Sonic Intention: An Interview with Metabolic Studio's Sonic Division The Sonic Division s David Baine, Lauren Bon, Aaron Ebensperger, Douglas Lee, and Dani Lunn discuss their sonic activation of the watershed of Los Angeles a 240-mile stretch that is defined by the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Lauren Bon s Requiem for Water is a sound score of this watershed with a glacial time signature. Lauren Bon The Sonic Division practice of weekly jam sessions is an intention-setting ritual in which we connect ourselves at Metabolic Studio in downtown Los Angeles to the Owens Valley dry lakebed more than two hundred miles away. We make sound by the banks of the Los Angeles River that resonates in an eightyfoot-tall silo, live, via an internet radio connection between the Los Angeles River and the snowmelt of the Eastern Sierra. Through a tangible offering of sound, we link the journey of water to a sonic trace. We play various gamelan-esque instruments that are handmade or adapted those sounds are feeding into the silo. 1
On the Owens Valley lakebed, the array of silos and the attached ruin of a glass-factory warehouse is the concert hall into which our sounds are played. We receive sounds from the sculpturally adapted silos' interior and exterior. We then respond in LA to the silos sounds, and our sounds are live transmitted into the interior of one silo. This back and forth interior and exterior creates a delay in the room: we're playing about thirty seconds to a minute later than the sonic broadcast from the Owens Valley silos. Depending on the season and time of day, we are sonically fed different birds that are living in the silo. David Baine There is also the common ground of thinking about the sounds each individual in the Sonic Division makes relative to the whole. And, as far as making sound, what we do is more free than conventional concepts of sound as music, or music as entertainment. Our shared practice removes us from that and allows us to intentionally think about all the great reference points within the studio s actions from the sonics of the desert to the sounds of water rushing by. There are so many different valid sounds out there that contribute to the whole. Aaron Ebensperger When we play together, I feel like all anxiety is removed. The goal is very different from conventional musical entertainment. We have only one rule and that's to listen to what everyone is doing. DB I don't think we are ever dominating each other. We seem to treat it like you would any conversation, and it becomes more about connecting without words. So it's very much in the moment, which to me is an ideal musical expression. It's also a conversation with myself because if I don't like what I'm doing, if I'm not inspired, it's my own fault. I have to get deeper into shifting the flow within the sonic conversation. And then I can get that joy of finding the connection out of nowhere, and everyone else is making it with you. AE I never refer to what we are doing as rehearsing. We are just in it. You're not worried about what happened in the past or what's happening in the future. You're very present. Charlotte Cotton How do you document your Thursday-evening jam sessions? DB We have a pretty decent setup may of the instruments are mic d and running into a recording studio out in the garage. What do you do with the recordings? 2
AE We upload to Sonic Division s SoundCloud account every Friday. We mix them down just to set levels so nothing is really dominating, but we don t cut our Thursday night jams down they stay at about three hours in duration. The most recent recordings play throughout the studio during the week on a loop. The desert has often been thought of as a place where there isn't much. But somehow amplifying that nothingness through the silo delivers to us an acoustic trace of the life there. The streaming of sound from the silos, including our weekly sound-making from LA, is all being recorded into a glacial time symphony, a Requiem for Water. Doug has been working with me to turn the industrial ruin of PPG s silos and warehouses into a musical instrument that makes sound with wind, heating and cooling, and other environmental stimuli, whether natural or human-made. This includes the sound of military jets flying over the lake, cows grazing on salt grass, owls, birds, coyotes all these sounds are part of the work. Douglas Lee I started by setting up the silos to be a positive, vibrational force. There were many conversations about what this could be. The idea of the Aeolian harp the first idea that took form came together because Lauren was really fascinated with the idea of long strings being the vibrational method. The strong winds of the Owens Valley mean the silo could be the resonator for the harp. It took us very little time, and about $500 in hardware-store materials, to construct the first string. We ran the string along the eighty-foot vertical exterior of the silo with a wooden bridge to set off the vibrations, like a guitar. When the string got into a wild enough flux, it created a tone that then transmits through the silo a cascading series of harmonics that rise and fall. In a way, with that one string, the piece was really done. The rest is icing on the cake. If we had stopped right there, this would be still the most complete artwork that I've done so far. But we didn t want to stop there. DL The more strings you add, the more you hear the harp play. It doesn t necessarily get louder, it just creates more sonic opportunities as the wind curves around different parts of the silo and passes through the strings. The other beauty is you have this 360-degree surface. Once we had made the first version of the Aeolian harp, we put up a series of flutes that basically work off the same theory: making sounds with wind coming in all directions from wide-open spaces. I made about eighty flutes from PVC pipe. Each is eight feet tall, with a reed of a couple of inches carved into it, and tuned to B Minor 9. They point in different directions along the 3
outside of the silo. When you listen to the kppg.org stream, they sound like a pan flute wailing in the background. When a storm comes through, everything lights up on the outside of the silo, you can hear the storm coming in. It's pretty straightforward, actually. I mean, the silos are wonderful, resonant chambers. They don't need much. Just a microphone in the ceiling and you re done. Two silos, two mics, and then there are two more microphones at either end of the catwalk, where the flutes are positioned. And then I have one microphone stuck inside a random small building just to capture some atmosphere. You mentioned two silos. Are they both set up the same way? DL One silo is set up as the Aeolian harp and the other silo is set up with the speakers that basically broadcast what we play here at the Studio. There is a pair of speakers inside that silo, and then a little microphone I tucked at the top of the silo that picks up those sounds, plus the live sounds of cows wandering through, or birds, and broadcasts it on KPPG.org. The size of the silo, even with its thick metal walls, makes a perfect diaphragm the sides of the silo become speakers themselves, vibrating in sympathy with what is being sonically brought into the interior and exterior spaces. What other ways have you been sonically exploring the Owens Valley? DL: We ve done many different things over the years. At the beginning, we had a feed from the Owens Valley rivers and streams playing constantly here at the studio. Or the field recordings of crickets or the trains. They connected this place with the Owens Valley the sound was right on top of you. Or we would play the sound of a Japanese water drum the delicate movement of tiny water drops to resonate loudly in the silo, filling its eighty-foot height, with the silo itself adding its beautiful harmonics. Where do you record the water flows? We've recorded it in different places along the water s journey: from the top of the glacial lakes of the Sierras to openings in the middle of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, where we dropped mics into the pipes as the water rushed by, to delicate little streams and rivers in the foothills. We have a sonic travelogue of the movement of water from one location to the other. This past summer, in 2016, we went up on mule-back to the very top of the high Sierra and made recordings of the glacial lakes. We used the best recording devices we could to record in the water and collect the material elements of this glacial time symphony. For about a month, we played those sounds in the studio on the site where Bending the River Back Into the City will bring the Los 4
Angeles River water out of its concrete straightjacket and into the building for cleaning. We wanted to begin the process of bringing water from somewhere else into the building. There is something interesting about realizing that the wastewater is the same water that we went to touch and feel on top of the High Sierra. We thought it would be interesting to take the raw industrial space of Metabolic Studio and bring the intention for it to be the catch of the LA River through a sonic catch. We started to think that the intention to bring wastewater back into the city was to, at least in part, re-naturalize it re-galvanize it with the qualities of nature. Beginning that process with sound stems from this methodology. And, of course, positive vibration is something that works very well with music because it's the nonverbal beginning of a remediation. Extending from that, there is always the desire to prove that this remediation is happening. Similarly, we began to look at the cymatic imagery, or the patterns of shadows and reflections as light moves through water when agitated by sound. Aaron has taken a lead in creating our cymatic works the kind of energy diagrams of our intention. Do you consider all this as part of Requiem for Water? Yes, I do. Requiem is a word I ve heard thousands of times but never really knew much about. One day I looked it up and realized that it's a song to bring rest to the spirits of the dead. It connected with an earlier experience of mine, sitting on the rocks of the Owens Valley dry lakebed and feeling a weight on me. I realized that if the lake were still here if the water had not been drained because of the unquenchable thirst of the metropolis I would be with these rocks at the bottom of the lake. A ghost of that lake is still there. And, in a sense, the idea of Requiem for Water is to bring rest to the ghost of a lake that travels down the Los Angeles Aqueduct into the ice in my glass. I guess there are other ghosts on this site, as well the ghosts of the pre-colonial floodplain, both animal and mineral. And, for me, the silo in that hundred-mile basin is a resonant chamber that is twinned with the studio right here in the historic core of the city. They are sonic nodes reflecting one another. 5
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