"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/

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.

Photos: Jenna Duffy for Artcards Review

Last month, I curated and produced the first Artcards featured event entitled “Happy Oasis.” It was hosted by Culturefix Gallery in the Lower East Side. If you missed the performances, catch it here with photos by Jenna Duffy.

Kristin Reger and Martha Moszczynski

Kristin Reger and Martha Moszczynski

Kristin Reger and Martha Moszczynski

link

Joshue Ott

Joshue Ott demonstrates Thicket

Joshue Ott

Ezekiel Honig and Joshue Ott

Ezekiel Honig

Culturefix

Artists Emmy Mikelson and Charlotte Becket

Hyun Moraes

Thank you all for coming out!

Photo by Mikhail Iliatov

Next Tuesday, Sept. 21, I curated a one-night performance event to happen at the new multi-media culture space Culturefix, located close to the brim of the Lower East Side. The show entitled Happy Oasis is an interesting blend of Hi/Lo Fi instrumentals and electronics with live projections, featuring experimental noisician link (Thessia Machado), electronic composer Ezekiel Honig collaborating with visualist Joshue Ott (superDraw), and sound/visual artist Mikhail Iliatov. The percussionist Hyun Moraes opens the show with an intense shamanic beating of a taiko drum. I’m really curious to see performance artists Kristin Reger and Martha Moszczynski (part avant-garde, part punk) collaborating for the first time to do an entrancing act with attributes to Middle Eastern women. If you have an iPhone or iPad, please bring it for a real-time interactive audio/visual experience. Complete details at opalnest.com

Joshue Ott is one of those innovative artists who visualizes new media in a broader spectrum. Having created superDraw, a platform in which he customized to become his visual instrument, along with multiDraw and Thicket, both interactive projects, Josh is constantly at the forefront. Working with soundscapes, his distinct style of visuals experiments with the basic qualities of form, texture and movement. Since 2005 Josh has been creating live visuals for numerous musicians and various performances around the world. I first experienced Josh’s work live at the 2010 Unsound Festival in New York. We had this conversation in his studio in Brooklyn where he lives with his wife and two children.

Helen Homan Wu: Okay, let’s talk about how you started superDraw. How long ago was it?

Joshue Ott: It was…years ago. Morgan Packard and Ezekiel Honig released Early Morning Migration and I played at the release party. It was some sort of debut. The first time I did superDraw live in front of people and called it superDraw.

H: So that’s when you started interaction or interactive art?

J: I was a Flash developer initially. I went to art school, graduated and got a job doing video compositing and that turned into Flash development. Flash was a fantastic tool for me because it combined animation, sound and movement, and programming. And I really got sucked into, fell in love with, the programming aspect of it. Someone described it as legos, that lego feeling of when you play with legos, you put legos together and make things. Flash is a lot like that. The amount of creativity, things that you could do with it are really fantastic. So I became a Flash developer and that’s what I was doing when all this (superDraw) began. I was experimenting with it and trying things out and one of the early things that I did was a little drawing, I think I might still have it…

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J: Anyway, the initial superDraw was dinky line drawing experiments. SuperDraw’s first version was really made in Flash. And I only performed that version at Share, which is a weekly electro-acoustic jam thing. It’s still going on. Anybody can go and show work and play music together. Visualists can go but it’s harder for them to put things up at the same time so it’s usually passing around the VGA connection for the projector. It became like a socializing thing as well. Morgan and I have gone to other performances together with all kinds of weird bad music, some good and some abstract weird stuff. I started getting inspired by some of the awful bad stuff that I was seeing and hearing, and thinking Oh I could do something cool and interesting too. We went to Share together a couple of times and got inspired as well. It’s a cool environment because it fosters the kind of attitude that you could also come and do it too, so it was encouraging. I actually whipped up something in Flash and performed there a couple of times. When Zeke and Morgan had this release party, I made a much more concerned effort. That’s when I switched over to Processing, which is another programming language.

H: Processing? Is that a different platform?

J: Not Flash, basically. I switched to a different platform.

H: I’m not technically savvy at all, so you’ll have to explain all this (language) to me.

J: In most programming languages, if you have a variable…hmm, how do I explain it simply and not take an hour.  The programming language is C so basically if C was 0 and the next line of code is + +, C would become 1.  So the programming language C++ is basically saying you’ve just incremented C language and made it 1 better. And C++ is really an object-oriented version of C.  C is non-object oriented.

H:  It’s very poetic.

J: Funny that you say that, but that was the very first moment I was inspired. When my programming teacher started writing the code on the whiteboard and I looked at it and thought structurally it’s actually kind of pretty and that’s when I thought to myself, wow it’s almost poetic the way this is and the way this looks.

H: What you’re doing is also really basic or pure and that’s the beauty of it.

J: This became my artistic expression and I really enjoy it.  I think as a creator I normally get bored with things really quickly and with this, whenever I get bored of it I would change it and add something new to it or…

H:  Because you can just manipulate the language?

J:  Right. So the way it works is that I have the main program that draws lines basically and I also have these extra algorithms that I can run on the line to make it do various things, so that I can make it bounce like there’s gravity or something or I can make it twist or do interesting things, or I can do both of those at the same time. So that’s what I do, I combine all these colors and flavors and things and use that to express myself. I have complete control over what it’s doing.

H: And it’s so original because you are the author.  So basically nobody can copy you.

J: Well! That’s not true. There are a lot of very technologically literate artists coming into the universe of creation right now and this is not that hard to do. Even what I’ve done is not that difficult.  I think what really sets me apart is the movement, the focus on animation, whereas most people focus on how something looks or is composed because they come from video art backgrounds.  I’m actually more interested in how it moves.  I actually originally made this program with the idea that my wife would do live contour drawing while I made music for her, and in my head we were going to form this little band but she wasn’t into it.  So it started to move further and further away from being about drawing to being about these effects that I was drawing or making to do all kinds of different things. That was the progression and in the years I just added more and more to it.  I kept adding features and the multi-user stuff.  Where I’m at now…I’m going in a whole bunch of different directions.

H: Do you still go to Share?

J: I have, actually. I was going to Share fairly often last year to work with Eric Redlinger who wrote the Murmur (Mmr) program, which is what people are using for the multi-user connection to superDraw. He actually wrote that on the iPhone. You can apply that to anything and it’s free. He was also part of the gallery show that I did recently, the Multi-user art show in Brooklyn (Devotion Gallery). Every piece (iphone) used the Mmr technology to engage with the audience and basically connect with the art. And there were four different pieces, so that was a cool thing.

H:  I noticed you put a lot of screen shots of your animations on your site. That changes the whole dynamic of it.

J: Absolutely. It’s totally different. I was happy with them, but they’re also very old. And the idea was to use superDraw in a different way, instead of making moving images but into still images. I used this technique for album covers, and I can show you…here’s the 2008 album cover.

H: Who is this artist?

J: Ryan Lott or Son Lux. He’s a pop artist, well not really a “pop” artist, he’s a number of things, but he released an album that’s on the “pop” side of things. So he found me and liked my work and contacted me to do an album cover. Oh and this is another album cover (he finds another album under a stack) which is for one of my other collaborators Morgan Packard. He released an album of electronic music and we released together a DVD of his music with superDraw’s work. It’s really old and early work of that stuff, but it’s still like a history of it.

H: It’s nice. And it’s Anticipate.

J: Yeah, it’s Zeke’s (Ezekiel Honig) label.

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H: What are you working on now? Any recent projects?

J: This thing for Anna Clyne, I made two different videos for her. They both use the same technique and it’s the same that I use for the multiDraw stuff. You saw that at Gina’s (Gina Gibney Dance Company) performance.

H: I could see Apple commissioning you to do something.

J: That’ll be great.  I’m also about to develop something new for the iPhone. I showed you Thicket right? Well it’s the same thing as superDraw where what you see is the actual interface, there are no sliders or things like that. And people are complaining that there are no controls. People are use to apps with a bunch of sliders, knobs and things that you can control aspects of the program. People are requesting that.

H: Right. That’s why I was surprised and I asked you where is the interface to superDraw?

J: There is none.

(I’m playing around with Thicket, magnetizing the iPad’s touchscreen with my fingers and palm.)

J: So this is what I’m moving forward with at this point. I actually want to make superDraw for the iPad. And one reason is that you can actually plug in an adaptor to go onto an external screen. So people can use this device to make visuals.

H:  Is this a beta?

J:  No, this is out on the app store, you can buy this.  So this capability makes me really excited as a visualist. The next thing that I’m going to do is some mixture of superDraw with something like Thicket but not just on the iPad but on the iPhone as well.

H:  But not for the internet?

J:  No. I mean it could, I don’t see a reason why it couldn’t, but it’s much more spectacular on the iPad.

H:  I know.  But I don’t have either of these!  I guess I should get an iPod Touch or something. There’s so many fun apps out, it’s like a whole movement going on right now.

J:  Yes, absolutely! And I’m really excited about it.

H:  What are some of the other visual art apps that you like?

J:  Well, the Brian Eno one is pretty awesome.

(We test that one out. Beautiful. He shows me a few more including an app by Record Makers.)

J:  I’m also more interested to make something that crosses the boundaries between game and art.  Have you seen the Sonic Wire Sculptor?

(He shows me this drawing and music app that is not unlike the Etch-a-Sketch)

J:  I can spend hours showing you stuff.

H:  Do you let your kids use superDraw?

J:  Yeah. I can show you Orli’s house.  (His daughter made a doodle mimicking daddy’s superDraw drawing on the walls of a life-size cardboard box house handmade by Josh.)

Helen Homan Wu is a curator and writer. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Photo credits: 1 (courtesy Joshue Ott), 2 (taken at Mutek by Caroline Hayeur), 3, 4, 5, 7 (Rebecca Black), 6 (HW)

Joshue Ott’s work and live performances can be found on
intervalstudios.com

More information about Thicket here.