Rain Clouds and Music For Headphones
Background
Rain Clouds and Music for Headphones is born of my desire to communicate how my reality has been inescapably shaped by saturation in contemporary technologies. Using materials and techniques familiar to my upbringing, I sought a representation of my experience that resonates with others of a similar demographic. Like many young adults living in urban spaces, I am an avid headphone user. They have mediated the interface between myself and the urban environment, rendering the digital audio-visual space synonymous with urbanity. Choosing to immerse myself in this dislocated reality is then a cognitive strategy, replacing uncomfortable urban spaces with the friendly and familiar. A privatized sound space promotes aesthetic colonization, while a wall of sound silences the harsh exterior. To that end, I wanted to represent these modern aural practices and aesthetics through digital and analog manipulation. Spatial disorientation and spectral features which are enhanced by near-field in-ear transduction cater to the intended listening platform, while the tonal and textural narrative act as an allegory for the experience of urban headphone use. Ultimately, Rain Clouds and Music for Headphones is about preservation; the desolate, mystical, and savagely beautiful little places we escape to in our minds as we navigate stormy seas.
“Silence which promotes both isolation and the flowering of self; the richness of interiority contrasted with the blandness of the outside world.” (Bull, The Audio-Visual iPod)
Score
The project began as a written piano composition titled Sketches For Headphones, in which I set out to convey my own “flowering of self” through the instrument most responsible for connecting me with an understanding of my ethnic culture. In this regard, Sketches For Headphones furnishes the DNA which sculpts Rain Clouds and Music for Headphones as a whole. In the score, the idiosyncratic expression markings for each sketch represent the source material and influences that have motivated the ethos of the piece.
The expression marking for Sketch 2 uses the name of the Ethiopian composer-pianist-nun “Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou”. I was introduced through her solo piano album in Francis Falceto’s Ethiopiques collection, in which western classical and Ethio-Jazz influences are fused into an unmistakable musical language. This fusion renders a life of musical virtuosity, religious self-exile, and maverick gender struggles, rooted in Ethiopia's tumultuous 20th-century political history. I wanted her musical language to influence the performance of Sketch 2, in the same way it has backdropped the reconciliations of the different parts of my identity.
The expression marking “Montuño, Like a Boricua'' for Sketch 8 instructs the performers to improvise “from the mountain” with the soul of the indigenous taíno people of Puerto Rico. The piano part is written with the montuño rhythm used frequently in Caribbean music, and the trumpet part is a collection of rhythmic sets transcribed from popular Puerto Rican melodies
“Emphatically Midway, Distinctly Nowhere” for sketch 9 is taken from photographer Paul D’Amato’s statement on his Midway series. The photos in this series depict the lives of residents of the neighborhood surrounding the Chicago Midway Airport, exploring “the gray areas of urbanity”. I understood his work as analogous to my own experience navigating the gray, liminal, and altogether strangely beautiful areas of Los Angeles.
Recording
For the recording of the performance of Sketches For Headphones, 3 condenser mics were placed around the living room of my childhood home where my family’s piano resides. A fourth boom microphone was placed in a small enclosed room adjacent to the living room. This placement captures the low frequencies of the performance propagating through the wall, and exterior noise/ambience from the room's open window. A fifth zoom recorder placed in a room at the farthest corner of the house captures the reverberance of the performance.
All of these microphone placements allow for shifts in perspective of the piano recording, as well a stronger emphasis on the listeners disposition and sense of space. I want the listener to feel like they’re in the room with me as I'm practicing, or to feel like a neighbor confusing distant piano with the ambient noises of their own house.
To accompany the sketch recordings, I exclusively used field recordings from the past 8 months, and a Moog Mother 32 modular synthesizer — no MIDI information was used. Integral audio bits used for instrumentation and thematic material include recordings of conversation on public transit, chimes on a windy day, rain pattering on the roof of my home, an old radio in my house, a kids choir, and public spaces from around the greater Los Angeles area.
I was particularly interested in the recordings of liminal spaces; through indiscriminate recording, I often found myself capturing fantastically spontaneous and non-re-creatable moments. Beeps, swooshes, and clicks in train stations epitomized a feeling of movement between places, while the inaudible chatter of radio felt comparative to the complexity of loneliness. The irony of how even in the most crowded, dense, and populated urban environments, and on the most hyper-connected social media platforms, we can still feel the most desolate. In both, innumerous voices are completely unaware of our existence.
Digital and Analogue Production
For the digital production, all of the sketches and field recordings were processed and fragmented using a tape machine, and/or Max for Live granular synthesizers in the Ableton Live DAW. The tape machine was customized by cutting a hole in the side to allow for the use of tape loops of different lengths. The tape is wrapped around a copper pole outside of the body of the tape machine, allowing for tactile manipulation and distortion of the tape recording.
I used the Max4Live Grain Freeze and PitchLooper89 audio tools in an Ableton DAW, with several parameters modulated separately in left and right channels by LFOs and envelope followers, to create indeterminate feedback loops whose instability self-generated the qualitative experience of fragmentation.
Assistance for all recordings was provided by sound engineer Abe Bradley. Stills taken during the field recording sessions are provided by photographer Marissa Aivazis, and BTS of the Sketches for Headphones recording session are provided by videographer Chase Hirt. The album cover used for Rain Clouds and Music For Headphones is provided by photographer Kyra McAllister.
Cassette Footage Experimentation
Pairing music from thesis with cassette footage from my dad’s 30 year old camera…