Time Arts · Music · Chicago · Todd Merrell and Patrick Jordan
Cafe Voltaire ·
3231 N. Clark St. · 312/348-6543
SWR is a two movement composition by Todd Merrell and Patrick Jordan that employs one shortwave receiver as both the sound source and the "score". The rich variety of strange hums, whistles, and hisses that lie between the programmed broadcasts of speech and music are influenced by unpredictable and naturally occurring solar and atmospheric events, as well as the receiver's proximity to manmade influences such as power lines, buildings, other radio transmissions, even the prescence of our own bodies. As a result SWR is very much a site- and time-specific work, a work that resides in contingency. This also means that as a composition, the performers do not follow a chart of predetermined manipulations, but a "score" embodied in an instrument (the radio) which determines the range and limits of the performers' actions. Accepting the instrument as a "score", Merrell and Jordan must follow the sonic events they find in a very specific and controlled way.
What we hear is the gradual and judicious establishment of musical themes and variations in the classical sense rather than a cacophonous display. This sensibility is reminiscent of the cool, ego-less rigor of late '60's Minimalism without the negation of expressive, emotional potential latent in any sound located in a musical context. Minimalism demanded participation of its audience in a repetitious, cyclical process focused on simple relationships and phenomena in pursuit of a change in awareness and perception in the listener or viewer. Merrell and Jordan recoginize the importance of this approach but break with its strict, sometimes excruciating results through their own use of dramatic narrative which draws their listeners into the experience.
The performance requires a somewhat lengthy time-frame for its sonic range and limits to be established. The artists carefully isolate a set of particular sonic materials with a range of variation and stability that will provide interesting results for each 30-minute movement. Processing gear enables them to maintain volume within a listenable range and, not unimportantly, to add reverberation, creating the sensation of a three-dimensional acoustic environment. Within these parameters the aesthetic challenge becomes a matter of steering a course between cold clinical process, on the one hand, and sentimentality on the other.
The composition requires that Merrell and Jordan work at the control panel of this large receiver as one performer, each carefully touching a switch or knob, slowly nodding to the other for acknowledgement or approval in the process of following the dictates of this carefully tuned instrument. The narrative begins with a quiet and ethereal field, a thin wash of textured noise rasping from some unworldly throat. Eventually the aural landscape becomes more robust, small things seem to flutter about, then fly away. Pitches and volume slowly rise and fall; homogeneous sounds appear then differentiate into separate entities; textures range from warm and smooth to harsh and prickly. The abstract nature of these sonic events changes over time to take on associative qualities. One discerns both remote and striking resemblances to the familiar sounds of chorused voices, falling rain, and wind rustling through autumn leaves.
SWR is a meditative work. It evokes a sense of having returned from a journey without recollection of particular things, people, or places. For some this may seem like having been nowhere. Thanks to the composers' sensitivity to sonic nuances, they remind us that this old and still ubiquitous technology - this radiophonic nowhere - can be a pleasant place to travel.
Eric Leonardson, New Art Examiner. Eric Leonardson is an audio artist and a founding member of the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago.
