Five Sound Questions to Jeff Mills

Jeff Mills is largely regarded as an innovative techno DJ or producer. More recently, he’s been adopting his ideas, concepts, stories and esthetics from the outset. Since 2000, he’s been pushing further than his DJ fame. Started with creating a soundtrack for Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”, his interest in the future and science-fiction grew, and over the years he has made various sf-inspired works.

For example, a more recent work is “Man of Tomorrow”. Featuring Mills’ poetic sounds and Caux’s invasive cinematic imagery, it is a portrait of Mills portraying his immense perception of the future. Other examples include him imagining a series of strange avant-garde objects questioning our relationship with the world, space and time.

Jeff Mills, Tomorrow + X, 2013 (c) Axis Records / 10 unique white records produced by Jeff Mills, iron spots and hands.
Beginning 2015, Mills exhibits his new work The Visitor, a “UFO inspired machine”, whose language system would be a complete reinterpretation and restructuration of the TR-909 drum machine. Something we might feature later here on Everyday Listening. For now, we’ve asked him to answer the Five Sound Questions, and we’re honored to have him on the site!

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

The sound of the ice cream truck that used to come through all Detroit neighborhoods. One sound of the iconic music the driver would play out of his loudspeaker would send any kid into a frenzy. The trick would be to run home, asked your parents for money, then catch up and stop the truck. It was almost like capturing a White Unicorn Horse. Every kid was conditioned to react immediately to the sound of the truck music.

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

In various ways. Because I only speak English, I’ve leaned to read body, hand and eye movements very well, so I may not know exactly what is being said, but I can detect the sentiment. As a career DJ, it’s taught me to listen to multiple things at the same time. Consuming more reality than the average person. It’s made me much more attentive to everything around me. A drawback is that sometimes, my focused attention can be taken away too easily because I’m quite sensitive.

3. Which place in the world do you favor for its sound?

New York City. The city never sleeps. It’s like an alarm clock they never shuts off. Crazy, but I love it. 

4. How could we make sound improve our lives?

I think we can improve our lives with sound by trying to achieve true  silence first. Then by strategically applying sound would make us more appreciative for the sounds that are more relevant. Like a baby crying or laughing, people having a conversation, nature, the sounds of life in general.

5. What sound would you like to wake up to?

The sound of the ocean. 

Thanks Jeff! See answers by other artists in the Five Sound Questions section.

Zadar Sea Organ

Zadar, Croatia is known for it’s beautiful sunsets. But since 2005, the coast of Zadar has even more to offer. In a redesign of the coast back then, architect Nikola Bašić made a sonic improvement as well. He installed this beautiful sea organ. I’ve seen or heard about sea or wind organs in Vlissingen in the Netherlands, or the Wave Organ in San Francisco we’ve featured way back. There are lots and lots of impressions on Youtube and Vimeo, but I’ve sought out some to post here:

The Zadar Sea Organ was brought under my attention when NTS Radio (a great eclectic radio station, playing everything from experimental music to house music), broadcasted a two hour recording of the sea organ.

I love the fact it sounds very otherworldly, but still very natural and flowing. Also great to see how people come there to relax and listen.

SOUND X SOUND

Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard is a Danish composer who, in his series SOUND X SOUND has been working with multiplying instruments to make the sound transcend itself, creating a pure new sound without references to anything.

The SOUND X SOUND series consists of a cycle of 7” vinyls where each release is an exploration of one single instrument, multiplied. The first release consists of music composed for 8 recorders. The aim is to get the instrument to exceed its own familiar sound and be transformed into a new and clean sound, by multiplying it. It was released on the 25th of november on Hiatus.

Currently, Niels is running a crowdfunding campaign for his next 7”, a fantastic spectral piece based on 30 chromatic tuners. You can watch the Kickstarter video below.

In these two cases, Niels uses the strengths of the instruments very well, treating the recorder as a single frequency and the tuner as a spectral building block. This tickles my curiosity; what will be the next instrument in the SOUND X SOUND series?

In Between

An exhibition can be quite a different experience than your everyday life, and it can even come as little shock. For the latest exhibition at De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, artist Henk Schut made an installation to bridge the gap between the everyday life and the exhibition.

In Between consists of 40 huge vibrating steel plates. By drowning out the ambience of the church when you walk along the plates, you slow down the transition from the bustling city of Amsterdam to the contemplative atmosphere of the church where the exhibition is held. The metal plates rumble with a low frequency, slowly transforming in sound character, but always continuous. The immaterial impact of the installation works on when you exit the narrow path of metal plates and enter the next space.

Henk Schut (1957) is a multidisciplinary artist from Amsterdam, who has been working with sound quite a lot for the last fifteen years. For sounds and spatialisation, he’s been working with sound designer Robin Koek for his most recent installations.

In Between is on display at De Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam as a part of the “Magisch Afrika” exhibition, which can be seen until the 15th of February 2015.

Yes/No Questions

Yes/No Questions is an installation by Guy Goldstein. Guy Goldstein is an Israeli artist, currently living and working in Tel-Aviv.

Yes/No Questions uses a dozen amplifiers whose fronts are covered with a photographic print of drum leather, usually found on snare drums. The sounds coming from the amplifiers are those of voices repeating the words “yes” and “no” in different languages. Goldstein strives to create a cultural and aesthetic clash between elements suspended in a state of continuous struggle and confrontation, while building up to a final conflict.

The sound waves create ink stains on the print of the drum leather. This embroidery appears as a violent act, which injures the canvas in a desperate attempt to give form to the inherently formless stains.

A conceptual but very nice piece about confrontation and contrasts. The round drum leather in a square canvas, the ink stains resembling maps alluding to political and social conflicts, etcetera.

The Enlightenment

The Quiet Ensemble is an Italian sound designer duo, consisting of Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli. We’ve seen their mice orchestra, and fish based installation before. Their latest project isn’t based around animals, but around lamps.

The Enlightenment is described as a “hidden concert of pure light”, performed by an uninhabited orchestra of lighting elements, including stagelights and high-powered bulbs. It reminds me somewhat of Francois Bayles “Acousmonium”, but with a variety of lamps instead of speakers. Neon lights instead of violins, strobe lights instead of drums, etcetera.

Each lamp is fitted with its own copper coil, receiving electrical current at various intervals. The electromagnetic field of the lamps are captured by a sensor attached to each lamp, which turns currents into sound. Salvo and Vercelli modify the electric emissions in real time, performing the orchestra.

Five Sound Questions to Oliver Jennings

 

Oliver Jennings is an audio-visual artist creating moving image and sound in unconventional ways. His practice is concerned with looking for new approaches to generating moving image and sound, with particular interests in revealing hidden natural structures, soundscapes and patterns within unexpected and everyday objects. We’ve seen his work Every Object has a Spirit here at Everyday Listening.

In his most recent work, the award winning Bio-Symphony: Music of the Plants (above), which premiered at this years RHS Chelsea Flower Show, he used a device to read bio-feedback in plant life, which he then interpeted as musical information.

As Oliver is someone who connects the physical and the audible world in his work, I’m very glad to have him on the Five Sound Questions series.

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

It may be a cliché, but the first time I was amazed by sound was when I was very young and wondered why if I held a shell to my ear I could I hear the sea inside it. To a young mind it seemed that the seaside was actually inside the shell. That was a first lesson in the transportive nature of sound that I can remember. 

 2. How do you listen to the world around you?

Even if you’re not consciously listening to the world around you, its frequencies are having an effect on you. Living in London, the sonic world seems to be on an endless loop, planes on the flight path create this strange high pitch wining noise like a drone which is constant, and always there in the background almost anywhere in London. This must have a subtle psychological effect on us. I think when you leave your usual area, the difference in sound is what effects your senses the most and changes your mood and opens up new emotions and feelings.

I love to try and listen to the sum of all the noise. If you are standing high up in a building with a view of London and try and focus on the wall of white noise that emerges from the whole city and think about the endless people, machinery, and movement that its made up of and somehow ends up as a rounded hum. Being able to then tap into secret and hidden soundscapes of singular objects is an amazing escape into a different world, a contact mic on the millennium bridge in London was my favourite experience of this. A hidden world of tortured orchestral sound which only I could hear out of the thousand tourists crossing the bridge, when I pulled the contact mic out the recorder I was in a different world within a fraction of a second.

 3. Which place in the world do you favor for its sound?

Lewes In East-Sussex on Bonfire Night is my favourite sonic environment. One of the most famous and oldest bonfire nights in the world the whole town turns into a crazed environment. It’s a very stressful sonic environment but one which transports you back in time with sounds of marching, pagan rituals and bangers going off consistently for 24 hours, bonfires the size of houses and absolutely no cars. It’s the closest experience to being transported back in time to the middle ages. 

4. How could we make sound improve our lives?

I think we should bring the way sounds function in the cinema into the real world. We already know that quite often accurately recorded sound adds nothing to the experience of an image in film. It’s always enhanced and manipulated to create an exciting new reality, quite often when sounds are distorted so they no longer correspond with the image, they create the most exciting audio-visual experience.

I think it would be great to use this cinematic enhancing property of sound in certain aspects of the real world, to make everyday things more fun and give genuine appeal to things which are difficult to motivate people to do. For example, imagine a headpiece that allows you to swim through pure silence so it feels as if you are swimming through air, for instance. I think this could be like bringing cinema into a new sensory dimension. People underestimate the power of experiencing something with separate sounds. In a world full of noise it could be a welcome escape from the familiarity of every day.

 5. What sound would you like to wake up to?

I love waking up to the sound of rain, especially in a tent, another cliché, but it is the most calming feeling in the world.

Thanks Oliver! See answers by other artists in the Five Sound Questions section.

Shimmering Beast

Nicolas Field is a musician, composer, and more recently, active in fine arts. He studied percussion in Amsterdam and The Hague, and is a founder of N-Collective, who strive to support and promote adventurous music.

His work “Shimmering Beast” is a huge, upside down triangle, formed by sixty cymbals and stands, bass-transducers and light. This monumental and visually stunning collection of cymbals strike eachother lightly because of a resonating floor, and produce a shimmering sound. “Shimmering Beast” was created during a residence in the Swiss Institute in Rome and was a part of the Needcompany performance Caligula.

This installation is one of many which can be seen at Orkest! a group exhibition featuring works by Rutger Zuydervelt, Julian Sartorius, Oliver Beer, Rubén D’hers, Michael Schmid, and Konrad Smoleński. Orkest! can be seen from the 7th of december 2014 until the 6th of march 2015 at the netwerk / centre for Contemporary art in Aalst, Belgium. We’ll feature some other works from this exhibition in the coming weeks.

Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More

Konrad Smoleński is an artist working in different fields, often collaborating with other artists and musicians. He works and lives in Warschau and Bern. His works are often big and sculptural, connected to sound or video.

His work “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More”, is a sculptural instrument written for two bronze bells, two walls of loudspeakers and resonating objects, in this case resonating lockers. The composition links the rich symbolic sound of the clocks to the abstract sound of reverb and resonating noise. By using delay and other effects, Smoleński creates a world wherein history comes to a standstill.

This installation is one of many which can be seen at Orkest! a group exhibition featuring works by Rutger Zuydervelt, Julian Sartorius, Oliver Beer, Rubén D’hers, Michael Schmid, and Nicolas Field. Orkest! can be seen from the 7th of december 2014 until the 6th of march 2015 at the Netwerk / centre for Contemporary art in Aalst, Belgium. We’ll feature some other works from this exhibition in the coming weeks.

Five Sound Questions to Ronald van der Meijs

Ronald van der Meijs is a Dutch artist working with physical objects and sound from an architectural perspective. We saw one of his works, If I Should Live in the Past, I Wouldn’t Need a Memory last week.

One of his latest works, Parthenocarp, is a big string instrument slowly transforming it’s sound as the connected cucumber plants grow. The growth of the vegetable plays the instrument.

As I was very intrigued by most of his works I’ve seen, I’m glad to have him on the Five Sound Question series!

Also check out an exhibition with six of his solo works from 2nd of December 2014 until 28th of February 2015 in Assen, the Netherlands.

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

It was in an early stage, still in my childhood that my own voice started to get darker and lower already, while my friends still had a high-pitched voice.

I was intrigued by the resonance in my chest. When I set on a wooden bench and made my voice real low the wood of the bench started to vibrate. Also when I was picking up the phone a lot of people thought it was my dad. They started to talk to me if it were my dad they were talking to. I was still very shy, so it was hard for me to interrupt them and tell them they were not talking to the old man himself but to his son.

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

With an open mind and real ‘open’ ears for details. I noticed many people don’t hear the details. But of course it has my attention because of my work. I relate to it. And I’m always looking for special sounds that have an appealing quality. 

3. Which place in the world do you favor for its sound?

None in particular. Every place in the world has its own qualities and specific sounds that can be interesting. For example when you go to India there is that typical ‘blow horn’ sound of every car on the street.

While on the streets in cities there is always a lot of background noise, empty buildings can be very nice because of it’s heating system and some hissing airco sounds. It’s like the organs of a building. Although I have to say in nature, sounds can be very clear and thus more interesting.

The most striking sounds I’ve heard were on a glacier in Iceland. Complete silence except from the cracking and echoing sound of moving, grinding ice masses. To hear this in such a hostile and out of space environment is really thrilling.

4. How could we make sound improve our lives?

By listening to it more, and having more patience in life. Standing still for a moment and really listening to the environment. For example when people go for a walk in nature, they’re always chatting with each other, and looking down instead of being quiet and listening to the surrounding nature and the wind blowing true the treetops. It has a real nice peaceful and relaxing quality to it. To enjoy it you need to be quieter yourself.

5. What sound would you like to wake up to?

I think with tropical bird sounds, crickets or Gibbon monkeys in a tropical forest and the sound of croaking frogs in a rice field at night. Not four or ten, but thousands of them at once. I simply love nature.