SWR · Todd Merrell & Patrick Jordan · Club Lower Links · Chicago
In performance, Todd Merrell and Patrick Jordan sit in front of the radio wearing headphones, acoustically cut off from the audience and absorbed in radio space. The performers are like navigators, plotting a course across a terrain that they themselves are creating in response to the extant terrain of the radio. This image is reinforced by the visual image: the two young men with headphones stare intently at the radio, a large perforated grey box with an orange glow emanating from within. They negotiate their wanderings and mutations by private whispers and slight hand gestures, in an isolated world, easily imaginable as a small shipboard closet.
It soon becomes clear that the focus of the work is not on acheiving any particular musical moment, but on the ephemerality of sonic transformation itself. The spaces created by the piece constantly grow and shrink; the timbres and glissando form sinuous low-pitch drones to dry high frequency ringing. Occasionally, a tap on the side of the radio or the flick of a switch causes a new unveiling. In process, Merrell and Jordan construct and traverse a fascinating soundscape - choral undulations, mechanical grindings, distant swoops and plunges, waves of white noise. As one vein is exhausted, they find another to mine, moving the piece along at just the right moment and settling momentarily, at just the right place.
SWR is a process oriented musical composition. The performers do not attempt to acheive pre-determined musical effects based on a written score. Instead, they explore the shortwave radio as a source of sonic material, to focus their attention on the manipulation of the sounds of the radio itself - distortion interference, sidebands, and carrier waves - to acheive slowly shifting sonic textures. In other words, SWR asks the performer to use only the "noise" of radio, avoiding the "signal" (voice, music, etc.).
Unlike compositions that utilize radio in part for its referential or signifying qualities, SWR is more in the minimalist tradition of relying on the primacy of the material itself. The work is a celebration of the radio as material and of the belief that minutiae and limited systems can yield rich results. But it is also a celebration of the rich, ragged, unstable thickness of analog sound in a world anesthetized by the crisp and clean precision of digital audio.
Lou Mallozzi, P-Form Performance Art Magazine. Lou Mallozzi is an audio artist and performer, Adjunct Associate Professor at The Art Institute of Chicago, and founding member and Associate Director of Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago.
