Soundwalk: Brooklyn Botanic Garden (Work in Progress...)

Soundwalk by Meg Kramer

Here's the current version of my soundwalk project. The music in the first track is an early demo of one of the Listing tracks...and that's me trying to overcome my congestion and recent laryngitis in the voice-over. I haven't really achieved my ideal here, but I'm getting closer. Here's what I wrote in my intro for my classmates:

In this version, I decided to take more control over the listener's encounter with this space.

I used the following strategies:

* I used the physical experience of the soundwalk form to alter the listener's consciousness in the space of the garden. The use of personal headphones creates a dissociative effect in the listener; the audio information they are receiving contradicts the evidence of their other senses. The movement through space at a predetermined pace creates an interesting tension between the active physical state and the passive - following instructions - mental state.

* I borrowed from radio ballad methodology by using found texts. In this case, rather than using the news, I used history, literature, and scientific writing as the building blocks of my script. The listener experiences the space physically, but is also placed in historical and cultural context.

Ideally, these strategies will result in an active, yet meditative, experience for the listener.

The Process

Sometimes I wonder why I am not a more prolific creative person. After all, I have ideas, drive, and a smattering of discipline.

Today, I believe I have figured it out. It's because my creative process looks like this:



and it works like this:
1. Write a bunch of stuff down.
2. Lose everything.
3. Find some pages, but not of what I'm looking for.
4. Acquire scissors.
5. Cut pages into pieces.
6. Explode them all over the room.


I bet Dickens didn't write all of his novels by cutting up little pieces of paper and exploding them all over his habitat.

The Mid-November Total Life Assessment

This fall has been all about the big questions for me. Who do I want to be? What do I want to accomplish? What kind of life do I want to have?

I make a lot of lists. By default I tend to rebel against any method of organization, strategy, or planning, but my mom is a list-maker and when I was young she used to make me write out to-do lists. When I was an adolescent I thought that was a perfectly stupid way to spend my time. After all, I know what I need to do, or want to do, so why waste the time and the paper writing it down? But still, any time I found myself overwhelmed with all of the projects I had taken on - dramachoirmediaworkschoolcrosscountryandsoforth - Mom would sit me down and say let's make a list. Eventually, I had to admit that it felt good to cross off completed items. A few years ago I began listing on my own steam.

I can make lists of my goals, of places I want to go and things I want to do, but right now it doesn't seem to be making things clearer. I think that this is because the goals are really simple, and they don't need to be elaborated or broken down into tasks. Life is short, and I want to enjoy mine. I want to see as much of the world as I can see, and I want to make beautiful things.




My Twitter diary is up and running. I started it November 1, but I accidentally erased the first post. I'm not going to worry about it, though. So far, I have managed to be very disciplined and post every day, usually right before I go to sleep. The most interesting challenge so far - other than trying to hit exactly 140 characters - is negotiating the public nature of Twitter with the desire to document things that I don't necessarily want the entire world to know. One of the goals of this project is to create a document that will help me remember what has been important to me, and when things actually happen. So I've been playing with different ways to code information that I want to remember, but don't want to make public. It's a fun game.

I'm letting NaNoWriMo go this year (again). I was slammed with schoolwork and social obligations at the beginning of the month, and now I'm far too behind to catch up. I'm not beating myself up about it, because I've been pretty happy with some of the other writing projects I've been working on. Yesterday, I submitted a few things to 12th Street, the New School's literary journal. I think that my subject matter might be just a little too strange for 12th Street, but we'll see. My submission last year was rejected, so I'm not terribly optimistic about it. That's okay, though, it just means that there's another home out there somewhere for my stuff.

The soundwalk project I mentioned a while ago has been graded and peer-reviewed, and I was surprised at the positive feedback I received. Maybe my dreams for the project were too ambitious...but the responses made me reconsider abandoning the project. Maybe I will return to it for my final project, and try to make the audio walking tour of my dreams!

I haven't been working on music much. Tried to attack a lyric problem, but my head's not really in songwriting mode lately. BUT, I have been coordinating with Joe and Jonny to finish the Listing album, and we've blocked off studio time in January. The new Close-Far studio is going to be gorgeous. Jonathan lost his old studio space this summer, and at the time it seemed like a tragedy, but now I think that it may have been a stroke of luck. The new place is in a former radio station, so it's already set up for sound, and I think it'll seem a lot more legit to his potential clients. I am also looking forward to recording in a space that is not a basement. I mean, I have fond memories of basements, but last January I spent the better part of the month in the dark, embracing a space heater, and shivering.

The electricity essay is coming along. I wrote a chunk about circuits and hacking, and my professor compared me to Jacques Cousteau. I hardly have to tell you how happy that made me.

The Open Source Outbreak

Wrote some stuff, made some plans.

Here's what I accomplished this week:

The Soundwalk - I'm not exited about the finished product. Voice-over work is hard! I think I'll set this ambition aside and focus on the other bazillion things I want to do.

Wrote a new chunk of the electricity piece. This bit's about hardware hacking and battery licking.

Started the Twitter diary today.

Will start NaNoWriMo tonight, after I do some studying for tomorrow's midterm. Don't ask me what the novel is going to be about. I have no idea. But you know, the last few years I spent a lot of time thinking about stories, and what do I have to show for it? Not much. So maybe winging it will work out better for me.

Didn't have time to work on music, but I did buy my plane tickets to go to Missouri for a month this winter, so I expect to do some intensive music making during that trip if we can wrangle some studio time.

And of course, the most important thing: I put together a great Halloween costume!

Fall Projects / Internet Presence

So far, I've been using this blog as a platform to share things that interest me, but I have been thinking that this is not the best use of the blog format. Or, rather, that there are more efficient tools that I can use for this purpose: Google Reader, Facebook, etc.

The question is, what is a blog good for? I have a bit of a horror of using this format to talk about myself, or about my feelings - I got that out of my system with my geocities page in high school. Still, this form lends itself to the personal and the informal more easily than anything else.

With these things in mind, I have decided to use this blog to write about my projects. Here are the things that I am working on now, or planning to begin:

1. Music - my solo project. Four songs are currently in the works, and I'll post recordings as soon as I feel confident that I won't embarrass myself! This project is all electronic so far (except for vocals), using Ableton Live and Reason. The music that I've performed or otherwise put out into the world has been made collaboratively, so writing songs by myself is very new and challenging.

2. More music - Listing. In January of this year, my brother Joe and our friend Jonathan and I decided to try to write and record 10 new songs in about 3 weeks. We thought that this was an ambitious, if not impossible, task. After weeks shut away in the studio, we walked away with 9 songs. I call that success. However, some of the songs are more finished than others, so there is talk of reconvening this winter to augment and polish the collection. Hopefully we'll have something ready to release out into the wild in early 2010.

3. Writing - the electricity project. I started writing a piece in the spring about the BENT festival (a gathering of circuit-benders and hackers who, generally speaking, make music with their creations). Its becoming a monster, and now I imagine a sprawling piece about DIY culture, the physics of sound, electricity, and the human body. It might turn out to be a series of essays on these topics.

4. Writing - a Twitter project. Why did I start a Twitter account? It's like Facebook status updates, except that hardly anyone I know uses Twitter, while everyone uses Facebook. I've been trying to think of *something* interesting to do there. So, I'm going to try an experiment: a Twitter diary. Here are the rules: I must update every day. I must use exactly 140 characters. I must try to represent what I have actually done that day, and I have to be honest. I must try to make each entry beautiful.

5. More writing - NaNoWriMo! November is National Novel Writing Month. Every year I try, every year I fail. This time, it will be different.

6. Audio project - Soundwalk. This weekend, I'm producing an audio walking tour of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a class I'm taking. It's an assignment, but I'm kind of falling in love with the idea of using sound to transform our experience of a place...so depending on how this actually turns out, I may try to continue producing these things.

& Other Stuff - Other preoccupations that are probably in the future: making music videos for Listing songs, short fiction projects, and possibly trying to write something in graphic novel form.

Repurpose

Documentary on a community of Montreal hardware hackers, by Jack Oatmon.

Sometimes I make noises.

Composition  by  Meg Kramer

This is a piece I put together recently for an audio documentary class. It's made of several field recordings, which I looped and edited with Ableton Live and Reason. I recorded some of the source material myself, and some of it was recorded by my classmates. It's the sound of our lives in the city, with rhythm found and emphasized.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

Carl Sagan -'A Glorious Dawn' ft Stephen Hawking (Cosmos Remixed), by Colorpulse.

Creature Cast: Science with a side of cute

CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

Creaturecast.org is one of my favorite blogs right now. This is first Creaturecast video podcast, which is worth watching just for the squid scientists (who appear around 00:53). But don't stop there! It only gets more interesting.

It's amazing what can be done with some quick and dirty animation, a little bit of music, and great content.

Miyazaki!

I am so excited for this!

What an interesting device. I can think of plenty of practical applications, although setting your preferences for every type of item would be time-consuming. That could be a new market: selling custom sixth sense presets that would weigh the values of each individual user. On the other hand, I can also think of plenty of ways that this technology could be used that are of questionable legality. But maybe I've just been watching too much sci-fi.

Gristleized

On Tuesday, April 28, 2009, Throbbing Gristle played their third show in New York City at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple.

The opening band, Emeralds, was finishing their set when I arrived, so I navigated through the crowd to the bar to get a beer. The Masonic Temple is in my neighborhood, so I'm predisposed to like the venue, but I was annoyed to learn that in order to buy a beer, I would have to go to yet another table to buy a drink ticket, and then I would have to fight my way back to the bar to purchase a beverage with said ticket. "I know," said the bartender, "It's really annoying." At the end of the obstacle course, I was rewarded with a six-dollar can of Zywiec lager - but it was a big can.

I decided to explore the balcony, where I found a spot to stand that afforded a decent view of the stage and the venue's columns and art noveau ornamentation. Then the house lights came on, and Throbbing Gristle took the stage.

Because the house lights were on, I found myself watching the crowd as much as I watched the band. At first, it seemed that the audience was fairly well-behaved, and I wondered whether people in general tend to be more polite when the lights are on. I noticed one couple dancing near the front of the crowd: a tall, thin man and a petite blond woman. They were the only people dancing as if no one could see them. After the first song, the couple managed to maneuver themselves into the center of the crowd, where they continued to dance with reckless abandon, the man lifting his arms up high. I was glad I wasn't standing behind them. As the set continued, the music became more intense and aggressive, and Arms-Up started trying to push up closer to the front. For the first time, the crowd started to become agitated - I wondered if this was how mosh pits started. Arms-Up was bouncing around like a pinball, he'd push forward and get pushed back, until finally a man turned around and punched him in the face. One, two, three times fast. I inhaled, startled, and looked around to see if anyone else had seen it. If anyone around me had noticed, they weren't showing it. Then it was over, just like that, and Arms-Up had bounced back to the blond woman, she was touching his face as he sagged and slumped. I watched from the balcony, feeling sick, my empty beer can vibrating in my hand.

Maybe I didn't see what I thought I saw. Maybe it's not that big a deal for most people if someone who is being disruptive gets their face punched in. In any case, Arms-Up was subdued for a few minutes, and just when it seemed that he had recovered, the venue's security personnel came into the crowd (everyone around him turned like synchronized swimmers to point him out to the bouncers) and dragged him away. I don't know what happened to the other guy.

The next song was dedicated to "the mentally ill who couldn't be with us tonight," and there wasn't any more bad behavior from the audience. We had the privilege of hearing a new piece, "Gristleizer," which used the Gristleizer effect unit. "Gristleizer" sounded like: Cicadas, wind whistling through bare branches, underwater roar, the laquer crack of billiard balls striking one another, and a howling constant tone ascending and descending in pitch. All of these sounds occuring in independent rhythmic patterns of variable tempo, the amplitude increasing until my ribcage was rattling.

When people really started dancing, they weren't trying to look cool or sexy. They shuddered and flailed ecstatically, and by the end of the final song, everyone is moving. Genesis P-Orridge moved like a puppet in citrus colors (lemon, tangerine, blood orange), the crowd shook, I tapped my foot. The show ended. There was no encore, though the crowd clapped and stomped until the band came out and took a bow together. I went out into the sticky Brooklyn night with stinging hands and a singing head.

Juana Molina rules the Loop

I picked up Juana Molina's new album, Un Día, last night, and I've had it on repeat all day today. It's warm, lovely, and a little bit skewed. In other words, it's my ideal soundtrack for spring.

Recommended Reading: The Chase, by Alejo Carpentier

The Chase is the story of a fugitive, a member of Cuba’s communist party who is running for his life. He takes refuge in a concert hall where Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony is being performed, and he arrives just in time for the second movement: a funeral march.

Originally published in 1956, before the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, The Chase is a tale of disillusionment with a corrupt left-wing movement, which has become as brutal as the government it seeks to overthrow. It is no accident that Carpentier opens the novel against the backdrop of the Eroica (or “Heroic”) Symphony. This particular piece of music had been inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte and the ideals of the French Revolution, and the symphony’s original title was Buonaparte. However, after Napoleon was declared Emperor of France, Beethoven changed the symphony’s name in disgust. The Chase explores the brutality that accompanies the struggle for power, and the betrayal of the ideals for which the revolutionaries fought. As the plot unfolds, from the points of view of the fugitive and the ticket seller at the concert hall, we learn the extent to which the revolutionaries of the story have lost faith in their cause.

Carpentier renders sensory information in crystalline detail. In the Havana concert hall where the story begins, a rainstorm has forced the crowd indoors. “The moist scents of green poplars and watered lawns” transport the reader to that hot Caribbean night, and we can almost feel the sweat rolling down a woman’s soft back, which looks “as though it were being pressed by a thumb at each shoulder blade.” The sights, sounds, and smells of the concert hall and the city are clear and vivid. On the other hand, the fugitive’s voice is emotional and visceral. His hunger, his dirty clothes, and his terror are presented in a raw onslaught of information.

Brain-Machine Interface Technology, now with cute humanoid robots

Came across this posted on io9.com; Honda is testing new technology that allows humans to control machines using thoughts alone.

...and I have to say: NO, it would not be convenient for the climate control system to adjust itself based on my thoughts! Just because I'm warm, that doesn't mean that I want to use more energy and spend more money! I don't want my every impulse to be manifested in reality. I want to make the decisions.

But I do want one of those helmet/cute robot setups.

Review: Efterklang at Mercury Lounge, NYC

Efterklang - Mirador from Rumraket on Vimeo.

The Danish band Efterklang first came to my attention as a recommendation on my eMusic account. I took a listen to the sample clips from their 2007 release, Parades, and I liked what I heard: playfully melancholy melodies, vocals ranging from intimate whispers to belted-out multi-part harmonies, and a broad palette of sonic textures produced by electronic and acoustic instruments. Still, I couldn't commit to buying the album that day...I was interested, but I wasn't smitten.

My second rendezvous with Efterklang was last night, when they played NYC's Mercury Lounge. I missed the first two acts (Oh Land and Shilpa Ray & Her Happy Hookers), but I was just in time for Peter Broderick's solo set. Broderick, a multi-instrumentalist, built compositions of looped samples. He'd play a few bars on guitar - or violin, or piano - and loop it, then play another part over that sample. Most of the songs were sparse, incorporating two or three instrumental layers, but on occasion he built sound over sound to intense effect. Broderick is also a member of Efterklang's line-up for this tour.

Efterklang's live show had some surprises. The elements that I liked from the album were present - the textures, the melodies, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation - but the balance was tipped from the delicate, lovely end of the spectrum over to the noisy, joyful, anxious, hedonistic side. There wasn't any loss of quality control; even the a capella vocal harmonies of Cutting Ice to Snow were impressively tight, and this at the end of the night. But I was most surprised by a phenomenon I have never seen at a NYC indie rock concert before: people were moving and smiling. Leaving the show, I felt happy. So that merits my heartfelt recommendation, and an album purchase, too.

Efterklang is playing a few more shows in North America. Info, videos, and free mp3 downloads are available on their website.


Efterklang - Caravan from Rumraket on Vimeo.

Society for Procrastination Research: Report #1

The Kappa, a Japanese water-sprite. Image from Wikimedia Commons

The Society of Procrastination Research is an international collective dedicated to art and science of procrastination. It has one official member (me), but I like to think that most people are members in spirit. From time to time, I will share my procrastination techniques, tools, and insights for the edification of the SPR's silent members. This is the SPR's first report.

Wikipedia's "List of monsters"

It's one of those things that I never knew I needed. Not until I stumbled upon it one day and wasted the better part of an afternoon reading about Medieval English Heraldic Beasts. The Afanc, the Cockatrice, and the Basilisk turned me to stone - at least, that's my excuse for my lack of productivity. From Á Bao A Qu to Zzzax, the list describes beings found in mythology, folklore, film, literature, and video games from around the world.

"How does something come out of nothing?"

Echoes from the Beginning from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Scientists and journalists discuss the Big Bang and time at the '08 World Science Festival. There are more videos available on their website; the clips are all short, fascinating excerpts from panel discussions.

The 2009 World Science Festival hits NYC June 10, and concludes on June 14. I didn't make it to any events last year, but it's on my to-do list for this summer.