ceasefire. In Tuzla, they were once surrounded by soldiers brandishing Kalashnikovs and feared the worst, but it turned out that the troops had been dispatched to tell them to turn the music up, and then proceeded to add some genuine firepower to the mix by letting loose volleys of gunshots into the air in time to the beat. Another crew who took their mission one step further were Exodus, who used their rave profits to turn squatted buildings into informal community centres and housing co-operatives in their hometown Luton. Their HAZ Manor commune managed to hold out for over a decade despite a series of raids, arrests and threats of eviction. “We see ourselves as freedom fighters,” explained Exodus spokesman Glenn Jenkins. Spreading the virus Since its origins in the 1990s, the Teknival circuit has become a staple of European underground dance culture, although it remains largely unreported. Every summer, from Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania to France, Holland and Germany, clandestine communiques go out announcing outlaw raves in far-flung farmlands and forests. Many of the scene’s veterans have also kept the faith; Spiral Tribe members are still staging events under the name SP23 and DiY’s DJs are still playing parties, while Tonka alumnus DJ Harvey has become an international cult figure for aficionados of twisted disco and Balearic beats. Some of the instigators have also remained true to what they saw as the social conscience of their mission, among them Steve Bedlam from the Bedlam sound system, who now runs a music charity and has been operating a field kitchen to feed destitute refugees in makeshift camps in northern France. For many people, rave culture opened up the doors of perception; some went through and never came back again.
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Sound Matters Issue 06
Sound Matters Issue 06
After The Big Bang /Aya Sato's Rituals of the Anthropocene
Welcome To The Anthropocene Over the past 4.543 billion years (or so) our home planet has been through many changes. But even inside that blip of cosmic time our collective actions have grown to directly impact our ecosystems. Whether in the form of our ever-proliferating and mobile gadgets, our vast network of global travel, or the massive server complexes that power our hyper-connectedness – what we all buy, eat, watch and listen to has an effect on our environment. So much so that many scientists and theorists have proposed a new epoch – the Anthropocene. This Mortal Coil But it is nothing new to worry that the end is nigh: numerous religions and philosophies have pondered the end of humankind. But those who theorise the Anthropocene also propose that it is not about bunkering down and awaiting the end of days, but rather that we should rise to the occasion and create a new way of living. And it’s with this future-facing spirit and resolve we collaborated with Aya Sato on imagining this new existence, balancing the dark with light.
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Creative Director & Photographer — Lasse Kusk / Performer & Makeup — Aya Sato / Dancers — Norihito Ishii & Makoto Takase / Production & Styling — Taka Arakawa (Babylon) / Hair — Nori / Photo Assistant — Andreas Bastiansen / Assistant — Hikaru Takata / Conduits of cosmic sounds from beyond — Beoplay A1 & Beoplay H7
Gallery
We live in an era where human activity defines our world – for better or worse, our actions have a direct impact on the planet we live. But are we really headed for complete disaster? We collaborated with dancer and artist Aya Sato, travelling to the unseen industrial hinterlands of Tokyo to create a new ritual for these times.
“The first time I visited the Kawasaki area I felt I had arrived on another planet. If Tokyo is Disney World, then Kawasaki is reality. There is an indescribable chemical smell, steam everywhere, and thousands of small lightbulbs dotted all over the factories.” — Lasse
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Sound Matters Issue 06
Sound Matters Issue 06
I don’t have any idea if the world is ending because I’ve simply never thought about it. I feel like I will live for another 1,000 years, or more. And I have a lot of desire to leave something positive in this world.” — Aya
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“For me Butoh is a dance of shadows, and Aya is also dancing with darkness, so we wanted to mix these two different elements.“ — Taka
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Sound Matters Issue 06
“I can relate to the shifts that happen in this space between lightness and darkness because my aesthetic is very dark, but in a very positive way – and I think it is something beautiful to leave in people’s minds.” — Aya
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Interview
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The power of sound / From industrial music to wildlife television, one thing unifies the career of influential British sound artist and field recordist Chris Watson. Words Luke Turner
Sound Matters Issue 06
Diamond geyser: Chris Watson in the field recording the sounds of an erupting geyser.
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Sound Matters Issue 06
Sound Matters Issue 06
“I have this notion that we hear everything but we rarely listen”
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The vast archive of sounds Watson has amassed over the years is eminently adaptable to this cross-media approach. In late 2015 he brought Okeanos, a vivid collage of his recordings from the world’s seas, to the 13,000 square metre concrete cavern of Imperial College’s Ambika Hall laboratory for the London Contemporary Music Festival. “The ocean is not only the largest habitat we’ve got, it’s also the most sound-rich,” Watson says, “They’re yet to discover a deaf sea animal. They all live in this world which is suffused with sound and vibration”. He’s even worked on computer game World Of Warcraft, under a brief to provide “exotic sounds”. An initial collection of tropical oddities from the jungles of Borneo were rejected, so Watson sent over audio files of blackbirds and frogs from his back garden: “they said ‘oh these are great’ and went for all these suburban Newcastle sounds for this exotic, sci-fi world.” The impact of Watson’s work comes from this knack of making what might superficially appear to be everyday sounds become extraordinary. It’s helped by his quiet Yorkshire enthusiasm explaining his techniques – he always has a microphone on him, for fear of missing something, and admits that “I’ve made some of my best recordings
Fishing for sounds: Watson on assignment.
“One thing I hope people do, and this goes for all my work, is walk or cycle across the Town Moor and just stop and listen for a couple of minutes,” Watson says. “Sound is so immediate that if it’s presented properly it doesn’t need any artistic justification, it strikes directly into our hearts and imaginations in a unique way. It’s as visceral as our sense of smell. We’ve all got that power to learn to listen.”
Photo / Courtesy Chris Watson
Newcastle’s Town Moor is a visually incongruous place. A skylark rises towards clammy spring clouds as a police helicopter circles a thousand feet above it. To the south, cows graze in front of a 1960s tower block. Yet what overwhelms the eyes can be even more astonishing in the ears, which is why sound recordist Chris Watson has made these 400 hectares of common land just minutes from Newcastle city centre the subject of his recent installation, The Town Moor – A Portrait In Sound. His collage of recordings is played back via an array of Ambisonic surround sound speakers in the Tyneside Cinema, a 15-minute walk away from the quasi-rural landscape. “You only have to stand in the Town Moor for an hour and there’ll be cyclists, children, birds, pumping music on the threshold of pain played through these lo-fi sound systems at the fairground,” Watson enthuses in the cinema’s noisy bar; “you get all these perspectives from this huge palette of sound”. Watson’s sonic landscape paintings began at the age of 12 when his parents bought him a battery-powered reel-toreel tape recorder. Still in working order, it sits in Watson’s studio to remind him of those early years. During the 1970s, as part of Cabaret Voltaire, he constructed danceable musique concrète from the decaying industrial heritage of Sheffield. After quitting the group in 1981 Watson took a job recording sound for Tyne Tees Television, which led to work in film and television, including the David Attenborough series’ for which he’s best known. Alongside this have been albums for the Touch label, including El Tren Fantasma, made up of the clanking of a defunct Mexican mountain railway. “I’m a sound recordist, I just get the opportunity to apply it across several different mediums,” Watson says, insisting that “there’s no separation between the different things I do”.
naked, standing up in bed.” The Watson family have a Christmas tradition of staking out the turkey carcass in the garden to test contact microphones, recording starling beaks grating across bone. Contact mics were again used to capture the “wonderful buzzing, rattling bottom end sound” of dung flies on the Town Moor’s cow pats for an installation in the reception area of Newcastle’s BBC radio station. Stepping on an artificial slab of brown dung triggers playback of Watson’s recording of the flies: “The kids love it,” he says with a chuckle. He’s similarly full of enthusiasm for the democratisation of his craft now that smartphones can be used for amateur field recording: “I love that people want to record now and not just take pictures,” he says; “They really recognise the value of how interesting, engaging and invaluable sound is.” This zeal to turn others on to the power of sound is the unifying thread that runs through Watson’s work across wildlife documentaries, gallery installa tions, albums and computer games. It speaks of a quiet determination to open up the many layers of the world around us that are otherwise hidden by noise pollution. “I have this notion that we hear everything but we rarely listen, because we can’t,” Watson says, gesturing around the bar, “We’re listening to each other now but we’re having to fight the background music and conversation just to communicate. There’s a lot of CPU being used in our brains to get rid of all this, and it’s tiring. The Town Moor is somewhere you can open your ears.” Watson’s work acts as an accessible take on the academic discourse that has sprung up around composer Pauline Oliveros’ concept of “deep listening” in recent years. He feels that a more thorough appreciation of the audible world around us can and ought be instinctual, pointing out that we’re all descended from primitive ancestors whose ability to listen saved them from nocturnal predators: “The people who didn’t hear them and wake up haven’t evolved”. Later on, upstairs in the darkness of the Tyneside Cinema, ears strain as Newcastle’s Town Moor appears in vivid sonic colour via the 16 channels and layered speakers of the surround sound system. The song of skylarks weaves in and around drunk Geordies discussing tattoos, the amplified sonar of bats, a bagpipe rehearsal, and the whine of flying drones. A crack of thunder rips and rolls around the room, a sudden and violent punctuation amidst the noise of Newcastle’s daily life.
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Sound Matters Issue 06
We met self-described curious outsider, ally, facilitator, and practitioner Taja Cheek – Curatorial Assistant at New York's MoMA PS1 – and spoke about art, noise and the unchanging states of NYC.
You grew up in New York – how has the city changed in your lifetime – culturally, socially? Especially now that so much of the world is turning inwards, global cities like NY, London, Berlin increasingly seem like separate worlds, feudal cultural fortresses compared to the interior national landscape/mindscape of different states. Noting change is a daily practice as a Brooklynite. But, instead of passively noting what is different in my neighborhood, I am trying to actively notice what stays the same. That is to say, I think there is a tendency to try to hyperbolize the uniqueness of the danger latent in this present moment. While there is some truth there , I think it can be dangerous to ignore or forget the precedents of gentrification (for one example), especially because our framing of this moment in the present will influence how we interpret this moment years into the future. This city has many histories of radical change and population upheaval, evident in the name of the borough of Manhattan itself. The euphemism of “change” is complicated. Is it a useful reflection of the everydayness of gentrification, or does it obscure its violence? The word ‘change’ is related to the roots of the word “barter,” which is an interesting thought experiment in a Bourdieusian sense. When neighborhoods change what is being exchanged beyond capital? What traces and remnants are left when people (are forced to) leave their neighborhoods? I often hear people say, especially in regard to New York, that the underground has disappeared. It’s true that it’s become increasingly more difficult for artists to sustain themselves here, spiritually and financially. But, I think and hope there is still a foil to the hypervisible mainstream, IRL and online. If New York is too expensive, too corporate, and too policed, then there must be an underbelly of the city built to resist these conditions, created and sustained by those that aren’t explicitly welcome here, but also aren’t able to migrate elsewhere. The myth of the disappearance of the underground seems to stem in part from an egalitarian view of the internet and media in general-- systems that presume to catch all, see all, and remain open to everyone. “If you can’t Google it, it doesn’t exist.” But, I am constantly reminded that interfaces, software, and the internet itself, are not universal systems; they’re designed by humans with their own biases and predilections. I try to assume that there are people all over the city creating exciting, relevant work that I know nothing about; we all should develop better ways of finding and supporting these artists.
Photo / June Canedo — Stylist / Tess Herbert
Interview
Profile/ TAJA CHEEK
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Tell us how you got interested in culture; art and noise music specifically? I was young when the Sensation exhibit was on view at the Brooklyn Museum, but I remember it vividly. I’d been to the Brooklyn Museum many times before, but I was suddenly awakened to fundamental questions about the nature of art itself. Trite maybe, but important and new to me at that time: what is art? Who is allowed to police what it is and isn’t? What is the role of the “State”? My interest in noise was sparked in high school and probably blossomed from my innocence, to be honest. I didn’t have a fake ID, so DIY spaces were the only venues I could get into. Many shows in those spaces were on the punkier, noisier end of the spectrum and I was especially excited by the music scenes in Baltimore and the noise scenes in Rhode Island. I would always try to see bands from those communities when they came into town. I also played classical piano and cello for many years; learning about the trajectory of art music and testing its limits (atonal music, free jazz, extended technique, prepared instruments, etc.) was an important precursor to understanding noise music outside of the canon.
Noise is one of the most distinct yet fluid scenes/ genres/approaches in music – hard to define but always somewhere in the background of all culture: tell us how you fit into that? Noise exists in a weird, liminal space. I gravitate toward it because it can be both heady and visceral: Annie Gosfield composing music from factory sounds, or Mica Levi using a vacuum as an instrument, or the rattling of a Shona mbira, or a set by Dreamcrusher in a basement, or a set by Dreamcrusher at MoMA PS1, or ATM in Philly, or “some guy” dressed in all black screaming into a microphone to an audience of two people, etc. Those two modalities of thinking about noise are palpable but also totally confusing. I’m not sure which of those examples are heady and which are visceral; that illegibility is exciting to me. Though, as often as noise is positioned as a resistance to mainstream aesthetics and consumption, the reality is often a culture of “noise bros” and the homogeneity of some noise scenes can be alienating. The utopian view of noise is sometimes valid, but in general I hope for more and support of and visibility for queer and femme noise musicians of color--especially as interest in the intersection of electronic music, dance music, and noise continues to grow. I’m not entirely sure where I fit in here. I am probably some mix between curious outsider, ally, facilitator, and practitioner. This past year, I’ve hosted a couple of queer noise and drag noise shows. The organizers and artists involved in those projects are creating a beautiful communities based around important work. Could you tell us about the DIY spaces and scenes you’ve worked with, and how they are important in a city like NY? I used to frequent the popular Williamsburg DIY spaces that many Brooklyn kids went to in the early 00’s. But, as much as I relied on those spaces, the only all-ages venues in the city that I knew of, I didn’t feel particularly welcome there. I always wanted to be more deeply involved in those scenes and never really found my way. Recently though, I co-operated a DIY space in Chelsea, strangely enough, and I now co-host experimental / noise shows in my neighborhood. (Post-Ghost Ship it’s a little too risky to mention addresses or even names). A friend once called those shows an “experiment in radical empathy.” Unearned adjective aside, the space is modest but communal (people keep keys and float in whenever they’re free during the week). I once met a young black woman there who was still in school and somehow found out about one of these shows online. She showed up alone, not knowing anyone, very new to the noise and experimental scenes in the city. As she was leaving, she told me that she was thankful for the show and the space, and that she’d met people and learned a lot in the hours that she spent there. I hope everything I do can be defined by simple profound experiences like that one.
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Songs of Experience/ Lil B “It feels great to be a part of the natural process of what’s going on right now – from the hail to the rain, from the rain to the sun…” Innovative, irrepressible and inspiring: we met the cult Bay-area rapper, Lil B – The Basedgod – on a car trip through skid row in Downtown Los Angeles, where he meditated on some of the core themes in his music, writing his second book, and dropping new music. Interview by Theo Bark
Sound Matters Issue 06 Positivity “I Seen That Light” Album: I'm Gay (I'm Happy), 2011 “Positivity is one of the main ingredients that’s kept me alive and kept my motor running. Just the word itself is great… Positivity is very key. I like to start of with a plan, something that means the next level to me… What this song is about is spreading that positivity around.” Higher Power “People Over Money” Album: Pink Flame Mixtape, 2013 “Higher power is always very interesting – in looking to something above yourself, outside yourself. Figuring out who, why, what and where you are – there’s a lot of thinking, humbling thought, meditation… The higher power is inspiring, it’s within you. Rebirth “Birth To Life (Rain In England)” Album: Rain In England, 2010 “This about me saving the rap game, and about to change it once again. The rebirth of myself. Sitting back and taking a year off, teaching myself how to produce, creating new understanding and new compositions from scratch, new sounds from scratch. Appreciating life and new ideas, and bringing those ideas into fruition – it’s the thing that makes me most happy on Earth… Sometimes I wonder how I just went and did music like that…” Gratitude “Earth’s Medicine” Album: Rain in England, 2010 “Hello Earth/You seem very sick/Are you okay? – As the Earth walked into the doctor’s office, I had to diagnose its problems, but keep things positive… Is the Earth going to be okay? Yes sir! Progression “Prayer To Music” Album: Red Flame Mixtape, 2013 “Sometimes to move backwards is progress, so long as you are moving. Progress has a lot of understandings, and it’ll always be with us… Respect to the music and respect to the process…” The Basedgod Exclusive unreleased track available at nts.live/ shows/songs-of-experience “All I can say is that the Basedgod is one of a kind: the world and life will be changed, things will change and music will never be the same…”
Photo / Courtesy Lil B
Interview
Sound Matters Issue 06
Theo Bark speaks with Lil B about his defining tracks at nts.live/shows/songs-of-experience. We’ve teamed up with NTS Radio – the live online radio station – to present a series of emerging musical talent, in partnership with Los Angeles’ MoCA – Museum of Contemporary Art 25
Sound Matters Issue 06
Sound Matters Issue 06
Portrait
Face to Face / Søren Solkær and Jan Grarup
“Man, don’t bother taking your shoes off – this is a house with a bunch of teenagers living in it!” The Danish photographer Jan Grarup says as he welcomes me into his Copenhagen flat in the Østerbro district. “You want a coffee?” Grarup shouts from the kitchen, just around the corner from the entrance to his flat. In front of me is a small portrait of a woman. Black and white and beautifully blurred as if a spirit emerging out of the picture frame, the photograph’s subject is both enigmatically self-contained as well as almost confrontational. “That’s a picture I took of my friend Patti Smith” Grarup later tells me, casually mentioning the legendary songwriter and poet. I’m visiting Grarup’s home at the ask of another well-known Danish photographer, Søren Solkær. The two men were born a year apart (Grarup in 1968, Solkær in 69) and though they are part of defining their generation’s photography, they have yet to meet. On the surface, the two image-makers might seem a world apart: Grarup has spent his career as a photojournalist covering some of the most war-torn countries from the 1990s to present, including Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Rwanda, Kosovo, Iraq and more. Solkær, on the other hand has pursued another seminal genre of photography: portraiture – specifically making images
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of leading musicians like Amy Winehouse, Björk, The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, R.E.M. and others. Both photographers are relaxed and easy; Jan with a laid-back intensity and Søren with a calm insistence – both personal qualities that probably benefit them in their respective field of photography. This morning, we’re in Østerbro to have Grarup take a portrait of Solkær. Søren arrives a few minutes after me and we sit down to speak about the plan for the day. Immediately the two start discussing photography, specifically Jan’s digital Leica rangefinder camera, and quickly start to disappear down a rabbit-hole into their shared passion and profession. But it’s after we make our way up to Jan’s attic studio space that the real mind-meld happens. Søren specifically wanted his portrait to be shot by Jan as the latter has, alongside his photojournalism, been refining his skills in wet-plate photography. One of the earliest methods of photography, wet-plate was the 19th century version of digital image-making. Quicker and more economic than previous processes, wet-plate required a large light-sealed box camera unit, heavy tripod, and if all that wasn’t enough, a darkroom immediately nearby – many of which were adapted to fit on horse-drawn carts to function in a truly portable fashion.
Søren: “I haven’t had a portrait taken in about 15 years...” Jan: “It’s about time!” (Portrait of Søren Solkær by Jan Grarup)
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Sound Matters Issue 06
Sound Matters Issue 06 1. Amy Winehouse, London 2. Pete Doherty (The Libertines), Copenhagen 3. Franz Ferdinand, St. Petersburg 4. Michael Stipe (R.E.M.), New York
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Søren takes a seat arranged in front of a dappled drop sheet hung haphazardly across a wall as Jan goes to work setting up one of the massive, ancient looking wooden cameras he has placed about the studio floor. After exposing one plate, we head into Jan’s darkroom. He puts the plate into a tray of chemicals and we watch as an image of Søren slowly, almost magically, appears out of a chemical fog. “I haven’t had a portrait taken in about 15 years…” says Søren. “It’s about time!” Jan quips back. Over a few more exposures the conversation covers their recent and forthcoming exhibitions, books and star-photographer-friends-in-common, a fast catching-up that could only happen between two artists who share a crossing career path. After, we head over to Søren’s basement studio in Vesterbro on the other side of Copenhagen. We buy some sandwiches at a nearby cafe then make our way past a record shop, Søren saying hello to several locals passing us by. Over lunch we discuss Solkær’s start as a photographer: “I didn’t have a real camera until I was about twenty, and I didn’t study photography until I was twenty-four, so I started pretty late.” Solkær relates, describing his early years studying in Prague in the Czech Republic, and an interest in theatre. “I don’t know if it exactly why I bought a camera, but it was definitely my instinct to just start approaching people and ask if I could photograph them… it was an ice-breaker, also a way of being brave. I would have never gone up to these people and just talked with them. But I would with a camera.” This was well over 20 years ago when Solkær was backpacking through Asia and elsewhere – indeed, he still has the photos the took then. “After some years, it turned out that I was focused on photographing creative people. Most of my projects have been about visual artists, directors, musicians. But my first big project was photographing photographers in the style of their own photography…” referring to his Photographers Posed series. From there Søren continued with portraiture but moving into some of his most well-known work taking pictures of musicians. “In a way it’s still the same”, he continues, “they’re still people for the most part I find fascinating. I’m interested in anything artistic, and that (photography) is a way for me to get close to it. Like working with Jan earlier today – I was really interested to get close to how he works, and his process. It’s because he’s so experienced, there’s very little direction. Also, it’s quite collaborative, and I think I’m the same, in many ways. I also try to leave a space for creative expression… It’s all about getting people to dare to be themselves, or to perform what they want… Of course, when there’s a camera present, there’s always a level of fiction to what is happening, a level of performance.” I ask Søren what it was like to be on the other side of the lens earlier in the day? “It was interesting to be photographed… It’s a very conscious effort – I do the same job as him so I know what’s going on!” Søren laughs. Was it like giving up control I ask? “No, actually I felt a high level of control” Søren laughs again. “But I think that was down to Jan’s decisions. He could have gone into the darkroom without us, for instance, but he allowed me to chose my expression… by allowing me into the darkroom, he allowed me a lot of say.” We finish up our sandwiches just as Jan arrives to meet and shoot some more, this time in Søren’s digs. As Jan takes pictures around the space they tell me how they recently connected – online: Søren recently traveled to the west coast of Denmark, photographing flocks of migrating birds, focusing on the abstract noise-like textures that occur when captured as a still. After posting one of the pictures to Facebook, Jan noticed and commented on how much he liked it. The two got messaging and as it turns out Jan had been in the same area and focusing on the same subject, but in his own way – and so, two paths meet. Back in Søren’s studio the conversation turns to how important separate, personal projects like this are to an artist’s work overall, how they help breathe more life into creative work that unfolds over years. I decide to pack up and leave the two photographers to get on with their work and let them continue their discussion.
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ceciliemanz
jmleee_
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#beoplay
laukatherine marekbouska
We think our speakers and headphones are more than products – they’re packed with stories and experiences all their own. One thing that makes us happy is seeing just how inspired our friends on Instagram are by our products and the stories they tell – so inspired that we decided to put together a catalogue made up of the pictures that people create and we share daily... instagram.com/ beoplay
nicolay.t
sydneyjuell
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ceciliemanz Today, B&O Play is launching my latest speaker design: P2. A handful of great sound, rounded like a stone in your pocket. #beoplayp2 #beoplay #ceciliemanz
fredrikrisvik
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nicolay.t Beoplay H8 in Gray Hazel by @beoplay #apple #iphone7plus #matteblack #applewatch #beoplay #beoplayh8 #macbook #macbookpro #tech #beautyoftechnology #setup
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marekbouska Vikendova inspirace. A tahle nova kraska od @beoplay predstavena ve cvrtek. Za me top speaker hned po #beoplayM5 lipstickmyname
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laukatherine I'm a spoiled girl Who says presents are for special occasions? Thank you honeyboo @hahajck #mycaptain #myboy #imahappygirl #nonstopeargasm #inlovewithmyears #beoplay #bangandolufsen #beoplayh5 #h5 #耳朵懷孕了 #耳 朵高潮到懷孕了 my_full_house
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4.234 Likes fredrikrisvik Finally weekend! Shoes off and relaxing with my favorite music #Multiroom #beoplayA9
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sydneyjuell Beauty in simplicity #beoplayh4 @beoplay allanfatum
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antongreiffenberg
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lipstickmyname Before fashion, my first love has always been music so I am super excited to be working with @bangolufsen.bn this month! These headphones sound amazing that I had a hard time taking it away from @hr318. #beoplayH6 massstudiodesign
2.597 Likes my_full_house Chill | let the music play #beolit17
jayseol jakobkahlen
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7 Likes massstudiodesign relaxing time #massstudiodesign#b&o#beoplaya1
antongreiffenberg Cheering #beobrew #infusedwithmusic #ipa #mikkeller #beoplay #beoplaya1 #soundmatters #makebeautifulmusic #beer #mikkellerrunningclub #launch #brewing #cheering #nofilter #proud #bestprojectever
21 Likes 139 Likes jakobkahlen Testing, Testing, 1-2, 1-2. Playing with podcast essentials this evening. #TroubleStories #BeoplayH7
jayseol Timeless design by Steve McGugan / B&O Form2i #headphones #B&O #Form2i #for iphone
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MAKE BEAUTIFUL MUSIC
Inside the Beoplay A2, shot by Alistair Philip Wiper, author of The Art Of Impossible: The Bang & Olufsen Design Story: beoplay.com/artofimpossible
