The Squid's Ear Magazine

Various Artists

The Architecture of the Incidental

Various Artists: The Architecture of the Incidental (GD Stereo)

An excellent anthology of improvising electroacoustic artists using aleatory processes, inc. Gen Ken Montgomery, If Bwana, Francisco Lopez, Geoff Dugan, John Hudak, &c
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Pat Courtney

Chop Shop

Sean Meehan

John Hudak

Geoff Dugan

Gen Ken Montgomery

If Bwana

Brian Conley

Francisco Lopez


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Label: GD Stereo
Catalog ID: GD014
Squidco Product Code: 10198

Format: CD
Condition: Closeout (New)
Released: 2008
Country: USA
Packaging: Cardstock Gatefold Sleeve

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"An open act of detournement (or diversion), The Architechture of the Incidental felicitously finds aural residues - traces of transcience and our growing experience of a drifting, siteless world - and, through an array of aleatory processes, endeavors to deflect them from their function. The work leans heavily on the aged body of The Situationists - specifically that of Guy Debord. In keeping with his vision, space is seen as having undergone a double reduction: first a heterogeneous space, with all its excrescences and such, is transformed into the homogeneous space of Euclid, where the individual enjoys a calcined life; finally, through further alteration, this space is cleaved such that it consists now in only two dimensional representations. No longer opaque and concrete, it's abstract and transparent; not space, but it's (truly full) image, an image that gives everything and is to be looked at passively, rather than lived directly, giving off an ineffectual decorative feeling.

In its depths, duplications, echoes, and reverberations, it's redundancies, and doublings-up, which engender - and are themselves engendered by - the most peculiar of contrasts, this album - consisting of tracks from artists such as Francisco Lopez, John Hudak, Pat Courtney, and Chop Shop, to name a few - makes an ardent effort to not only edify, but to reinvigorate and restore a certain sense of space, to rip the notion away from its image and, in so doing, to open up a spawning ground in which a certain energy is able to feed off the differences - however slight - that ensue.

It's successful in that it ferrets out the illusion of transparency. Even in the opening few pieces, which in their arrangement and sequencing represent the discs most abstract and uniform moments - moments which, at least in part, try to hear for the listener - reveal that such standard sonic architecture still vibrates with detail. The selection from Sean Meehan isn't merely a distillation of the sounding properties of an environments detritus; without turning it into an overtly aestheticized object, clean and appealing in its ambiance, the space enters into a sort of in-between zone where anachronistic elements appear and disappear, leaving traces that accrue, alter the texture, and in turn the sense of time.

The latter finds itself particularly altered by the transition from the pieces put forward by Geoff Dugan and Gen Ken Montgomery to that of If Bwana. Whereas the former two push forward the instigation (rather than designation) techniques that preceded them, focusing on higher, more abrasive frequencies, challenging in an almost surreal manner the limits of endurance, in a surprising and quite effective manner If Bwana trim all of this away and find a place to breath fluidity back into time like a mothers cord pulsing life into the womb. In fact, however one runs up against it, the slice of time presented, afforded by a vast, open space, with a calm, coherent, and spontaneous sequence of natural events, in stark contrast to the plenitude of destructive forces on display elsewhere, is something of an exemplary experience. Make of its theoretical underpinnings what you will, the effortful dialectic between ungiving materials and musical decisions dictated by studied and alert ears jars open just enough clefts in its subject-matter to allow one to conceive and consider space in their ever-heightening contiguity and contamination. "-Max Schaefer, The Squid's Ear



This album has been reviewed on our magazine:

The Squid
The Squid's Ear!

Artist Biographies

"Sean Meehan is a drummer who most notably plays a pared-down kit often consisting of a single snare drum and cymbal, creating sounds that range from the subtle friction of a fork rubbing against a drum to tones that seem electronically-generated. These complex, sometimes subtle sonorities require a great deal of concentration for the performer and listener, foregrounding the act of listening just as much as the production of sound, and bringing the audience's attention to both spatial acoustics and social interactions within a space.

Meehan traces much of his development as a musician to the time he spent as a teen in the public library, in particular reading Downbeat Magazine's Blindfold Tests, for which magazine staff would play recordings for jazz musicians without identifying the artists. The guest musician would comment and guess whom they were hearing. From this he understood the importance of having a unique sound and language. How to obtain that goal was informed by other books Meehan selected for the provocative titles running down their spines: As Serious As Your Life: Black Music And The Free-Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977, by Valerie Wilmer helped him understand that the way to one's own music was for it to be a reflection of one's particular social context, politics, and inner being; and from a distant shelf, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music by Hermann von Helmholtz provided a lifetime of information and inspiration.

Some of Meehan's early performances were at the Amica Bunker series for improvised music, located at the Anarchist's Switchboard and later at ABC No Rio, New York. Since then, he has presented at many venues, including the Instal Festival, Glasgow, The Whitney Biennial, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Goethe-Institut, Hanoi, but he primarily performs at small, informal, transient spaces and artist-run festivals.

For nearly twenty years, Meehan and saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi presented a summer concert series, always in different locations in New York City that Meehan considered to be marginal. Meehan's work with Shiraishi most directly reflects his interest in urbanism, which includes the acts of walking, writing, filmmaking, and talking to strangers, as well as the practices or concepts of social history, cartography, community control of land, foreclosure and eviction prevention, and tenant advocacy. Three of these concerts have been documented on LP: In the City (Fusetron, 2003) and Summer Concerts 2002 & 2003 (GD Stereo, 2005). In 2007 the duo worked with Arika, a cultural presenter in Scotland, to mount a condensed multi-concert version of these works in similarly "marginal" locations throughout the United Kingdom.

His other significant collaborators include: John Dierker, Geoff Dugan, Michelle Ellsworth, James Fei, Ellen Fullman, Paul Hoskin, Greg Kelley, Andrew Lafkas, Sachiko M, Ben Manley, John McCowen, Ken Montgomery, Toshimaru Nakamura, Kendall Pigg, Matthew Sperry, Edwin Torres, Taku Unami, Barry Weisblat, and Barry Wolifson.

Meehan also makes music-related objects, intended to be used in the way recordings are, but within the listener's imagination, rather than aurally. These include Field Recordings Vol 3 (2003) a folio of letterpress cards, and Audio (2001) a boxed set of four cassette-like objects. These too are rooted in Meehan's early experiences in the library imagining what free jazz sounded like based on Wilmer's descriptions long before actually hearing it, and imagining the swirling, beating tones of Helmholtz's Victorian-era experiments, which Meehan paid homage to in the abridged book-on-tape Meehan Reads Helmholtz (2017).

Meehan completed both his M.A. and M.U.P. at Hunter College of the City University of New York before obtaining his J.D. at the City University of New York School of Law."

-Foundation for Contemporary Art (https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/sean-meehan/)
12/26/2023

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Born 3 28 58 Framingham Massachusetts USA. John Hudak has been interested in sound and music from the age of four when he began to play a variety of instruments. At the University of Delaware (BA, English 1981) and Naropa Institute for the Arts (1979), he studied video, photography, creative writing and dance. He then began to create taped soundtracks for his solo performance art pieces. In recent years, he has concentrated on sound, particularly natural sounds. Hudak's current sound work focuses on the minimalism and repetition of sounds below the usual threshold of hearing, sounds that are filtered out or considered non-musical. These sounds are recorded, deconstructed and processed, their rhythms and textures being the basis for aural manipulations."

-John Hudak Website (http://johnhudak.net/)
12/26/2023

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Ken Montgomery is a New York-based visual artist and "sound/composer" whose involvement in the cassette-culture and mail-art movements of the late seventies led to the creation, in 1989, of the first and arguably still the most important sound art gallery in New York City: Generator. Located first in the East Village and later in Chelsea, Generator's wide scope and novel approach toward audio art made it a vector-point for some of the most interesting and important artists from around the world. Ken was also the founder of A.T.M.O.T.W.- Art is Throwing Money Out The Window - and Generator Sound Art Inc., and he co-founded the seminal experimental labels Generations Unlimited and Pogus Productions. As a composer in the early eighties Ken was creating multi-channel sound works often performed in total darkness. More recently Ken has been focusing on visual art, collage, bookmaking, and international correspondence art. As The Minister of Lamination (a.k.a. Egnekn) he is the world's foremost practitioner of sonic Lamination Art. Montgomery has collaborated with a wide variety of artists including Conrad Schnitzler, Andrea Beeman, David Lee Myers (Arcane Device), Zoe Beloff, Michael Zodorozny, and Ishtvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin).

As a sound artist Ken Montgomery finds novel ways to work with sound. He has created an audio-only CD-ROM (Inner Eye / Outer Ear), a record label for experimental music (Generations Unlimited), the first sound art gallery in NYC (Generator), and a Ministry devoted to conducting one-on-one listening rituals (The Ministry of Lamination). Since 1985 he has been performing multi-channel sound concerts in intimate settings, often in total darkness. Montgomery began creating soundtracks for non-existent films in 1979 and distributed them on cassettes through what became known as the International Cassette Network. In composition and performance Montgomery has employed an ice crusher, an aquarium, a refrigerator, a hand massager and a laminator, to name a few.

In 2008 Montgomery was a visiting artist and taught Sound Art and New Media at the University of Cincinnati - College of DAAP. Montgomery has presented his sound work in Europe, Canada and the U.S. In New York his sound work has been heard at The Whitney Museum, P.S. 1, The Kitchen, White Columns, Rotunda Gallery, Issue Project Room, Pierogi 2000, Experimental Intermedia, P.S. 122, Roulette, Lotus Music & Dance, Gargoyle Mechanique, and The Pyramid Club. Montgomery was Artist in Residence at Harvestworks in 1992 and the Spritzenhaus in Hamburg in 1999. He received a Sound Art Fellowship from Media Alliance and The Jerome Foundation in 2000, and in 2003 he was awarded a NYFA Fellowship in Computer Arts.

Montgomery's music has been released on the finest labels in the world - De Fabriek, Esplendor Geometrico, Staalplaat, Banned Productions, Firework Editions, XI Records, GD Stereo, Pogus, Tellus, Touch, XV Parowek, Generations Unlimited and Generator Sound Art."

-Gen Ken Montgomery Website (https://www.genkenmontgomery.com/bio.shtml)
12/26/2023

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Francisco López is an avant-garde experimental musician and sound artist.

He has released a large amount of sound pieces with record labels from more than fifty countries and realized hundreds of concerts and sound installations worldwide; including some of the main international museums, galleries and festivals, such as: P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York City), London Institute of Contemporary Arts, Paris Museum of Modern Art, National Auditorium of Music, Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sónar, Darwin Fringe festival, Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art.

For the Spanish Pavilion of the Expo 2008, López presented a "double sonic intervention", consisting of both an indoor sound installation and an outdoor performance.

In 2006, López won the First Prize for the Sound Art Competition of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. He has received honorable mention of the Prix Ars Electronica on three occasions(1999, 2002, 2007) and is the recipient of the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology.

He is director and curator of the sound archive SONM."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_L%C3%B3pez_(musician))
12/26/2023

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Pat Courtney - Libratory 5:34

2. Chop Shop - Diffusion 6:20

3. Sean Meehan - Everyday I Look At Your Picture 6:16

4. John Hudak - Asphalt 5:02

5. Geoff Dugan - Interstitial 5:48

6. Gen Ken Montgomery - Public Hearing 7:59

7. If Bwana - Evening 7:17

8. Brian Conley - A Field Of Delineations Passing Through A System Of Coordinates 9:18

9. Francisco Lopez - Untitled # 87 6:27

Related Categories of Interest:


Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
Organized Sound and Sample Based Music
lowercase, reductionist, micro-improv, sound improv, onkyo sound
Sound, Noise, &c.
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