Testimonials
"“It's becoming part of the family! I keep hearing new modules and new combinations…”
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"More entertaining than I expected. Also, surprisingly comic - in the sense that the sounds were sometimes so novel and unexpected, they'd make me laugh out loud."
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"Question asked about Room Pieces: am I a composition?
- imho, definitely yes, but this question is definitely going to get on some people’s nerves, the fact that it is a composition.
Question asked about Room Pieces: am I a “good" composition?
- hell yeah, it’s a great composition, basically it’s the most exciting composition I’ve heard in the last 10 years.
Question asked by Room Pieces: am I the Last Composition?
- I am imagining this as the end of composition as we know it, where in a few generations not writing for “infinite” length will be seen as “quaint”, a bit like people making Fabergé eggs now, or people painting icons now… [irony aside? Writing for finite length will be seen as an ironic statement in the future?]
Still getting to grips with the “infinite” time factor (am restarting it each week now).
Still getting to grips with the “synchronous" time factor (am starting it each week at a random time).
Anyway, fascinating stuff…your use of delay blew me away this week… gave my apartment a very Ballardian feel… (this week… every week I get blown away by something else).
Am thinking of buying some more speakers so that I can put two in each room (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom).
By the way, in the context of 'an apartment' ('the apparetmential' context?), in French 'une pièce' means 'a room'. The French translation of 'Room Pieces' could be 'Pièce pour pièces'."
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"I was worried initially that the sounds might be intrusive or distracting. I like the natural sounds in my neighborhood--birds, wind, neighbors' voices. And I like quiet, too. So I wondered if having a sound installation might just add clutter. I found that it didn't. It helped that the piece was pretty spare. Also, oddly, the installation made me notice sounds in and around my house more--because I wasn't always sure if they were "natural" sounds or sounds from the installation."
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"On Sunday when I installed it, I was in the middle of cleaning a box of 45's picked up years ago in a garage sale. After cleaning, I would spin the records in the same room as the LRP. The combination of 70's souls and country with the LRP was astonishing!"
"Yesterday morning I was onto my third cup of espresso when the 10AM trigger scared the crap out of me. This morning I couldn't wait for the start, and I was treated to a gentle, slowly ramping envelope of tones.”
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"I have found it interesting as I have become increasingly more aware of the sounds of our house -- the heat pipes, wind blowing against the siding, the espresso machine gurgling-- and they all begin to blend into the LRP and become one entity."
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“The living room piece has been a pleasure to have, here’s a few bullets: it’s very different than any other type of presentation because you live with it and it lives with you, so it becomes an entity, almost like a friend. Sometimes it sulks and does nothing for hours and then sometimes it is aggressive and attacks. Because it is an entity with its own control (on/off) it reacts with your environment, it makes you think about sound differently and it inspires you to decipher sounds more often. As art it exists but as an entity, different than owning a painting where one decides when to look at or having a recording you want to listen to so you turn something on or going to an exhibition or performance where you are calibrated to view work with full attention. This merges with your environment and becomes part of it. Because it is sound, it occupies space for moment and then leaves but on it’s own accord so that’s another difference. If you walk through a plaza and encounter a public art sculpture, you decide to stop and look at it or not but you are in control of that experience, this is a different experience. At times, it merges with other sound sources that are active, almost sounding like it was composed to do so. I had the windows opened and it was emitting some FMish tones and the birds were going nuts. Another time some neighbors were fussing with their car and one of the more aggressive passages kicked off and it sounded like part of their work. A crucial aspect was to get the speaker placement right, that took a day of messing around with it. I put one channel in my 3rd floor painting studio on the floor pointed towards the hall and the other channel in the middle room elevated and pointed at the door and the quasi cathedral ceiling I have in the stairwell. This made for some great reflections and refractions and I was able to listen to it from the second or first floors. Because these are sounds broadcast in a space, it has it’s own convolution reverb of sorts. It would be great if the speaker to speaker connection could be wireless, that would just free you up to experiment with more speaker configurations and greatly add to what it could do. It would also make it less visible, but like I said the speaker placement is a super important part of the piece. It made me think of a Vito Acconci piece (I think it’s Vito) where he encased a speaker in a block of cement that broadcast the sound of a scream.”