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Ghostly International sponsored a "remix contest" for a cut from Christopher Willits' exquisite recording Surf Boundaries. The possibility that I would be more humbly dressed than some of the other girls at the Cotillion is no reason not to attend. There I am, standing toward the back (This recording is licensed under Creative Commons (attribution-non commercial), bless 'em). The title "Taming Routine" is an anagram. The clever reader will note that these abound in what I do. In this case, it's a rearrangement of "Tiger Mountain." Not the revolutionary Chinese opera that I'm still planning on doing something with. Rather, it's the song by Brian Eno. I was working on a project that involved using Mr. Eno's work as source material during the year I lived last in the Netherlands (wrote his then-assistant asking for clearance to do it, too - which I got). I chose a short fragment of the first verse of the song "Taking Tiger Mountain," and my resulting procedures wound up being such that the whole thing grew like a weed and remained so staunchly unrecognizable that I never really shared it with anyone. While picking through the rubble of a dead hard drive, I came upon it in MP3 form, and have decided that - apart from the decided lack of resemblance to the original - it kind of stands on its own.
The following bit was originally intended to be something you heard coming out of an old European-style tube radio in an installation - a darkened room of some vaguely 1950s vintage you could not enter. Standing in the doorway, the radio and a folded newspaper on a table were the only things you could clearly see, illuminated by light from a flickering neon sign filtered through a set of partially closed Venetian blinds. The problem was that I couldn't really decide what headline you should be able to read on the folded newpaper, let stand what newspaper it should be. Oh yeah - the radio is playing very quietly. I've have known and watched the gentlemen of BMB.con practice their particular form of site-specific electroacoustic wizardry almost from their beginnings in the late 1980s to the present. Bmb.conster Roelf Toxopeus gave me an early version of their most recent CD, which came wrapped in newsprint, fastened with a rubberband, and labeled "Verse Vissies" [Fresh Fishies]. Tiny snippets of the material on that CD became the source material for this recording. Their work is occasionally difficult to locate, but worth the search. |
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