Playlist

Preface

"To the recording, sound is simply data contained in time - each "instant" of time holds a certain value of pitch, intensity, timbre, etc. Time is nothing more than a container. And just as the film reel reformulates motion as a large number of pictures laid side by side, the audio recording makes it possible to turn a sonic flow into a progression through space, in foil, vinyl, or magnetic media. In a word, the recording causes sound to become reified - it is turned into a thing." - Bill Rankin, The Reification of Sound (2002) - The Open Space Magazine issue 8/9 Fall 2006, Spring 2007

Texts

Recorded

Bruno Walter

May 24, 2016
Das Lied von der Erde - Mahler, New York Philharmonic, Bruno Walter, Mildred Miller, Ernst Hafliger

The big beats arrive together. Between them is the subtle polyrhythmic play - meters loosed from each other, our hold on now made increasingly tenuous, desperate. It winds down to mere alternations of notes, holding patterns, the howling gravestone ape (does Ernst know the text he is singing is pointing back at him?) less than a shimmer on the horizon, effaced.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

May 23, 2016
Banned Telepath 48 Somerville 160523
Banned Telepath 48 Seattle 160523
Banned Rehearsal 910 160523 - Aibell, Jenny Chung, Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

Wonderland Trail, Mt. Rainier National Park
(near Panhandle Gap) - August 1976

All told there are currently 1,324 sound files that are part of the Banned Rehearsal project, well over 1,000 hours of whatever it is we have done over these 32 years. I got to thinking during the last few weeks about the nature of it all as a body of work. What is it most like, or, what kind of thing outside of music, were I to run across it, would strike me as being very like Banned Rehearsal? Try this: a vast and expanding landscape constructed bit by bit of junk sculptures, hundreds and hundreds of them, sharing variously persistent characteristics for sure. But the more globally one tries to take it in, the less essentially one grasps what the things themselves are. They are none of them, intentionally, compositionally, or effectively, parts of any bigger thing. Rather, the closer you look, the more fascinating the singular found moments are. The big view is deafening.

This will be our last cross-continental telepath for a while, as we hope to see Aaron and Jenny in actual person soon. Aibell is their cat, who sang for supper and gets the last word.