The Fence/Experimental Sound Studio Artist-in-the-Archive Exchange Project

Crossing Over & Into the FENCE + ESS Archives

INTRODUCTIONS:

Spencer: Having been a long time supporter of ESS, I was thrilled to have been selected as one of the resident artists for this exchange. I decided to take this project as a unique opportunity to develop and see afresh (interrogate? see from yet new angles) a project I have been working on for many years: works on paper that I have dubbed “Silent Piano Scores.”

The drawings are partly inspired by the paintings of Agnes Martin, the Zen philosophy of John Cage, and the formal pencil on paper techniques of composer Philip Glass. The drawings are done in a horizontal scroll-like format, similar to that of a player piano roll and consist of horizontal lines drawn across the page that sometimes break apart and go off on subtle angular tangents that cause the lines to appear continuous at first glance yet upon closer inspection are found to be quite varied.

I took for my first source material from the FENCE archives an editorial letter

written by editor Rebecca Wolff in which she writes that Fence might be thought of as “a demonstration of individuality in cross-section” analogous to the dissected body she encountered at the Chicago Museum of Science: a cisgender female person cut vertically from head to toe that is preserved between 50 sheets of glass. I saw a correlation in the division of the body and the format of the drawings. To make the connection more tangible, I produced a drawing of 49 lines and produced a poem sampling from lines of other poets that I felt reflected the emotional tone of the overall work that I wanted to produce, and inscribed it within the drawing.

I found Alyssa’s poems intriguing and challenging when I began to read them. It felt like being dropped into a metallic labyrinth of words. Some of the poems appropriate specialized syntax and semantics from commercial, technological, and other specialized realms. Her poems are not about her; instead they are intricate surfaces as remote and unyielding as one of Agnes Martin’s geometric abstractions. If you stay with them, with close attention and after several readings, they begin to shimmer, as one begins to perceive rich tones and feelings wavering between the human and inhuman. Her work created a mood that I felt was consistent with the aesthetic that I was trying to convey.

I also produced an “Audio Tapestry,” being a composition consisting of nonharmonic sine wave tones that overlap and continue or discontinue, similar to the waves in the “Silent Piano Scores.” Within the finished poem, I have embedded an abbreviated version of the poem that I generated from the pre-existing Fence texts.

Alyssa: In early April, I traveled to the ESS building in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood where CAA archivist James Wetzel introduced me to the collections. To sketch out the range, one could encounter photographs of Hal Rammel’s amplified palette and invented instruments, videos from Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge, audio of Alice Notley at Links Hall, or Malachi Ritscher’s recordings of local shows, like the set by Xiu Xiu I found early on. In the finding aid I found an entry for Ndikho and Nomusa Xaba’s “The Song of the Frogs,” a sound installation for elevators. It couldn’t be excavated from deep storage within the time I had, but I love to imagine it.

Guided by an ongoing project on space imaginaries, I gravitated toward the expansive Sun Ra/El Saturn Collection: mp3 files of Arkestra rehearsals and concerts along with a number of Ra’s lectures and poems (like SR-C211, “Sun Ra reading poems on telephone with Alton Abraham”), an original reel of The Nubians of Plutonia, and unlabeled cassettes, like the 30-second recording of a child humming almost below their breath.

Or SR-C239: Over twenty-one minutes, someone procedurally unfolds chromatic scales on a piano. Twice a telephone rings, complementing the piano’s particularized dissonance. Then, almost abruptly, the chords come together in brief melody.

I think about these octaves, the spareness and duration of which recalibrate my perception of time and sound, in relation to Spencer's audio tapestry and ambient electronic works. I am moved and instructed by the Arkestra’s commitment to recording, to keeping the tapes running. Everything is practice, nothing is practice. Stay attentive. (Does a version of that melody resurface elsewhere?) This ethos is echoed in Malachi Ritscher's documentary practice, about which I'll say more in subsequent pages.

Alyssa and Spencer: Throughout the residency, we exchanged writing, music, and conversation. Describing the audio tapestry in mid-April, Spencer spoke of sonic layers — “each line goes and breaks off and picks up, picks up again or kind of fades into a different one” — and how sounds can collide to create the illusion of other sounds that are not there. This also describes his verse composites drawn from the Fence archives.

Looking back, Spencer’s ideas set the parameters for Alyssa’s work here, too, a collision of impressions, thoughts, and phrases overheard at a concert. Voices intermingling, breaking off, picking up, combining to a sound that was not there before: also an archive, an exchange, a thing made.