Walls Are For Listening

“A wall is built in hope that a light, once observed, may strike it even for but a rare moment in time.”
from “Silence and Light” - Louis Kahn, Essential Texts, p. 231

The Seattle Phonographers Union improvises with field recordings collected at home and around the world. Isaac Sterling, to whose memory we dedicate this album, described our mission in 2002: “Our intent is to move beyond habitual experience of sound and uncover what is foreign in the familiar and familiar about the foreign. We seek to explore what we hear and relearn what we know. Some sounds will be familiar; others less so. Both novel and familiar sounds will be juxtaposed in ways unique to each event. Our intent is to investigate and enrich both our intuitive and analytical relationship with sound. The goal is not to excite, confuse, or entertain per se, but to attend to the world, which is much more detailed and diverse than any one person's perception of it.”

In live performance, the SPU culls and combines sounds from our respective libraries of field recordings. Collectively, the resulting mix can encompass cicadas, whirring bathroom deodorizers, distant birds, wind, passing motorcycles, water droplets, magnetic fields, frogs, garbled airport announcements, and enigmatic thrums. We don't process or loop or edit. By consensus, we excerpt our sounds from continuous recordings. Some of us apply EQ when needed to get the sound closer towards what our ears, rather than the microphones, remember while others, honoring the microphone as a third ear, leave the recordings untouched.

Every recording we share captures a behavior as well as an acoustic space. Together, we create and contend with continuums of presence (near and far, closing in or moving away); recording fidelity (hi-, mid- or lo-fi); proximity (dry/reverberant/echo); and identification (from familiar to unknown aural phenomena). Our sounds and spaces overlap, collide, or exist discretely.

On this LP, the SPU improvises inside Building 27 and WNP-5; these two remarkable acoustic environments not only transformed our field recordings, but guided these live, unedited improvisations. A decommissioned aircraft hangar at the former Sand Point Naval Air Station, Building 27 melds our sounds with audience footsteps and murmuring, along with, in quieter moments, birds, and nearby water. The unusual skittering slapback echo heard in WNP-5, part of an unfinished nuclear power station, results from gradually narrowing walls and tile-like surfaces inside the cooling tower; sound spirals upwards to the sky.

Performing in acoustically distinct spaces poses a challenge: The walls matter. By blurring, stretching, and occluding the acoustic space inherent in our recordings, distant walls and surfaces teach us to relisten. We hear our recordings anew. Our own, oft-heard sounds become a mystery. Other improvisors might compensate with visual cues or a roughly outlined score. Yet our instruments – mostly laptops – do not offer useful clues. Peering at a fellow performer's screen or fader position usually reveals little; mouse moves or trackpad swipes may just indicate the selection of a file. And aside from the occasional piece of mutual advice said before a show such as “Don't injure the silence,” there is no performance plan or score.

Building 27 and WNP-5 invigorate our ethic of “no solos, no soloists.” Inverting the practice of musicians to dapple sound with moments or brief sections of silence, the SPU spends more time listening (in improvisor's parlance “laying out”) than sharing sounds in the mix. Correlating a specific field recording with a specific union member is impossible for the audience and difficult for us, even after a decade together. Who does what dissolves.

Unusual acoustic environments remind us that we strive to be a collective of listeners, not performers. Clustered at tables with laptops and dangling cables, there is nothing to see. The group resembles an incipient conference panel or a de-cubicled open office. Unlike most amplified performers, the SPU hears what the audience hears; we bypass the hoary dichotomy of monitor wedges and FOH (“front of house”) sound. We stand up, walk around, and listen. Footsteps, birds overhead, passing vehicles, and much more join what we are making. This LP documents our desire to transform Building 27 and WNP-5 from something to see into places for listening.

- Christopher DeLaurenti

Also available:
Phonographers Union Live on Sonarchy (Accretions)
Seattle Phonographers Union (and/OAR - mimeomeme)
SPU #3 (banned production)
www.seapho.org


Building 27
Perri Howard, Steve Peters, Toby Paddock, Doug Haire, Jonathon Way, Dale Loyd, Christopher DeLaurenti, and Steve Barsotti.

WNP-5
Pete Comely, Dale Loyd, Christopher DeLaurenti and Steve Barsotti.


Live Recordings: Steve Barsotti
Mastering: Nyberg Mastering
Cover Design: Tiflin
Outer photos: Steve Barsotti
Inner Photos: Left- Steve Barsotti, Right- Hank “EspressoBuzz”
Produced by Steve Barsotti and Prefecture Records
The Seattle Phonographers Union would like to thank Dan Iverson and the Seattle Parks Commission as well as the SATSOP Industrial Park Staff

This album is dedicated in loving memory to Yitzchak Dumiel (Isaac Sterling).