Justin Lander & Otto Muller 
Improvisation @ The Plank House, Hardwick, VT
Nail Fiddles, Landerwire, Cigar Box Ratchet, Etc.

Wire

Sound for Animal: Archaeologies of Instict, a choreographic piece by Hanna Satterlee

Triangle Trio (2)

Collaborative composition and instrument-making workshop at ORCA Media in Montpelier VT.

Montpelier Project

The Rural Noise Ensemble incorporates the sound and energy of cutting wood in preparation for a cold Vermont winter. The sounds of the amplified firewood are modified by a computer and later mixed with additional homemade instruments, guitar and a sample of a shredder. The work ends with a shop vac cleaning the debris left over from the active performance.

The work premiered at the North Country Electronic Music Festival at ArtsRiot in Burlington Vermont on September 10, 2016. The performers were Sean Clute, Al Larsen and Otto Muller.

Cutting Wood

About Composition No. 1

In the remote Northeast Kingdom of Vermont is the infamous home of Bread and Puppet. Composition No. 1 was born from its people and land. After a day of workshops an ensemble was formed to perform homemade instruments including nail fiddles, bottles, stringed cigar boxes, garden hoses, air compressor, a mechanical wood box and amplified dirt. The composition, composed by Otto Muller, was brought to life by the residents of Bread and Puppet and premiered inside the magical Dirt Floor Theater. The short work is tribute to decades of renegade spirit demonstrated by Bread and Puppet, its founder Peter Schumann, and the contemporary investigation of noise in a rural context.

Credits:
Composition by: Otto Muller
Performed by Rural Noise Ensemble and Bread and Puppet
Workshop conductors: Sean Clute, Justin Lander, Otto Muller, Joshua Stumpff

The work premiered at the Bread and Puppet Dirt Floor Theater in Glover Vermont on July 22, 2016.

Composition No. 1

Dispossession and Disposal:
Each scrap pile settles,
inscribing colonial history (and
futurity) into the sediment itself.
I watch the slow death of metal,
in the creek bed,
its resonance eaten by rust.

The half-buried pile of rusted scrap etches a boundary line into the earth. It marks a border between the taskscape of the yard or field and the terra nullius of the woods, the land in use and the empty space. The rural, especially in the Northeast, is an intersecting network of these lines, archived in topsoil, stone walls, and long-forgotten barbed wire.

For this installation, I excavated metal from the streambed where I live in Woodbury, Vermont. With this metal and wood from a local sawmill, I built a collection of instruments, and composed a 24-minute soundscape combining sounds from these objects with field recordings from the site where they were found. The instruments were arranged as a participatory sound installation accompanied with the stereo soundscape and large format photos of the creek bed and scrap pile. As participants, ranging from young children to professional instrumentalists, played along with the soundscape, I moved through the space engaging observers in discussions about the rural idyll and old dump sites.

The work was installed at Sounds of the Earth, a one-day music festival in Shelburne, Vermont, produced by New Music on the Point in collaboration with Scrag Mountain Music and TURN Music. Almost one year later, the instruments were burned in a prayer ceremony in solidarity with Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, who asked allies to light fires in support of their sovereign claim to their reservation lands.

The Slow Death of Metal

The Rural Noise Ensemble is a collective of Vermont based artists, musicians and makers that employ the aesthetics of noise as a critical framework for interrogating reality. Rooted in its conviction that the rural landscape is not defined by its relationship to nature or history but exists as a dynamic contemporary periphery. The group uses scrap wood and rusty nails, interactive electronics, amateur performers and whatever else is present to make sound; to decode and disrupt a dialogue of this thing called the rural.

Rural Noise Ensemble

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