It may not be much in the news, but 10 years ago Occupy Wall St began as a tiny encampment in Zuccotti Park. I've been thinking about Occupy recently and how its ostensible failure molted into a success, shifting the conversation to economic inequality, spawning a generation of activists, and morphing into practical activist projects such as the disaster relief offered by Occupy Sandy and other campaigns.

Live at Occupy Wall Street 2011-2012 (torso version) presents a collision of many ideas and experiences at Occupy. 

Sourced from front-line field recordings made at Zuccotti Park as well as at other affiliated marches and protests in 2011-2012, "Live at Occupy Wall St 2011-2012 (torso version)" captures unusual sonic phenomena such as "the people's microphone" and cooperative asynchronous performances which includes marching rhythms out of sync due to distance or ongoing movement (Charles Ives might have been delighted) along with autonomous chants and stray comments whose meaning has magnified with time.

I hope you will give it a listen. As always, headphones are best.

ps This work also embodies aspects of phonography, which:

- Does not conform to established, commercially driven ideas of "quality," technique," "fidelity," and subject matter.

- Liberates the forbidden elements of field recording including mic handling, hiss, narrow frequency response, distorted proximity effect, haphazard directionality, drop-outs, device self-noise, glitchy edits.

- Erodes the erroneous idea that recordings objectively represent one "reality."

- Employs varied and varying recording fidelities expands the palette of procedures and techniques and deploys various and sometimes multiple microphones and recording equipment

- Affirms the inevitable influence (and presence) of the recordist and recording equipment both in the field and in the studio

Thank you for listening!
Christopher DeLaurenti
14 September 2021

Live at Occupy Wall St 2011-2012 torso version

Gloomy, convex murk derived from my improvisation on stone tablets, water gong, zither, and metal objects.

Buy on bandcamp

Atramentous

Held at the University of Richmond in Virginia, Third Practice is an annual festival devoted to adventurous acoustic and electronic music. See http://www.thirdpractice.org for details.

Live and unedited with no post-performance processing or overdubs: I improvised a short set in AudioMulch layering, mixing, and processing acoustic and electromagnetic field recordings. 

The photo shows a small cubicle I found to rehearse and make some last minute adjustments to my set up. The copier's LED reads HELLO, which I took as a good omen!



Live at the Third Practice Festival - November 2, 2013

Sylvian's Wood convolves the voices and music of many, many 1980s pop singers.

Sylvian's Wood

Another installment in my found soundscape series; Below the written pitches spectrally extracts sound beneath the written pitches of a famed work for solo piccolo to reveal recording anomalies, latent undertones, and mechanical noises.

Below the written pitches of BF's famous work for solo piccolo

Composed, mixed, and mastered by Chris DeLaurenti. All field recordings by the composer using a custom rig of binaural microphones. Created in part with the pHreaker, a modular synthesizer designed and built by Jake Joseph of AHC Audio.

soft gradient (excerpt)

Stridulating, dub-like glitch with tilting planes of reverb and echo.

Deckle was created live as a pocket remix for Wyndel Hunt's album Sunshine Noir released in 2010 by Dragon's Eye Recordings.

Deckle

Police parlance for a radio that has been inadvertently left on in talk/transmit mode, an "open carrier" stymies broadcast traffic, leaving so-called "dead air" to delineate sudden gaps, smudges of hiss, a hazy drone, beeping alerts, fragmented words, quick phrases, recessed conversations, and other unexpected artifacts.

When summed to mono, this stereo mix reveals a phase-dependent undertow of roiling pulses, an admittedly impoverished encoded concession to ears that seek more typical "electro-acoustic" music.

The first in my series of found soundscapes, "Open Carrier:..." originally appeared in the February 2005 release of Addenda on the Seasonal Brooklyn netlabel. 









Open Carrier: Citywide One Manhattan (found soundscape series no. 1)

Sketch mix of "as long as autumn lasts" 44.1 / 32-bit mix from session 08.

as long as autumn lasts (sketch mix)

Live improvisation with the flap-o-phone, a cardboard turntable. No edits or processing.

Blue Evening (a flap-o-phone nocturne)

“soft gradient” is dedicated to Annea Lockwood in gratitude for her friendship and her music. Annea’s gift of a kempul gong recurs quietly in this piece.

Best heard on headphones, soft gradient reflects on the concept of the petit Bardo through multiple, often parallel presences - first through human movement in the soundscape and then by overlapping vestibules of abstract and concrete sound. What might be described as liminal polyphony is demarcated (or decentered) through passageways that are short (such vintage light switches and their tinkling bulbs recorded in France) or ever-elongating inharmonic clouds.

Begun in 2023 and completed in 2024, soft gradient also marks a personal rebirth—an ongoing passage to good health after COVID-19. Based on responses I continue to receive after this music was released in July 2024, soft gradient also offers a pathway for rest and rejuvenation, which is essential to survive and transform our troubling times.

soft gradient

Support this music

soft gradient (complete)

Grand Openings, a collective that puts together amibiguous happenings and provocative events, asked me to shadow them and create short pieces based on field recordings for them every day during their residency at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Singles night at MoMA (Grand Openings at MoMA day three)

On August 9, 2014, protests erupted just outside of St. Louis, Missouri in the United States after the killing of Michael Brown, a young Black teenager, by a white Ferguson Police Department officer. The blisteringly defiant yet peaceful protests against the racist practices of the Ferguson Police Department were met by regional and local law enforcement with a militarized show of force.

Radio and television reports packaged the events in Ferguson with a near-pornographic fixation on looting and property damage. Yet skeptical viewers and listeners had to go on-line and piece together a mosaic of video feeds and social media posts to get a sense of what people there were really thinking, feeling, saying, and doing. 

Fit the Description (Ferguson, 9-13 August 2014) collates multiple live video and social media streams from August 9th and the subsequent protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder. Multiple and terraced audio fidelities range from gritty, lo-fi voice mail textures to clarion stereo. These unstable and turbulently polyphonic viewpoints continually affirm this work's artificial and (humbly attempted) symphonic construction. 

You will hear events in Ferguson from multiple and occasionally contradictory voices. Grief, shock, and anger mingle with exuberant defiance, astute observations, fear, steely resistance, and wisdom. I owe a profound, life-changing debt to the activists and protesters who shared their (sometimes private) audio and video posts with me personally as well as online.

Fit the Description was commissioned by the Creative Audio Unit of Australia’s Radio National for Soundproof, a now-defunct weekly radio show devoted to adventurous listening.

This is a stereo mix of the four channel Decade Memorial version, which I composed in 2024 and debuted at “A Surround Sound Evening of Agitprop Sound” heard at The Red Room in Baltimore on August 25, 2024.


Fit the Description (Ferguson, 9-13 August 2014)

Live and unedited solo improvisation with vintage electronic devices, gossamer electromagnetic fields, and location recordings. A few momentary sections appear in altered form in soft gradient.

live improvisation January 2024

Recorded and mastered by Chris DeLaurenti, To the Cooling Tower, Satsop is a soundwalk documenting my journey through a tunnel intended to connect WNP-5 and WNP-3, two aborted nuclear power station cooling towers. The tunnel is now closed.

The entire album is an unedited, single-take field recording. Released by GD Stereo on compact disc, To the Cooling Tower, Satsop appeared as part of their Improvisational Architecture series in 2015. 

Designed to deliver water to cool the reactor core, the tunnel is long; it took me the length of the album, about 44 minutes, to enter and exit.

Much of the tunnel is a perfect tube, however the occasional turning passageway, pools of water, debris, and unexpected  vestibules contribute to the unusual acoustics heard in To the Cooling Tower, Satsop. Sounds near and far reverberate, smear, and echo.

My movement through this architecture co-composes the soundscape. Presence becomes performance: With eyes often shut, I walk through the tunnel. Performing blind belays most of the habits I have developed with other instruments and ideas as an improvisor. With no light, I cannot know how the tunnel - My instrument? My collaborator? - will change, or even where I and the passage ahead will go. 

Wanting a flashlight for a mere moment reminds me that darkness, nighttime, "the dark," shadows, and even the poetic adjective umbral deceptively connote mystery, the unknown, fear, the Other, menace, and evil, as if "to see is to know." To those who listen, darkness becomes a place of discovery, an aurally radiant invitation to re-listen and remap the world.

So I navigate (bypass, stumble over, probe, kick, step on, jab, echolocate) obstacles and small dangers with focused listening. My ears map the walls, the floor, the ceiling. I listen to the drones ahead and what flutters behind. Detecting changes in air pressure, my eardrums bend as oxygen thins. Sounds feel different inside and against me. This tunnel has an architectural, acoustic pulse.

To the Cooling Tower, Satsop embodies my notion of phonography: Vivid, possibly transformative field recordings made in unpredictable locations, amid accidents, and by often unorthodox means in tandem with an open embrace of the recordist's presence - all crucial components in the urgent quest towards new ways of listening.

- excerpted from my essay "A Length of Sound" slated for the book "Sonic Contestations of Nuclear Power."  Skyward photo of WNP-5 at Satsop by Chris DeLaurenti.

GD Stereo

To The Cooling Tower, Satsop (excerpt)

Recorded at the Richmond Zoo in Virginia in March 2016. Dedicated to the memory of Jed Speare (1954-2016), composer and phonographer; his Cable Car Soundscapes (Folkways) is a landmark album in phonography and 20th century music.

I had the honor (and pleasure) of meeting Jed and performing with him and Ernst Karel as part of the New England Phonographers Union in January 2015.

kids say "echo echo echo!" (to the memory of Jed Speare)

The third track on my 2007 album Favorite Intermissions (GD Stereo). No edits or overdubs.

SF Variations from "Favorite Intermissions"

Composed from 1993 to 1995, Three Camels... scrambles and reinvigorates the syntax of symphonic music through the riotous deployment of triumphant cadences, arctic blocs of sound, tuttis, and sonic homophones.

Three Camels for Orchestra

The mute right channel of Lionel Marchetti's Train de Nuit (Noord 3-683)" (2010) is at once an homage and an investigation of Marchetti's work, composed, unusually, "pour un haut-parleur" ("for one speaker") and thus heard only on the left channel, in mono, not stereo.

Marchetti's Train, released by Metamkine in 2002 on a 3-inch CD, is a feast of digital errors, recessed dialogue, and juxtapositions (a coughing smoker, the clack of rails, a snippet of "Riders on the Storm") that startle and delight the ears. 

Released in 2011 on the album Perforate Silence (Spectropol), you can download the file at http://spectropolrecords.bandcamp.com/album/perforate-silence

the mute right channel of Lionel Marchetti's Train de Nuit

This piece welds combative field recordings of the various protests and art actions with police transmissions, NOAA weather alerts, radio broadcast anomalies (splashes and sprays of tape hiss, enigmatic numbers glossolalia, crude phase encoding), and wild card audio snatched from the airwaves into a vivid soundscape of dissent. 

Live in New York... was made possible by 4 Culture, Mark Radonich and Present Sounds, Puffin Foundation, Yellow Fox Foundation, and the Pausanias Foundation with huge gratitude to Ian Vollmer.

Live in New York at the Republican National Convention Protest September 2 - August 28, 2004

Sometimes we need to leave home to remember who we are and what we love.

An autobiography, Adrift in New York is the fourth in my series of aural safaris capturing risky (and at times dangerous) sonic environments and was completed in 2002 at Harvestworks’ AIR program in New York City.

Adrift in New York

On the morning of November 30 1999, armed with a portable DAT (digital audio tape) deck and two microphones, I ventured into the streets of Seattle to record the heady and harrowing protest against the World Trade Organization.

Spattered by pepper spray, enshrouded in tear gas and pelted with rubber bullets, I was engulfed in maelstrom of drums, slogans, chants, screaming, and police violence.

Immersing the listener in the polyphony of the protest, N30 is an aggressively edited orthophonic "you are there" recording. Propelled by the audible drama of the unfolding protest, N30 has no narration, objective reportage or interviews.

N30: Live at the WTO Protest November 30, 1999

Two Secret Wars (2003) is an audio dossier of two secret wars fought today using field recordings made from an anti-war rally in Seattle made on December 8, 2002 and a [long since de-classified] recording of an American air attack on a suspected “enemy” camp in Afghanistan. But does the time and place matter? These wars (secret government military action, and political activism) have been fought continually for decades now... 

Two Secret Wars

A rapid-fire portrait of New Orleans’ 2001 Mardi Gras. My aim is to preserve the meaning and the melody of speech, as well as unearth the unintended polyphony of the event. No layering or time juggling, just lots of aggressive old-fashioned linear 2-track (left and right channel synchronous!) editing.

Originally released on the compilation Hearing Place (Move Records).

Your 3 minute Mardi Gras

Composed in 2002, The night I met Maria C_____ was also a breakthrough for me not only in shaping mundane yet sonically alluring matters of my life (driving, parties, taking a leak, chatter) into an epic, but also in the use of "blurry audio."

Given a sonic miasma of several simultaneous conversations, our hearing filters out extraneous (usually distant) material and focuses on the foreground (like the person next to you). Audiologists call this "the cocktail party effect."

Good microphones capture just about everything, revealing what the ear filters and relegates to the background. The mediocre microphones of The night I met Maria C_____ , placed in unusual places and in near-perpetual motion, find a middle ground by warping and blurring the background into sometimes strange, gnomic, not-quite-in-the-foreground sounds. 

Released in 2003 as part of the Met Life series on Locust Music.

The night I met Maria C_____

This opening section of Live in DC January 18-21, 2017: A Queer Dance Party, the DeploraBall, J20, and The Women's March collates multiple forms of sonic resistance immediately before, during, and after the Presidential Inauguration of Donald Trump.

Front-line audio of blockades, chants, speeches, interviews, sound diaries, music, and marches large and small re-sound in tandem with broadcast detritus from fringe and mainstream outlets. Listeners might also detect denatured audio from social media posts and live-streamed video.

"Live in DC" is not a soundscape composition; there is scant, if any overt digital signal transformations beyond EQ (a mode of memory) and dynamic compression (a shaper of foregrounds and fields). Instead socially engaged microphones become, in the Partchian sense, corporeal and continue the radical extension of phonography that emerged in the 1990s in which field recordings embrace multiple fidelities, audio errors, frenetic intercutting, and guillotine edits while affirming the presence of the (or many) recordist(s).

Other hallmarks include one or more forms (e.g. stratigraphic, recombinant, parallax) of artificial and obvious polyphony of overlooked or unknown sounds, people, and ideas. Anyone in the middle of an uninterrupted polyglot YouTube playlist, or curates a well-curated Twitter feed, or is addicted to TikTok experiences something similar, visually and sonically.

excerpt from Live in DC January 18-21, 2017

Amplified room tone reveals the inner workings of an organ and its environment, including residual tones, traffic, stray speech, and tiny electrical anomalies. Originally released on <A target="_external" HREF="http://www.mutesound.org/?page_id=1345">El Peligro Rojo</A> by Mute Sound.

Amplified silences in the complete organ music of OM (part 1)

Phonography has been sometimes been defined as “creative field recording,” taking and placing microphones out into the world in unusual ways and unexpected places. This playlist presents several specimens of subaudible phonography – field recordings from outside the realm of human hearing.

This playlist features three examples. “Below the written pitches of BF's famous work for solo piccolo” spectrally extracts sound beneath the written pitches of a noted work for piccolo to reveal recording anomalies, latent undertones, and mechanical noises. It’s akin to hearing the piece through a hydrophone.

In “Amplified silences in the complete organ music of OM (part 1)” I amplified room tone to reveal the inner workings of an organ and its environment, including residual tones, traffic, stray speech, and tiny electrical anomalies.

The third example is an odd specimen of radio transmission—a rarity for its length and depth of activity: “Open Carrier, Citywide One Manhattan.”

In the United States, an “open carrier” is police parlance for a radio that has been inadvertently left on in Talk/Transmit mode. An open carrier stalls and paralyses broadcast traffic, leaving so-called “dead air” to reveal sudden gaps, smudges of hiss, gently swaying drones, beeping alerts, fragmented words, quick phrases, recessed conversations, and other unexpected artifacts. It’s like butt-dialing everyone who is listening to the radio. I recorded this example by accident in 2004 during the protest against then-president George W. Bush and the Republican National Convention in New York.

The final example is an excerpt from “of silences intemporally sung: Luigi Nono’s Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima.” Here, I have inverted Nono’s only string quartet by muting the audible passages played by a string quartet. Then I elevated room tone, discreet ambiance, and other assumed silences above the threshold of audibility. You will hear on-the-fly tunings, annunciatory gasps, hurried breaths, sul ponticello bowings, and creaking chairs; these eruptions and outcries fuse with flickers of ambient sound. You might also hear artifacts of the recording process, especially digital glitches and artificial echo. 

Thank you for listening!

of silences intemporally sung (excerpt)

Open Carrier, Citywide One Manhattan

My sound work encompasses field recordings, electroacoustic and acousmatic music, text-sound scores, free-improvised low-tech electronics, and compositions for acoustic instruments. 

Christopher DeLaurenti

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