Re: [-empyre-] boundaries, or not

["Trace Reddell" <treddell@du.edu>]

fizzion:
> I am particularly interested in the act of listening and would like to
hear
> if anyone else has focussed on this aspect of music/sound making and
> experience.
> 1.
> There is the way of listening for instance where music is like wallpaper,
> ambient background, mood enhancing, mood suppression, happy cow milking
> music.

I'm really interested in the function of ambient media, particularly given
the dual requirements outlined by Eno in his liner notes: ambient has to
function both as a tincture of the environment and as something that will
allow for close and repeated listening. The work has to accomodate and
reward imaginative expansion and contraction of the senses.

In my work -- particularly the stasis_space exhibits -- I'm drawn to the
book through sound, particularly to the sonic atmosphere of the book, using
the software I've mentioned to facilitate a transfer of organization schemes
across file types and see what can be evoked in terms of those rhythms,
melodies, and voices I mentioned earlier. In some of the works, "Machinery
for Dreaming" in particular, "voices" also connotes some distinct instrument
sounds which were spontaneously organized out of intersecting synth patches
for an interesting effect. I've been working with multiple layers of
Absynth, which can generate pretty rich, complex sounds.

LITmixer plays with this idea, too, but with the groovebook. I wanted to
work with Derrida in particular, because it was in "Plato's Pharmacy" that I
was introduced to the idea of listening to literature; Derrida's essay ends
up being about writing as sound-fx processing (particularly reverb, echo)
controlled at a mixing desk. Because it has shifted forms and taken on
different media sources, the LITmixer remediates the book and so brings with
it different expectations, use, interaction, layering into multiple
sequences at the level of micro-overlays, echos, and delays; looping Derrida
catch-phrases on the fly. The book becomes a way to generate ambience.