Jeff Gburek / Orphan Sound

While making the piece “mass and momentum” I had been involved on two levels with the “open source revolution”, inasmuch as this movement had trickled down to me as a sound-artist.

The first level, on the plane of distribution and software: I used the inter-net, low-bit rate (high-speed transfer rate) method for rendering to the public the sounds that resulted from experiments with Pure Data patches and other hacked softwares floating around that are finally too legion for even me to remember or catalogue. There was nothing thrown my way that I didnt fiddle with. The resultant forms were published first at Bagatellen when editor-in-chief Al Jones asked me to submit something for the webzine’s “Listen” project and the mp3 was free to the public for listening and for download for one month. I continued composing the piece over the next few months. I offered the final version to the Basque artist Mattin for publication as ogg file on his desextea label, where it can in fact still be found, like a tangled wreck in a junkyard, amid other similarly ugly-beautiful, unique and occasionally useful objects.

The second level of participation in the “open source” situation consisted in the live and mostly improvised performances where these sounds were generated. All the concerts were at unnofficial venues and a few of them might validly be called an “open sourcery” community meetings that occur as temporary autonomous zones in various cities. I name two of them that still exist as far as I know: the “Share” network and “Cue”. In both of these situations, artists convene in a previously unstructured time-frame to experiment with one another simultaneously. In a few instances I was alone with my sounds and/or silences. What I appreciated and found most radical was the respect one was given while either making sounds or refraining from making them. I felt in most of these situations that the idea of performance spectacle had been momentarliy skirted. Free abstract sound art cannot easily exist inside the framework of clubs and normal consumption oriented venues. “mass and momentum” as a document owes much to these two levels of novelty in the social and technical environments of the first decade of this century.

The foregoing shouldn’t be taken to mean that the work is all digital, although it has been digitized, now in 16 bits in order to preserve more low level sonic spectres. In my live performances I used both analog gear and the laptop. In restructuring the improvisations for the various incarnations of publication I employed thematic and symbolic structures that were implicit in my way of improvising. Some of these may be of interest to the listener, alhough I would like to say quite simply I believe in the freedom of interpretation.

The thematics that are overtly political consist in the use of field recordings made in various locations under the pressure of historical events. The opening is a (quite obviously) French radio broadcast concerning the youths involved in recent riots in the Parisian banliue. Later instances of autonomist activists were recorded on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz and a large demo I was caught up into in Barcelona, regarding the rights of colored immigrants in Europe. These instances of people congregating or acting out the promise of change represent for me “masses” or “blocks” of sound. They are composed of smaller entities but condensed in such a way that one cannot grasp the sense without the overall form. The blocks are striated and I used constrastive frequency ranges to trace these kinds of striated masses’ granular structures. What people do together often cannot be decoded without external ideologies but these ideologies remain ambiguous unless articulated by individuals. The loss of the individual in the mass is one of my themes. The recovery of the voice of the individual might be considered an objective aspect of this research, granted that such a recovery is also unstable and only momentarily detectable by certian signs that are also disappearing and being dragged back by the undertow of overwhelming ideologies.

The small sounds one hears in the final track represent for me the moments of the Indivdual Constitution. They arise as small clusters of sounds and flourish for a moment and then their lives drift away into the echoless and drama-less continuum of physical existence. These individual energies always seems to be gathering into granular amalgams, building energies toward a form of self-expression that by joining forces with collective expression, lose some of their isolated characteristics. That one may be very serious in collective participation is represented by the sounds of workers and noises they make and by the chanting of political demonstrators. That one can be just (and justly) having fun in collective situations is represented by the sounds of the children in paris school-yard that provides the denoument for the composition. This latter however, as many of our school-yard memories tell us, is also not without it’s own ambiguity and lost innocence.

Poznań, November, 2009

Preamble

I had recently relocated to Liege, Belgium. Called “the burning city”, it is an industrial town whose nearby factories were developed by John Cockerill in the Dickensian age. It smelled in certain declivities just like Buffalo, the rust-belt town in New York where I was born. These notes, in retrospect, showed an evolving project that I didn’t have time to complete.

Liege is architecturally noisy and aurally as well. The riot of architectural styles, gothic cathetdral, arte noveau , multiple layers of post-war trendy architectures, backgrounded by the factories makes Liege very special to listen to. This is not a pitch for tourism. Liege is fiercely polluted, the air something to protect yourself from and the conservatives keeping open ear to Sarkhozy are only challenged by the even prouder working class folks who have liberal tendencies but also “la pierre dans la ventre” (a stone in the stomach), the stone referring to their homes which they value as their mothers. The architectural plans change with every new government, every five years. A city made up up of proud microsocieties, they often counter-punch a new plan after kicking the others out in a libidinous design fiasco that bears direct comparison to the rivalries between Brunilleschi and Borromini, the queens of that kind of classification-defying Mannerism that keeps Italy on top for historically anticipating too many Gehry-like protrusions. The topic is the new, massive rapid train station being installed in Liege. Its need to be properly visualized will lead to the destruction of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Architecture as formalist intrusion.

Architecture is concerned with making spaces and controlling what passes through these spaces. The two extremes that must be anticipated reflect the orderliness of society and the indeterminacy that this orderliness eventually gives rise to. Advertising and vandalism are two of these indeterminacies. We don’t know what will be advertised or we cannot tell yet who will be able to afford to adverstise. The architecture is also a form of advertising. The architecture is also a form of vandalism, an imposition of power. In turn, it will become a place where the dynamics of integration are challenged.

Art as form of poesis requires long-term data. It requires mathematical thinking to make the transition from art to architecture. But a theory of archetypology, in the form of shapes which architecture inherits mimetically, pervades the architectural unconscious. Making architectural spaces comfortable is important. It is also important to not make them too comfortable. In some instances it is useful to make them deliberately uncomfortable. This reflects society’s silent war against the undesirables.*

It is not suprising then that architecture as power contruct is oriented toward visuality and verticality. Silence and visuality and ideal projections of order. Silence in this case does not mean no sound but rather, it is a silence about a silence, a silence about sound and it is this silence about sound in architecture I want to address. Sound is, as such, largely ungovernable. When sound will be considered an aspect of architecture, we shall have entered a new age when sound will be more precious to us, an age in which the earth and all what its atmosphere supports and calls life will have become a distant dream. For the moment, sound, functioning on the permeability of the binaural grid, is a plane of artistic intervention and vitality incarnate. Sound is a voice. Sound cannot be asked to shut up. The architecture that takes sound as a basis is going to be both visionary, nostalgic and revolutionary. The architecture that exists already is merely a battle-ground for the sounds of struggle.

There is a certain kind of social blindness in every situation of construction. We will tolerate much chaos in order to achieve a new visual environment. Indeterminate sound also is also tolerated. It is only ordered sound that society has a problem with. The rigidity of this order for sound is the plague of every creative musician and sound artist on the globe. It is also the premonition of the totalitarian order capitalism is quickly consuming and imposing upon every aspect of life. The appetite for destruction that this requires reflects the situation of clearing up congested spaces for constructions that make us, some of us, feel new. This also shows a genocidal strain in the mythology of populations that sense they are growing unsustainable. How we can learn to work with all aspects of our society depends on being able to listen more. How things look will need to become secondary to hearing how they actually are. This listening is not only a practice of abstracting sound and turning it into an interesting but politically neutral drone. It must involve listening to people. Just as the station is a point of transit, it is a gathering point for those in precarity. The situationist declaration concerning the flexibility of architecture depends not primarily on its visual projection but on developing the world from strategic points of listening to an environmentally solvent mentality.

The architecture of intrusion must be subjected to a hearing.

*Anecdote concerning loud radio on station platform p.a. used to drive away homeless people from benches in the less used section of Montpellier station is apropos here. This abusive, anti-social and “collaterally damaging” event evinces sound as weapon.
Note on layout for photos.

I am intending to present Guillemins Station upside down or from various viewpoints that are not designed to undermine (nor to flatter) Mr. Calavtravas’ design but are, instead, intended to show the current invisibility of the station. I interpret this crisis as an opportunity for intervention and re-evaluation. The photos in some instances will be replaced by paintings (not photo-shopped abstractions) that work with the geometrical force lines, in order to review these lines of force in terms of waves and therefore achieve an aural sound-score. To transform the visual lines into audible wave forms. In this way, I would like to suggest to planners the idea that the visualization of architectural spaces should be previewed in a perceptual manifold so that analytics can be informed by another sensibility.

The recent renovations of Berlins Alexanderplatz station. A wide open space, free for movement, is being closed precisely as the population of the city grows. Why?

“hunger/makes the world blind” –a poet once said…

the following theses where found in an archive recently. whatever they are saying, and i think that it is what they say that could be interesting, the echos of novalis and debord straining for an impossible synthesis make for amusing reading.

1. life seeks to recur. this is important for the maintenance of a thesis, which itself, generates only its likeness while differing with the world absoprtion that denies thought and art any functional probability and sets them both in relationship with danger, death, supernatural enigma and social unrest.

2. just the way things fall is perfectly correct and a minimal or reductionist changement in the direction of order is choatic, interventionist. it leads to interest in aesthetics and classical mourning.

3. there is no reason to think. that is the reason we do. there is no reason to do, so we think. life seeks to recur. these words erase themselves in order to be real words in your mind. these sounds do not stand alone. you are the stand alone player. your eyes stray from the sceen. distance enters.

4. time is a prisoner of the body. the thought-maker stands at the edge of thought and ordains music minister of bringing hands to work on the unity of the species. freedom is the thing made by these hands which never possess what they make.

5. the concept of logically ordering theses is an affect of recurrence. this affect reveals not one unity for order but the desire for an otherness of order. order and freedom are seen to be intimately related but in no orderly fashion. the institution of mannerism leads one to think the linea seprentina is a kind of place where thought and nature coincide in an erotic illusion. this produces numbers if not numerology.

11. the theory of the erotic and the locative, like the dynamics of illusion, display themselves only in particle bombardment situations: huge machines create invisible entities of probability that have little or no effect on the machines themselves unless something goes radically wrong. the mastery of the machine emerges in the theory that makes the machine obsolete.

6. this is only the begining, stuck in the middle.

The following was included in a performance at the new Staalplaat in Berlin

http://www.lepetitmignon.de/

The improvised preamble, however, ended in this manner:

…I have a few times received suspicious emails from people doing geneaology searches…my surname, Gburek, is Polish…my surname, I was told a few years ago, means something like Grumpy and Obstinate Man…so a few weeks ago I received an email from a woman in Poland searching for her tribes-people and at the end of the exchange she said we must have relatives in common because “after all, you know that Gburek is not a very popular name”… and in fact a Pole I met in Berlin asked me if I knew what my name means in Polish and since I did not know he said, after a slight pause, “he is always a little man who is very rude and farts and belches at the dinner table and speaks very loudly and usually he always ask you for money that he never pays back and he has very bad sexual habits…” and so forth and so on, so you can see Polish people have a very extreme sense of humor and like to exaggerate quite a lot…and when I met the Polish musicians and composers in Darmstadt last year each one of them at least was very quick to laugh when I told them my last name…

Anyways, in Poland, they say that the very first city was built around the vicinity of a great mountain which I will call the Nameless Mountain…I call it nameless because of an intuition that the mountain itself did not care too much about the names given to it

So it is said that Anagywnas-or someone calling himself

Anagywnas (we are not sure also if it was male

or female or both or neither)

Anagywnas said-we assume he said it to someone, but in fact, we don’t know

the name of the people, his tribe, or what kind of creatures they were or if he had a people-

Anagywnas said, the first problem “we” have is the STONE-meaning, the HARD

Mountain before his Eye—

IT WILL NOT MOVE AND IT REFUSES TO SPEAK.

And so….

Anagwynas invented VIOLENCE, thinking maybe Violence would help him find a way

To get from the mountain what was needed.

Now, Violence didn’t want to go. But being an Invention, it was forced, like any other TOOL, toward doing something-while Violence truly didn’t feel like it had anything to prove and might prefer to sleep in the dark matter of the universe…

Anagywnas nevertheless took Violence to the Mountain.

He first made a huge column of AIR and projected this from his LUNGS

Through a kind of TUBE. The Mountain typically replied with SILENCE.

Having heard the reply of SILENCE,

Anagywnas shouted,

“WHAT? …DID YOU SAY: ‘VIOLENCE’? …TO ME?”

When Silence was heard again,

Anagywnas, sure of himself now, and very brave, began to smash Mountain into pieces.

Expending great energies, his Violence was still great, while indifferent.

But then Anagywnas began to see that all the broken pieces were not regular.

Each one was different and worse than expected each one was equally silent, no matter how much violence was applied. He did not find what was needed.

And Anagywnas regretted smashing the Mountain and decided to put it all back together using a mixture of mucous and blood as a kind of glue.

It was difficult work. There was something missing. The shape of the restored Mountain was not like he remembered it. There was a more fragile integrity than before and it was in this that Anagywnas discovered SPACES. Everywhere there were Gaps and Spaces that caused great instability. The Spaces were interesting. Animals started immediately to occupy the Spaces. And so the first city in Poland came to be formed. It was always falling apart, undergoing disruption. The noise of sex and indigestions of the animals underground caused the city to fall apart quite often. Everyone tried to hear Silence

But it was not possible anymore to hear Silence. The arguments over how to put the city together were endless and unhappy. And stones sometimes disappeared. The inability to find silence caused some of the animals to go and find another place to live.

And the animals that succeeded were never heard from again.

Material for sound: stones from Wannsee, Alps, New Mexico, Athens; layed-out guitar with piezo and telephone pick-up; two looping pedals; mixing board; two guitar amplifiers.

Procedures: Speaking, reading, suspending stones above magnetic coils of guitar until vibrational field changes are appreciable in output. This may entail turning stones in various ways. Eventually most stones on top of guitar, experience of these in many configurations produce varieties of textures. Stop when you feel like “it”.

Jeff Gburek

June 21, 2007

Le Petit Mignon//StaalplaatBerlin

On a train ride from Berlin to Gdansk, I encountered that laminal experience wherein not only auditory consciousness gains access to the deepest internal and bodily experience of hearing that is the externally silent transversal of dreams but also the sensitivity grew that there was indeed a code that could be discerned in it all and a way to translate it sensibly. While the wheels where running and I tried desperately for hours to doze off, there came that peculiar leveling of the hearing, the one in which there is no longer judgment made over the signal to message ratio of sounds and they all became equal partners in a weaving of sonorous percussivities that merits political consideration. While mankind makes sounds to be heard across nature, all of nature works simultaneously and without interruption across all the sound we make trying to communicate and, in theory at least, retains the power of feeling less self-important. That is why these sounds can ooze back into the bodily folds and maintain a relation with our elemental and animal fundament. We cannot detach, for all our mass miscommunications, from the overall pulse of the elementalities riding through wave-forms and which in our atmosphere render audible gusts from the distant comminglings of winds. But when I was searching most to sleep, having this interpenetration of spheres, to take the cagean phrase, I was simultaneously having the visionary experience of the back of my eye-lids and the light trapped in the brain that flashes like so many retinal flowers of rods and cones. Eventually, a strangely red glow formed on the wall of the cabin and I found my entire being sucked with the glee of a renegade autonomous vacuum cleaner into this unlikely portal. I immediately found myself adrift amidst corpuscular beings, strands that I could perceive following variable geometric patterns, the roseaceous and laser pontillist figures metamorphosing in seeming randomness and yet sensibly evolutionary, with a grade of steadiness that defied our clock’s temporalities. These fields of swarming fireflies opened their wings to let small sounds out from glands secreted therein and, yes, they appeared also to be rufflings of wings that visually stimulated some cortex to send a buzzing into my ears. This condition of sound created internally that some call tinnitus is in fact a place of maddening resonance with the usually forgotten pulsations outside us.

I then recognized that the laser points constituting these strands bore a unique resemblance to the stochastic elements of field recording that, if left to spin in discs of their own design, would create unpredictable but also curiously consistent and observable family relationships. In fact, these once monocellular creatures began to assume the shape that we can recognize as part of our ancient and contemporary bestiaries but imbued with a completely plastic character that admitted of miscegenations and foetai that were half-moose and human, half-deer and lobster, birds with long fertilizing noses that resemble the flowers’ pistils. In short, these were hybrids. Their sonic emmittances where similar to what I described above. Their fur made a sound that was as loud as the leaves they rubbed against wandering their forlorn and shrinking forest in the rural stretches beside the rail-road tracks of Poland. The birds became extremely fluent in their passages from one species to another and they accelerated the rate of the movement of the light locked into and emitted from the corpusculars. One of these transitionary entities had a particular taste for my ear and while the ear seemed to grow towards this luminous animal it also descended into and traced the contours and convolutions of the spiral with a gentle and caring ligament somewhat like a tongue. It was soon to be revealed, however, that, while this seeming paradise could not be detached from the alarming rates of movement provided by noisy and noxious machines, and the fact it was in Poland, the train had ceased to move. The birds were singing now in a more staccato and repetitive way that, like a piece of music one knows well, had both the abiltities of charm and cloyingness. It was then I opened my eyes to see between the slit of the curtains that we where in a station. A woman’s voice came melodically over the speakers repeating what we assume were the schedule and track changes for unseen trains en route to that same place. It was perhaps one of the most beautiful sounds I ever heard a train-station exude.

If we can mix sonic realms, does this not give us a great opportunity, perhaps before dreamed but never given to all as a platform for personal psychic experimentation until the present moments, to encounter a cross-pollinization of substances drifting in the universe and coalescing into vibrant sacs of aural intensity? And from the auditory intercalation, we can imagine a genetics of sound, a place where the splicing of originary elements of nucleic acids is mirrored in this organic mash-up of songs, those which mingle together in our minds and bodies but which also emerge from them the way croaks do from frogs. It could be that in phonography lay a key to those shamanistic or otherwise indecipherable amalgams of forms we see in the ancient caves and petroglyphs, the graffiti whose cascades and cadences announce the birth of a singularity culminated from the generations and yet giving us an awareness of the sacrificial ingestions that of necessity sustain us. Therein I think reside both an ethics and an ecology that is not easily reducible to the rationality standing over and against us in the capitalist and corporate ontologies of exploitation. We can emerge yet from the corpuscular clouds of, and with some new, information. Composition and hybridization creates the possibility of recomposing a great masterwork that is unfinished and its forms sui generis follow from the hybrids that are not so much an engineering as they are a shape discerned necessary and beautiful in decomposition. And in the analysis of its hidden life forms we find in the materiality of sound a music informed by the noise that perches on the barriers of culture.

Jeff Gburek

Feb. 10.07

Berlin

I begin with a return. To a certain musical territory. Sept.17.06, Berlin

Muslim Gauze Revisited

In the caustic feedback washes of a magical recording machine the memory of humanity beats its hands against the tightened skins of animals it has slain and eaten in order to contain its overactive brain that grows mosques and churchs and cities until something snaps and the house of cards wins our hand. Why are these recording so alive? When the Cold War had yet to be graced by Gorbachev’s beauty mark there was a militant Islam that in a way must have convinced us Godless whining leftists, of, for example, the struggles of the Palestinian people. All the Sufism pressed against the Wahabism (and its repressed necromancy) does not seem to achieve any longer the balance between the fear of apocalypse and the communal celebration of the fall of the oppressive State that might allow us to enjoy the risk of what this music means. What is revealed in this enthusiastic slapping, this slap-back again, this agglomerated cacophony of ordered devotions to the empty resonance of a feeding trough struck by sticks, this calamity of cowbells, mangled sarods and stampeded subwoofers ? Once cut into a rotatable dish of petroleum by-product, or spooled around one of those infinite cassette releases Bryn Jones made in the 80’s, it is now mathematical measures of data lightly lasered into a small discs then only nerdly imaginations. The recording however is a monument not to “music” but to the ability to remember and situate an entire paradigm shift away from a liberationist oppositional culture carried over into to a disenchanted orientalizing package presentation of the current moment. The Thatcherism of those days has only morphed into the role-playing of the self-deputized people-duping protection of illusory democratic freedoms that, pitched in a battle against the shadows of Islam-not the careful study and analysis of its internal laws—has only been able to rend open the crisis in the concept of the Law once again. Not only Kafka’s but that of the Enlightenment which did worry itself about the internal as well as the external apparatus of control. It is really only in the torn space between shari’a and the “rights of man” (read: the disastrous results of Global Corporatism) that this music is at all danceable. It is within a more absolute post-modern “condition” that Levinas’ observation is true: “when I dance my mind stands in one place”. That was not always the case, however. This music reminds me the mind danced once widely filled with ecstatic hope for a tomorrow of abolished sorrows.