o.t.r. & s.w.o.t.r.

2001 - 2002
stereo sound installation

o.t.r. & s.w.o.t.r. were composed between 2000 and 2001. both pieces used one side of a 45 rpm record of the dimensions singing “somewhere over the rainbow”. the record belonged to my mother when she was a teenager, and more than using the song, i was interested in a physical artifact of my mother’s childhood.

o.t.r. was originally commissioned for the 2001 en red o festival in barcelona, and s.w.o.t.r. was commissioned for the beyond noise conference and festival at uc santa barbara in 2002.

while the notes for both works tend to share a lot of ideas and information, i decided to post my original notes from both pieces:

o.t.r., 2000, 6 minutes, stereo.

“the 7″ vinyl record came into prominence as a sales and marketing tool for the ‘pop’ song. its format – the single – was perfect for the consumption of a single song, and its size – 7” running at 45 rpm, seemingly determined the typical 3 minute length of a pop song. as songs became commodities in the 40’s and 50’s, young teen agers began to collect songs, which because of their light physical weight and small size, could be carried them around in cases, and shared at parties, and similarly fit into jukeboxes.

as a child, my mother had a small stack of 45’s and over the years she hung on to her favorites – chuck berry, danny and the juniors, the platters, etc. a few years ago she was going to get rid of them and thus, i took became their caretaker. the records were extremely scratched, and as my mother no longer had a turntable, i decided to record them for her onto tape.

initially, i began listening to the songs of my mother’s childhood, hoping to discover a few songs i’d never heard, but eventually i started to think about all the surface noise and how the object’s handling had created another layer to what i was hearing.

i don’t remember why i chose  ‘over the rainbow’ by the dimensions as my source material – perhaps because of the song’s lyrical themes of longing), but i decided to focus on the process that my mother had already begun by handling the records in such a way that the ‘noise’ was easily placed at the forefront, allowing it to, essentially, become ‘the song’. like memories of incidents, as time goes by the details and clarity of the remembered moment tends to evaporate. with a record or object it is less evaporation and more intervention, as the content is less erased than covered up and/or broken apart… thus, i began to hear the crackles, skips and other physical artifacts as a history of everything that had happened to this object since it was pressed.

in the end, i focused mostly on the non-song parts of the disc, where melody and words had been consumed by noise – rendering the original song somewhat mute. nonetheless, i wanted some feeling of the song to somehow survive, even though the melody and the words are now gone.

the resulting work was mainly constructed through recordings made from the sounds that occurred before and after the song – the surface noise and needle drop at the beginning of the record, and clicks of the locked groove at its end. “, 2000

s.w.o.t.r., 2001, 6 minutes. stereo.

“a few years ago, my mother gave me a small stack of 45’s that were her favorites as a kid: chuck berry, the platters, etc. when i began listening to these, it was not only the music that i was attracted to, but to the surface scuffs from repeated listenings and years of wear and tear. for s.w.o.t.r. i used a recording of ‘over the rainbow’ by the dimensions as my source material. what you are hearing are the processed sounds of the surface noise at the beginning and end of the record – along with some of the first and last notes of the recording.

the experience of listening to a vinyl record is not only a durational experience but also a physical experience (for the action of placing the needle on the record in the beginning and picking it up at the end is a kind of performance.)

in this piece, i wanted to explore the unintentional sounds that frame a song on a 7” record – to emphasize the ‘before-song’ and the ‘after-song’.  in the final seconds of listening to a 45, the needle becomes trapped in the repetitive rhythm is born of a locked groove. these clicks become a process of disintegration, as the constant clicks begin to dull the memory of the just listened-to song… allowing the repeated soft clicks become a kind of lullaby.

like the aging process of a human being’s skin and body,  a well played piece of vinyl generally also contains the audio equivalent of wrinkles and scars in the form of scratches, scrapes, chips, and detritus. these unintentional soundings caused by handling transform the object’s surface into a new persona – a kind of “second face” as if a new one was built upon the old one – a kind of opposite to plastic surgery.  the more the object is handled, the more the song is tranformed to an entirely different atmosphere – where  disturbances and interruptions can overwhelm the song.

listening to the sound of  the needle trapped within the final groove of one of my mother’s records, i think i must be hearing the exact thing she heard while listening to the same object possibly 30 years before i was born. as the record continues to offer clicks and nothing else, i imagine my mother falling asleep to one of her favorite songs. there, in her darkened bedroom, she falls asleep to the after-sound of the needle stuck in a groove. as she sleeps, her ears absorb the minimalist rhythmic clicks as if a lullaby – as the needle endlessly circles the outer realm of record label until morning…”, 2001