"Folding In On Itself" (2011, Type Records)

Ezekiel Honig is a NY based music producer, sound artist and founder of two respected labels – Anticipate and Microcosm – well known in the circles of music connoisseurs and art enthusiasts. Many people, including myself, have fully embraced his solo work with the beautiful and enigmatic “Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band” (Anticipate, 2008). Aside from having released six studio albums and an equal amount of singles/EPs and splits/collaborations since 2003, Honig has also been producing sound for picture as well as being a constructive audio thinker.

Ezekiel has generously shared his latest release with me on a rainy Thursday afternoon of April. From the first seconds of this recording I immediately sensed that I am entering a very private territory.  It brought me to a place that was warm, organic, and, strangely enough, familiar. The sounds coming from Honig’s latest album blended exceptionally well with the moody cityscape outside my window as if they were the reflecting voices of the neighboring buildings or the sighs and the pulses of the passers-by. “Folding In On Itself” carries Honig’s signature sound but its textural palette tells a more personal story that ties the artist to the city he inhabits and the city respectively becomes the skin and bone of Honig’s aural canvas. A minor difference worth noting compared to his earlier offerings is that Folding In On Itself is released under the Type imprint, home to artists like Xela, Helios, Goldmund, Deaf Center, Mokira and Rene Hell among others.

Folding In On Itself Record Release Party is on May 12 at Littlefield. The bill also includes a DJ set by John Xela (founder of Type) as well as a set by Borne. More info about the event can be found here.

MP: Does “Folding In On Itself” summarize your personal soundprint within the collective memory of this city and its past?

Ezekiel Honig: Well, it’s a tiny sliver of that, an example of moving through cities.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling it a summary, but more a version of it.  Similarly, although New York City dominates the album, there are moments from Torun, Poland, and Milan, Italy as well.  In a way, any city serves the purpose and the symbolism, even though the heart of it and the majority of the outdoor sounds do originate in New York.  I recorded all the original sounds so it’s all remapping experience, wherever I was when the recordings happened.

MP: How long did it take you to make this album?

EH: Roughly two years.  That time is of course not full time, eight hours a day and not regimented in any way.  There were weeks where I didn’t get anything done and weeks that were extremely productive.

MP: A recurring pattern in your work which, I think, is responsible for the uniqueness of your sound, is its muted, slow paced meditative flow. Do you spend a lot of time with your materials until they get their final shape and sound?

EH: Making music is as much about meditation for me as anything else.  Each track gets finished slowly, editing and piecing things together until they feel correct.  Because the music comes out of the process itself, and is not incredibly preconceived, it needs to happen over a period of time, revealing itself to me though trial and observation, making sense as I delve further into it.

MP: How much space do you leave to intuition when you produce a track?

EH: Intuition is a big part of it.  That being said, let me be clear that the intuition is based on a range of experiences and sounds and built over time, a cumulative idea rather than a make it up as you go, free-for-all.  Intuition might be another way of saying internal logic, the system that a track or a series of tracks sets up for themselves, moving from one piece to another in a way that makes sense within the confines of the world it is existing in, the sounds it is using and the place I want it to go.

MP: What is your approach when it comes to field-recordings? Do you hunt the sounds that you have in your mind or do sounds reveal themselves to you after the recording process?

EH: Definitely the latter.  I never look for something specific when I record outside, though of course the sounds that happen are limited by where I go.  Besides choosing a location I’m more interested in finding things that just happen, searching for the sounds that occur within the recording and have potential for a track.  I often find a sound that leads to a track being built around it and I never could have planned that.

I’m more excited by the happenstance of what occurs at any given moment, the accidental nature of the process of recording a situation that you can’t control, and then the paradox is that you do in fact control the final output, manipulating that material to do what you want it to do.  It’s almost like digging for samples, but within a few spare moments of actual occurrence rather than records that exist.

MP: Do you have a favorite location in NY that you regard highly inspirational and sonically interesting?

EH: There are certain spaces that have a particularly interesting resonance to them (subways, museums, etc), but honestly, any second on any city street has a wealth of potential.  If you’re listening carefully, it is all interesting, but certain nuances need to be coaxed out.  Because it’s more about editing and processing any two minutes of recording can at least potentially yield something essential.  It makes you listen to the world more carefully, which changes one’s perspective, on life as much as music.

"People, Places & Things" (2004, Microcosm)

MP: I get the feeling that in this release the use of recorded environments/spaces contains at times a denser network of metadata and personal memory stamps. How does that relate to your concept of the loop as a tool?

EH: There are certain moments which feel like they can work as a loop, while others need to play out on their own a bit.  I don’t know how to explain this accurately because it is based on instinct (leading back to your previous question).  This instinct (or intuition) is based on all past experience and sound work, so it is incremental in a sense, and part of being myself.  Just as a loop is a tool to be used in the construction of a piece, any sound is a tool in the same vein.  That is, however, a simplification of something more emotionally complicated.

The fact that I recorded the sounds of these spaces inherently carries with it a memory association, but it also gets manipulated from a source of all memories.  It’s difficult to separate the event itself from all other events.  Sound is so powerful for memory.  While a photograph is missing what was out of frame, and one fills that in with what they think was there, sound is just as it is, if it hasn’t been manipulated of course.  It retains all things which were within earshot (microphone-shot, more specifically).  Listening to a recording of a space I am instantly transported there and begin remembering details about the moment, even if it was from years ago.  While I may remember some things incorrectly, the sound is what it is.  I may have forgotten that this car drove by, but I hear it very distinctly, so I know that it happened.

Editing those moments into something new, utilizing shards of them for a new purpose, is a layered process because depending on the processing and the arrangement it can either color the rest of the track with those memories or it can get lost in the new thing which it is now a part of.  It completely depends on the way it is used, how it is mixed, and how strong the associations are.  In many ways working with these materials can be flashback oriented, movements through personal stories, and sometimes they’re just sounds with potential, a tool to be harnessed like any other towards the desired goal.

"Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band" (2008, Anticipate)

MP: Recently I read a very interesting article about the state of music industry. The author made the remark that an artist who has developed a unique aural vocabulary can stand out and defy the challenges of the democratized and yet cluttered music community. Do you think that being “unique” is enough and if so how would you define this term?

EH: This is a question I think and talk about often.  There are so many interwoven layers to it, of art, business, social culture, technology. Unique as an idea is of course defined differently for everyone, based on their taste.  What is unique for one is boring for another.  It all depends on context, on cultural associations, so it’s an extremely “eye of the beholder” type of construct.  There is also the need for something to be unique and ‘good’, another word with a multitude of definitions.  My point is simply that uniqueness helps you stand out, but the work needs to also connect to something familiar enough that people will respond to it.  It’s an interesting balance.

To comment on the article you read more directly, being unique is necessary to stand out in the crowded marketplace, but it is far from being enough to make a difference, or to stand out to the extent that people will support the work (i.e. support the artist, support the label).  There is so much out there, that while some things rise to the top because they touch a specific emotional or cultural chord with audiences, much of the success of something still relies on how loud the shouting is (promotion, marketing) or the label that it is released on.  A small number of labels have an established enough brand for it to affect how a release does in the marketplace.  An overwhelming majority does not.

Similarly, the crowding of people’s time and mental space creates a situation where all of us miss out on material that we might love, but will never find out about, or have time for if we did.  Aggregation is consistently being given more attention because it can use filters for people, but the filters still leave something to be desired.

The thing which is both interesting and scary, exciting and challenging, about the current musical landscape (and all media for that matter) is the fragmentation that we are in the midst of.  While there used to be a set route of producing, releasing and promoting a work, there are now pretty much no rules and lots of options, both tested and still to be thought of.  It’s amazing, and also can be confusing.  It calls into question some basic tenets of distribution and finding an audience.  One can dream up a new approach and make it work, and there is no need to really follow the same path that has been used for the last bunch of decades.  This then calls into question the whole concept of course, and reminds us that what we take for granted as the manner in which music is released and received is an extremely new thing in history, and we are merely at the beginning of the next phase, and we don’t know how it will turn out and what the effects will be.  Because so many of the boundaries have been removed, there is less authority of taste in a sense, which is amazing, not just because it creates a situation which makes it easier for more creative ideas to break through, but because it requires the average listener to curate their own taste more concretely, to shape one’s listening habits rather than turning on the radio and accepting whatever the pop charts are.  I realize many people still do that, but a lower percentage than it was twenty years ago.

MP: How did your release with Type occur?

EH: I’ve known John Twells, the owner of Type, for a few years, through music industry circles.  He asked me about doing a record for the label after hearing my Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band album, which I released on my Anticipate label in 2008.  Thankfully the resulting record met his criteria for a release on his label.  It’s pretty amazing to be working through Type, with a label and a person that I respect creatively and organizationally, that I trust with my work.  Self-promotion has always been a necessary evil for me, rather than something which comes naturally, so having another company take care of that end of a release is pretty rad.

MP: Do you have any other creative activities currently going on apart from your latest release?

EH: I took a bit of time after finishing the album to clear my head creatively, but am back in full swing now, working on a couple collaborative audiovisual projects which are in a different direction, am in the early stages of a collaboration with Mark Templeton, and beginning to work on music for a couple of short films and possibly a documentary later in the year.

Artist Links:

http://www.ezekielhonig.com/

http://www.anticipaterecordings.com/

http://www.microcosm-music.com/

Deaf Center (Image: John Twells)

Behind the alias of Deaf Center are Erik Skodvin and Otto Totland, too pals from Norway. They are equally fascinated and inspired by the lights of the cities, an atmospheric walk in the empty forests of Norway, the dark yet disarming emotional contour of the movies of David Lynch or Kubrick. Erik has recently moved to Berlin where Deaf Center recorded, within three days, their latest album Owl Splinters, in Nils Frahm’s studio. He also runs Miasmah one of the most distinguished labels of experimental music and has being releasing solo work under a variety of monikers, the most prominent Svarte Greiner (Black Leaves in English). Otto has also been actively producing work for Nest, among others, as well as taking care of his home in Norway. I first encountered their music when exposed to the beautiful sincerity of Pale Ravine (Type Records, 2005). I was impressed by the density of their modern classical-ambient soundscapes, knowing that both considered themselves classically untrained or to be more specific self-taught musicians.

I had the chance to see them perform live here in New York as part of this year’s Unsound Festival’s Beyond the Dark – a tribute event for the music of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki at Judson Church in Manhattan. Erik has also performed as Svarte Greiner with Polish-German percussionist Paul Wirkus on the live soundtrack for Murnau’s German Expressionist classic “Nosferatu”.

In the following questions I try to focus on Deaf Center’s creative process, their thoughts about computer sequencing as opposed to live instrumental performances, and the power of words in their music-making.

Deaf Center's "Owl Splinters" (2011, Type Records)

Erik: Thank you. I think they definitely have something in common, though the way their made is so different and there was no intention to try follow up Pale Ravine sound wise. I think its best if peoples take on Owl Splinters as a self-expanding universe, rather than having to compare it to PR.

Otto: The process of making Owl Splinters was very different from Pale Ravine – texturally, I would consider Owl Splinter much richer. Emotionally, I would say Owl Splinters is darker.

MP: During your set at Judson Church I was engaged by its meditative flow. Was it all improvised?

Erik: Yes in the way that we have very small things set like maybe a certain key we’re working around, and Otto plays one piece in the end which is from the record. We did however pick out certain sounds from the album that we play underneath some parts of the performance to make it slightly recognizable for the audience.

Deaf Center "Pale Ravine" (2006, Type)

MP: Do you think that playing live and improvising has opened up your working/creative process and the way you compose your albums?

Erik: Yes, most definitely. The way I/we make music now is totally different from back when we made PR. None of us had any idea on how to perform things when we did our first live shows, but over the years things become more and more live – which I think is think is much more fun to perform. This has been the case on Owl Splinters and some of my own albums under “Svarte Greiner” also, meaning the way the album is made in a much more live improvised way rather than composing it traditionally.

Otto: Yes, having a set this improvised makes it a little unpredictable – even for us. We heavily depend on improvisations when we make new material also.

Deaf Center performing at Judson Memorial Church for Unsound Festival NY 2011 (Image: Stephen Cardinale)

MP: Both of you have been producers (either in your collab in Deaf Center or in your solo works) and know both sides of the story. What would you define as the pros of computer sequencing, as opposed to the physicality and intuition of live instrumental improvisations?

Erik: Pros. For the computer sequencing, you have much more control over all aspects of the sound and the way it’s presented. Though I think a good combination of the two approaches is the best way to work. It’s all a big experimentation progress in different ways of making music. Making Pale Ravine, Knive, Kappe, Flare & Owl Splinters have all been very different processes, and hopefully this will continue to change.

Otto: With sequencing you get the time to work with details – It’s easy to go back and add or change something. But when I just use computer sequencers, I tend to end up with a result that feels more clinical. The best way to go is a combination of both.

MP: Your choice of words for album and song titles is triggered by atmospheric and emotional gravity. How does that have impact on the mood and the sound palette you end up using?

Erik: Album titles and track names were all invented after the music was made. Which has been the case on pretty much all releases. I find it much more fun finding track names after the music is done, impacting the mood and how people would listen to the track by playing with words.

MP:  Erik, I have read from your previous interviews that you are a big cinema buff and that walking in a city or a forest can inspire you. With your music, do you intend perhaps to guide your listener through what you see or feel in a similar way that a movie director does?

Erik: In a way, I guess so – though in the end the music i/we produce is a product of whom we are as persons, rather than trying to put too much intellect or depth in everything I/we do, it’s more up to each and every person that listens to it, to come up with their own interpretation, which I think is a good way to listen to things. In my perspective, listening to music is all about mood and making your own little universe out of it.

MP: Are you working on any new solo or Deaf Center releases?

Erik: Nope.

Otto: I’m working on some new Nest material for a 10” Serein release.

Artist Links:

Deaf Center

Miasmah Recordings

Ben Frost, Daniel Bjarnason, Sinfonietta Cracovia with film manipulations by Brian Eno & Nick Robertson (Photos: Stephen Cardinale for Unsound Festival)

It has been a highly provocative and musically charged past week and a half. For those who have been following Artcards Review, I’ve been covering Unsound Festival 2011 here in NYC since its opening on April 1st.  And yesterday was the final wrap up of an entire week and a half of experimental music and sonic arts events. The shows were aesthetically diverse and seemed to have opened up new pathways for a lot of local sound art enthusiasts. Besides igniting interest through cross-cultural collaborations, audiences also got a chance to get a closer look at the artists’ practices through “conversations” during Unsound Labs. In retrospect, Unsound 2011 seemed to have a much less focus on electronic music per se, with a more diverse palette on genres ranging from Iceland’s Ben Frost and Sinfonietta Cracovia, to Lustmord and Deaf Center, both deep, dark, and ambient in its own ways, to the Bunker nights of techno music to the finale disco party by local hosts Kiss & Tell. Even though I wanted to attend it all (trust me, I penciled it all in my calendar), I would not have been able to write this recap if I did. But apparently Stephen Cardinale, Unsound’s official photographer shot through the entire week of events, and here it is below.

Ben Frost at Alice Tully Hall

Daniel Bjarnason and Ben Frost at Alice Tully Hall

Anna Zaradny at ISSUE PROJECT ROOM

HATI + Z'ev at ISSUE PROJECT ROOM

Deaf Center at Judson Church

Sinfonietta Cracovia at Judson Church

MERCE at ISSUE PROJECT ROOM

Morton Subotnick / Atom TM / Visuals: Lillevan at David Rubenstein Atrium, Lincoln Center

Morton Subotnick / Visuals: Lillevan at David Rubenstein Atrium, Lincoln Center

Robert Piotrowicz at Littlefield

Harald Grosskopf at Le Poisson Rouge

Lustmord at Abron Arts Center

http://www.unsound.pl/en

Unsound Festival New York is presented by Fundacja Tone, the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York

As we approach the horizon of the 2011 Unsound Music Festival NY, I can feel the anticipation building up. If you are a fan of electronic music and sonic arts, like I am, you probably know that Europe (particularly Germany) is the place to be. Beginning April 1st, New York folks will be in for a treat.  It was only until a few weeks ago that the 2011 program has been announced, but it was well worth the wait.  Last year’s line-up was amazing, but this year’s will not disappoint. The Festival officially opens on April 6th, with a preliminary week of screenings and lectures opening on April 1st under Unsound Festival NY Labs.

View full program and artists here.

Honig performing at "Happy Oasis" (Photo: Jenna Duffy)

Our guest contributor Ezekiel Honig is a composer of ambient music, a sound artist and designer, an electronic music producer, and founded the music labels Anticipate and Microcosm. He recently scored music for the film “Florent: Queen of the Meat Market” (2010).  Last month Zeke performed at “Happy Oasis” a show that I produced, proved to be a smooth and yielding experience to work with a truly professional music artist. As we’ve been exchanging thoughts and philosophizing on art, music and life, I invited him to write a column focusing on just that–music. In the following words Zeke amplifies his thoughts and different takes as a music artist on the definition of “Genre.”

I think about genre all the time.  To be more specific, musical genre in music which is difficult to categorize, that falls between certain margins.  As someone who produces material that is in this landscape, but perhaps more so as someone who runs a music label, I’m always looking to frame an artist’s work, to give it the context it needs to relate to something which already exists, and the distance it needs from that thing in order to be original.  This is the constant tension experienced by artists (of all kinds) and one could easily argue, of humanity as a whole.  We want to be connected to something larger than ourselves but also uniquely individual. In this way, musical genre is a scaled-down version of a principle that runs a thread through everything, but that is perhaps a larger discussion.

So where does music fall in this balancing act?  Where does genre help and where does it hurt?  Should it serve some basic functions and then be left alone, or is it something stronger that needs to be lauded over and nurtured, or simply re-translated, with people paying homage to a concept and institution larger than themselves?  To put it quite simply, I would say yes. Yes to all those paths and the multitude of less severe ones in between.  There’s no actual answer, which is good, because it means these topics are in flux, never standing still, always developing…as they should be.

The Balancing Act of History

A genre is at its best as something which grew on its own out of customs of producing music, passing ideas and experience along the way. It’s important to remember the historical counterpart, a lineage which allows musicians to build on what each previous generation has done, to progress (or at least change) what was happening, rather than needing to go back to the beginning without learning from the mistakes and experience of the past.  Everyone is getting a head-start because of everyone who came before, which gives us all a means of referencing influences in order to position and understand current work in a different way.  Regardless of one’s time in history, originality is extremely difficult, but where genre has taken a movement in sound can be a stepping stone, a base from which to act and a healthy set of limitations, if one chooses to traffic in them.

I speak about this from my own experience of acknowledging my influences and looking for more, to help shade the original ones.  I’m always thinking in terms of broad connections like house, dub, techno, ambient, because those are categories which have tropes built into them now, and one can quickly hint towards that without going too far down the path of defining the material as being that thing, or easily go all the way down that path if it’s the goal.  Genre can be used to color something without covering it entirely, like applying a cultural footnote without explicitly saying so.

The Club Definition

In electronic music, different forms of dance music (or club music, or however you refer to it) control the conversation because they are such ingrained genres and even when something is clearly not meant for the function of dance music, it needs to often define itself by the degree to which it doesn’t do that, which in and of itself is kind of an odd concept.  The function of dance music is interesting though. If people are dancing then it’s doing what it’s supposed to do.  It’s almost like comedy. If people laugh, it’s working, though there will always be a level of criticism that may demand it makes one dance (or laugh) in a specific way, with a specific thought in mind.  Once these basic standards are established there is room to build.  When there is a function involved genre becomes even more essential because it lets you experiment within the confines, or stretch what the confines mean.  That’s my favorite place, where something is new but has the subtext of, “by the way, this is also techno, sort of.”

This constant tension exists for concepts themselves.  Though many may disagree with this statement, I think that – at least at this point in musical history – once a genre becomes codified and the list of what makes it the thing which it is becomes a known quantity, it begins to die.  It becomes too easy to copy and homogenize and has little else to offer, removing the initial excitement of this new discovery.  Simultaneously, if someone doesn’t know what to call something it makes them less likely to talk about it with their friends (which isn’t to say they won’t, but it requires more creative conversation).  Words actually mean things even if they mean different things to different people. There are exceptions, where something seems new and trendy and coming out of nowhere, but is actually rooted in some long-standing forms and emotions (i.e. disco, house, hip hop), which is what allows it to keep developing and spawning off new genres with further and further subdivisions. If it has a deep base that it stands on it has an easier time jumping off, knowing where it’s tethered to the past, acknowledging that it can only stray so far.  Once it becomes unique enough to be a new sub-genre unto itself with a tidy name to describe it, it begins the process of its own dismantling.

A tall slight man carried a blank sign through the sea of seated people silencing them in his wake. Then Liz Harris, of the music project Grouper, trickled through the crowd and the sounds began cascading down from the cement balconies that comprise the University of Berkeley’s Art Museum. Grouper’s installation performance piece SLEEP is part two of four Friday night ‘Gatherings’ curated by David Wilson at the Berkeley Art Museum. In this performance Liz Harris uses tape-collage, live instruments and the cavernous architecture of the Berkeley Art Museum to create a ‘downward-pulling current, lulling with the hiss and resonating pulse of watery sound and light’.

This effect is created by situating speakers on all levels of the building that spill and mix sound into the echoing void below. This creates a soft swelling ominous noise that shifts and changes as you move through the museum. An underwater effect was created by projecting light onto a cluster of silver streamers casting dim shimmers onto various parts of the museum walls. Harris certainly put her crowd into a sleepy dreamworld and created an open-ended environment letting the audience experience and explore their own rendition of sleep.

Photos courtesy of Kanoa Zimmerman and Mariko Reed

When I was told that Alva Noto would be performing at the Kitchen last night, I braved it to Chelsea just in time before he started his set. Carsten Nicolai a.k.a. Alva Noto is a minimalist sound artist, post-techno electronic musician. I started following his work since his early collaborations with Sakamoto Ryuichi. What I didn’t realize is that Mr. Nicolai also produces visuals. Last night’s performance was mind-blowing, literally, the heavily broken beats, blips, and prolonged static are sounds from faxes, modems and the telephone. They were in sync with the intense visuals which was manipulated real-time by Mr. Nicolai himself. There is something quite ecstatically surreal in this work in which he uses old technologies (with recordings by poet Anne-James Chaton) that throws you off the chair. It is the art of minimal simulation to the max. The show is presented by the Pace Gallery.  More photos to come.

“Since 2003, Unsound Festival, Poland’s most adventurous music festival, has brought a bold and uniquely modern program of music to Kraków. Now, with seven festivals in their native city under their belt (and outpost events further east in cities like Minsk), Unsound is coming west to New York for their first ever North American edition. Unsound Festival New York’s mission is to forge new links between music genres, between generations and even between artistic practices. The driving force in the assembling of the New York program has been Unsound Festival’s commitment to forms of music and sound art that involve experimentation and risk. Unsound Festival has made a worldwide reputation by breaking new ground while dealing with vibrant electronic, experimental, independent, post-classical and club music scenes from around the world.”

Thursday February 4th opens an exciting series of sound, visual art and music events that has never happened in the East Coast of the States. If you follow any sort of experimental electronic music or video art, chances are you heard the waves coming. As an electronic beats enthusiast, I was extremely excited that the Unsound Festival is actually taking place in New York City. I’ve always been disappointed that the experimental electronic scene isn’t happening much here in my hometown compared to Berlin or London, but when I saw the lineup to Unsound I was more than impressed. The program boasts a nice mix of multidisciplinary art forms including electronic/post-rock/classical/neo-jazz music, sound art, experimental visuals… That is the best I can do to categorize — a lot of the work doesn’t cleanly fit into any one categorical box.

The first show begins appropriately at Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium with an improvisational performance by Berlin video artist Lillevan (who’s also working on the Warhol Screen Tests) and Finland’s Vladislav Delay, followed by the avante-garde group Solid State Transmitters. This show was also part of the Thursday free Target shows, so the queue of people went around the block. Half of the people didn’t even get to step inside. I decidedly gave up, saving my energy for Saturday’s 8-hour long set of experimental improvised soundscapes from Group Show (Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler).

The line-up looks like this: