Listening to the Space #03: Mike Stoltz

Under the Atmosphere (2014)

Listening to the Space is the title of a new series of collaborations with different filmmakers, concerning the ideas and practices around the sound of theirs films. The header of this section makes reference to a film by Robert Beavers named Listening to the Space in My Room (2003) where the sound recording is entirely relevant. The third post is written by Mike Stoltz.

The North American artist works with film and video to "explore time, mythology, memory, and the medium itself". These are the concepts written by him when describing the ideas behind films like Under the Atmosphere (2014) and Half Human, Half Vapour (2015) where geographical investigations of environments related to human activities and artistic practices are depicted "to create images-within-images, or directly addressing the audience in the form of gesture and language". Short films created on 16 mm or HD like With Pluses and Minuses (2013), Ten Notes on a Summer's Day (2012) and In Between (2006) articulate different modes to approach architecture or the human body to reveal the possibilities of the moving camera, in camera editing process and analogue sonic procedures to elaborate rich experimental instances.

Mike Stoltz is a cooperative member at The Echo Park Film Center, where he programs films and teaches courses. Extracts of his films can be watched at his website, three of them can be rented as 16 mm copies through the distribution center Canyon Cinema. To read the ideas of Mike Stoltz and his procedures to produce films here's a precise interview done by the Canadian filmmaker and cinema writer Clint Enns for the excellent North American magazine Incite!. Both films analyzed here are going to be screened at the (S8) Mostra Internacional de Cinema Periférico at the end of May.

With Pulses and Minuses (2013)

Mike Stoltz: 

With Pluses and Minuses
(2013, 16mm, 5:00)

The image is made by photographing through a wall with many openings –like a piece of swiss cheese. These “privacy walls” are a staple of late twentieth century American suburban architecture. They are large structures that are designed to let light, sound and wind move through them but manage to keep people on one side or the other.

My technique for photographing this wall works like an inverse animation. Rather than a fixed camera shooting a moving subject a la traditional animation, the subject is an immovable wall, and behind it an immovable horizon. The image is filmed one frame at a time and in between each frame the camera is moved to a new position. When the film plays back at 24 frames per second this static wall begins to rotate and jump off the screen.

The wall's many openings become apertures to peer through as it gyrates. These circular openings begin to dance around, mimicking the movement of molecules (or even that of carbonation bubbles). It is ecstatic and visceral. In between sections of movement are stretches of darkness that act as visual rests –like the insertion of silence into a musical composition.

Because so much of the image consists of movement versus negative space, when I began to build the soundtrack I worked to translate this idea of darkness or emptiness as silence within the track. I wanted the soundtrack to move at the pace of the image. Using a tremolo effect (1)  allowed me to route the sound through a hard square wave path, effectively chopping it up in real time. By manipulating the rate of the tremolo I could subtly speed up and slow down the effect to approximate what I saw as changes in the image's velocity. The fast tremolo creates a percussive effect that not only do I find pleasant to listen to, but also relates to the film's strobing flicker. The fixed interval of the square wave on the soundtrack cutting in and out is an aural equivalent to the projector's shutter, blocking the illuminated image as the film advances to the next frame.

For the sound sources I wanted them to mirror the image in the sense that they needed to be familiar but not too specific. I hoped to draw the viewer's attention to how sound and image are moving through the space in which the film is viewed. Some of the sounds were generated on a small battery-powered keyboard, the other sounds came from a mystery unlabeled cassette of dramatic vocal music that had been kicking around for a while. The keyboard and the tape were routed into my 4-track cassette recorder with both signals sent through the tremolo.

I edited the image first, working silent, then had a low-tech transfer of the work print edit made. I played the footage and performed the sound live to it, manipulating the speed of the tremolo and occasionally overloading the signal for feedback and distortion. I recorded 3 or 4 takes and the one I was happiest with is the what can be heard in the film.

Ten Notes on a Summer's Day (2012)

Ten Notes on a Summer's Day
(2012, HD, 4:30)

This piece was part of an exchange with Sílvia Das Fadas in which we both set out to make portrait films of one another. Although they are quite different (Sílvia's Portrait of Mike is a black-and-white 16mm film in which I play and discuss some of my favorite albums), both are centered around sound, voice, and music.

Using the portrait prompt I began to think of depicting my friend in a way that was interactive and collaborative rather than purely observational. The HD video format offered an opportunity to play with sound and image in real time.

On a formal level I was thinking very much about the frame of the image. It was my hope that the locked-down static video frame would allow the viewer to notice subtle shifts in the on-screen performance and similar shifts in sound composition.

When I made this video I was beginning to work through strategies to incorporate my musical practice within the moving image, beyond simply creating sounds or music for the soundtrack. Playing with other people, performing in front of an audience, the attack of the pick against metal strings, pushing sound through the air with an amplifier, making mistakes then quickly figuring out how to recover from them...these were the things that were visceral and satisfying about playing music. How could these elements be present in a movie?

For Ten Notes on a Summer's Day we filmed in the backyard of my house. I set the video camera on a tripod between the performer (Sílvia) and myself. I was playing bass guitar from behind the camera. The camera was facing her, recording as she hummed along to the notes I was playing.

I arranged the microphone to prioritize picking up the sound of her voice. I made sure the bass amplifier was audible without overpowering the level of the voice. Through trial and error with several microphone positions I was able to capture the sound of birds, wind chimes, and trucks on the nearby road. It was a goal for the piece to have a complex sound composition that would act in contrast to the unchanging visual frame. Any sense of movement, drama, or inflection is provided by the audio track.

I devised a strategy to play notes (2) on the bass which Sílvia would hum along to, not knowing what would come next. Through this game-like structure, and because Silvia was singing without a monitor, headphones, or any way to hear herself, I hoped to make space for the voice to be free and go to unexpected places.

____________________

(1) For further examples of tremolo in practice listen to “Germ Free Adolescence” by X Ray Spex, “The Cruel Sister” by Amps For Christ, and “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and The Shondells.
(2) There are actually only 4 notes in this piece. The title is borrowed from the final Crass record and not meant to be taken literally.

With pulses and Minuses (2013)

Listening to the Space #02: Deborah S. Phillips

Slide collage (2017)

Listening to the Space is the title of a new series of collaborations with different filmmakers, concerning the ideas and practices around the sound of theirs films. The header of this section makes reference to a film by Robert Beavers named Listening to the Space in My Room (2003) where the sound recording is entirely relevant. The second post is written by Deborah S. Phillips.

The German artist and filmmaker Deborah S. Phillips has been working on celluloid since the early nineties. Her work includes a diversity of visual disciplines and media including collage, film slides, 35 and 16 mm film, drawing, handmade books, etc. She was a member of the artists collective Laboratorium between 1988 and 2001. In 2007 she co-founded the gallery Kunstverein Neukölln in Berlin, an art space where there have been, inoccasionaly film screenings and film performances for international artists. Her films are created mainly on 16 mm but in 2001 she finished a major work named Mosaïc filmed on  35 mm which has been screened widely. Among her greatest interests are the performances dealing with film and slide projectors as aesthetic tools. "I looked for films in which colors, textures, light ant time were more important than people and stories" has said this artist whose films have been presented on festivals like the Toronto International Film Festival and the Fajr International Festival in Teheran as well as film centers like the Anthology Film Archives in New York.

Some of her films can be rented through different distribution centers as Arsenal and Lightcone, based on Berlin and Paris respectively. To follow her slides and visual creations visit her website. There are preview digital files online to watch and hear the collage sounds of the films 71 (2005) and Capsicum (2008).

Untitled Colourmation (1992)

Deborah S. Phillips:

My approach to sound and film.

As a visual artist, a reason to work with film, besides the joy of the luminosity inherent in the material, is also to work with others (musicians, composers).

Film is only one of the media I work with, but it is one of the best ways to work with other people. Have been lucky to deal people who also make sounds, who relish reacting to pictures and improvising: this was the case in my first film, Untitled Colourmation (1992). I was part of a collective and a new guy moved in, the painter and musician Wolfgang in der Wiesche. When he saw the painted animation I'd made for my first film (after helping other members of the group on their 16 mm films for a couple of years), his enthusiasm for the images resulted in asking him to improvise music that would fit and we ended up collaborating on a number of films. I had imagined piano sounds going up and down like the images and he was able to make that happen.

When I work with people who make sounds, they are usually those who make visual works too. Suppose that's because I have specific ideas and make sounds and gestures to express what I mean and those people can develop on that.

Santoor (1997-98)

Having organised a program of Indian films for a film festival, I had the honor of working with a santoor player who accompanied a 1920s German-Indian silent co-production, Nandkishor Muley. We stayed in touch and he often asked if I would make a film about him. After a few years of deliberating whether I could, Santoor (1997-98) resulted, which became a musical collaboration between my two musical friends, Wolfgang and Nandu. The latter was also trained as a dancer and gestures as sounds make sense to him. Some of the santoor sounds were already recorded and Wolfgang re-worked/sampled some of them, while he also came up with passages between the chapters of the film.

A few years later, when I was working on Mosaïc (2001) and talking with Wolfgang about what work well with the images, he had the idea to work with a singer he'd heard but never met, Saadet Türköz. I selected sequences of almost finished film for her to view before retreating to record with Wolfgang, who then sampled other sounds and combined them with her singing to an effect that is thrilling each time I hear it.



Mosaïc (2001)

Sometimes, I make projects in which an idea is crucial not just the sum of pictures and I want that idea to reach audiences (this is not always the case for me) . To do this, sound/words to provide a context to or juxtapose with the image. The best example of this is how Geographie (2000) came about. After listening to Americans express their distaste for the German language, I decided to make a sound collage of three voices dealing with notions of Jewish identity: in German (me) Turkish and Russian (spoken by two friends), three languages with long and complicated histories. I then thought about different sorts of maps as a suitable kind of images for the sound. After speaking with a colleague about how he attained interesting textures through the use of mouldy quark (a soft German cheese, like fromage blanc) I put strips of leader in and let it eat away at the emulsion for just over a month (until it really really stunk) and then, multiple exposed maps copied on to transparencies together with these textures, creating both acoustical and visual imaginary geographies.

For my two films about colour research (into red and then green), Capsicum (2008) and then later Im Grünen Bereich (2015-17), sayings and associations with each colour were important on an idea-level. After having realized an installation with Ruth Wiesenfeld, who had been a neighbour for a while, who had made several musical compositions focussing on colours, it seemed logical to discuss the project with her. In the end, she realized musique concréte and word collages for each film, while Wolfgang came up with what can be perceived as being closer to music. Through sketches and discussions featuring a lot of gesturing, sound resulted that accompanies the images without being too close to what you see.



In Grünen Bereich (2015-17)

As someone who has, on and off over the years, realized performative works and then organizing live accompaniment of silent films, it was a long term idea to make a film that would have live, performative sound. So when I had printed using lead type on 35 mm leader, A Printed Film (1994), it seemed logical to perform live sounds for it myself.

Years later, following a discussion at a film festival about how people everywhere enjoying clinking glasses that led me to make Chin-Chin (2013-14), it was clear that that should also be the sound. At first, I was unsure about whether that should be recorded and used as a soundtrack or live: since I started having it as a performative piece involving the audience and breaking the ice, I see the potential for more works using live sound and involving those in the space, as I often do in performances, making them more film happenings in a way.

I print films, use the material for slide collages together with dried ink and paint and I am now thinking about how I could copy textures like that on to an optical soundtrack... The possibilities of combining materials with analogue media including film are very diverse and I hope to explore more of them in the future.

Capsicum (2008)

Listening to the Space #01: Peter Rose

The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough (1981) Peter Rose

Listening to the Space is the title of a new series of collaborations with different filmmakers, concerning the ideas and practices around the sound of theirs films. The header of this section makes reference to a film by Robert Beavers named Listening to the Space in My Room (2003) where the sound recording is entirely relevant.

The North American filmmaker Peter Rose is the first who has decided to exchange thoughts about the process of creating and arranging the soundtracks of some of his pieces, in this case two of his most known films: Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time (1977) and The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough (1981). Since 1968 this artist has been making over thirty moving pictures, videos, installations and performances. To deal with the idiosyncrasies of time, space and light –through sound and moving images– has been one of the major themes of works that also include mathematics and language issues, as well as oblique strategies and structural film inspirations. His intellectual point of view and sarcastic humor make him one of the great filmmakers of avant-garde cinema. Since today he has been able to produce a rich body of work on video, a medium he continues to investigate through pieces like 6D for Google (cardboard) Glasses (2016).

The french label Re-Voir released a DVD compilation of some of his films under the title Analogies. His vimeo channel is an awesome resource of digital versions of incredible conceptual procedures and formal solutions, deeply stimulating for the viewer and the listener.

Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time (1977) Peter Rose

Peter Rose:

I’ll offer some general thoughts about the thinking behind, the genesis of Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time (1977) and The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough (1981).

I’ve always been impressed by music as a model for organizing events in time and my first films were efforts to try to embody musical thinking in the structure of the work. Incantation (1970), for example, plays with a complex form of rhythmic polyphony and was inspired by both my own experience as a hand-drummer and by elements of Baroque music, Bach in particular. I found, however, that there were limits to the approach –there were only so many levels of superimposition that might be readable, and so settled on a kind of visual canon, juxtaposition rather than fusion, as an organizational solution–. This required the invention and construction of an insanely complicated optical printer that allowed me to integrate images in a more controlled way, and Analogies (1977) was a second attempt to try to understand the laws of this new format. The first attempt was shot in 8mm and ended up in a film called Studies in Diachronic Motion (1975). (This was all inspired, too, it must be said, by a vision I had while on my first LSD trip in 1965 during which I observed a Japanese couple making love in the thousands of tiny spaces between the weaves of a napkin; their motions were displaced in time and I was transfixed by the whole experience, vowing to try to find a way to capture the experience. Ten years later I was able to do this…)

It seemed logical, in this context, to turn to musical form for the sound as well, and to try to echo the rhythmic understructure of the image with a similar configuration of sounds. I had been much impressed by a series of lectures presented by Slavko Vorkapich at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in the sixties, during which he talked about the “kinaesthetics” of the medium. I saw sound as a means (perhaps the more important) along with image, of provoking a muscular, as well as visual/intellectual/verbal, response. And, too, many of my generation were inspired by Phillip Glass, Harry Partch, and Steve Reich, as well as by the work of those exploiting tape recorders to construct new kinds of sonic experience.

So, in Analogies you’ve the sound of the optical printer, an empty hallway, a drum, an automobile engine slowed down, a developing tray struck and slowed down, piano strings being struck, and what purports to be synch sound (footsteps) but which was actually post-dubbed. These are all percussive in nature and intrigued me by virtue of the way a vernacular source could give rise to something “mysterious and strange.” (Prospero’s words in The Tempest) Indeed this has animated much of my work, particularly in the more recent The Indeserian Tablets (2014).

The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough (1981) Peter Rose

On to The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough. Having figured out the basic laws that characterized “diachronic motion” I then wanted to apply these to the articulation of something more personal, more poetic, and more evocative, and so I tried to assimilate the approach to a grander ambition.

"The Prologue" is interesting. I had written the text while traveling in the Caribbean in the late sixties and liked the way it seemed to apply to the game of hide and seek being played by the shadow of the car. I tried narrating it in English but found it hideously dull and thought that perhaps a voice speaking another language might bring a little gravitas and register to the occasion. It seemed arbitrary to settle on any particular tongue and so I thought I’d invent a language for the occasion. Several weeks of improvisatory articulation led me to develop a kind of right-brain talent for riffing in what sounded like a language. And so I “translated” each line into what sounded like it might be a semantic equivalent, taking cues from the etymology and rhythm of the English utterance. (I later exfoliated this approach into a much more complex investigation called Secondary Currents (1982)…).

Moving on: the second section, titled “One”, actually, is a visual representation of what I understand to be “klangfarbenmelodie”, tossing around a melodic idea between different instruments. Here the landscape is, in effect, tossed around by the force of Time –we see a consistent subject but it has been refracted by weather and time of day–. (This particular section took me a year to make; I composed and executed many different scenarios but this was my favorite). The melody here, too, is tossed around between different instruments so there is a fairly literal relationship between sound and image.

“Two” is pretty self-explanatory, although it is fun to note that the sound of impacts, made occasionally throughout the film as if they were made by cars hitting struts on the bridge, was actually made by dropping a chair on a bare floor and adding a little echo. Too, the voice moves from a vaguely interior space throughout most of the narration and out into an exterior soundspace at the end.

The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough (1981) Peter Rose

“Three” was shot during total solar eclipse of the sun. I’ve seen three eclipses and they are so totally overwhelming that it is difficult to shoot in any objective way. This particular event took place off the coast of Mauritania when I was on a boat with a bunch of astronomers who also wanted to observe the event. I wanted to document the way the sky changed, rather than concentrating on the details of the eclipse itself. That was, I thought, the source of the power of the moment. The multiple image is directly inspired by the music of Steve Reich insofar as it devolves upon unpredictable structures that arise when predictable cycles of different lengths are juxtaposed. It starts out seeming to be completely ordered, but then it seems chaotic, and then it returns to another kind of order –like a sign being given–. This is all the consequence of the algorithm I used to construct the compound image. But the sound is actually generated by my voice –I thought of it as the “sound of light”–.  The screams of the astronomers were recorded on location during the event.

Part "Four" is too complex to be described verbally. Suffice it to say that we see a hemisphere of space that revolves, like a kind of astronomical instrument, and which presents us with an perfectly coherent image of the sky and yet a fractured and fragmented image of the viewer. And yet there are no cuts…. Sound was made by recording running water and slowing it down.

Finally, part "Five" is pretty self-explanatory. As backstory, I’ve climbed around ten bridges, most without permission, and thought it would be fabulous (taking the term in its original meaning) if I could climb the most iconic bridge in North America. I had originally been given permission to go up in November, and had intended to go up to the first tower only, but the weather was bad and, in the interim, I realized that I had to cross the whole bridge if it was to be about “passage” rather than “conquest.” The final image is modeled on Peter Bruegel The Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1555), wherein the protagonist is so small as to be almost invisible. The track was taken from Ornette Coleman’s Skies of America (1972), but I superimposed the music over itself with a one measure delay, trying to suggest an immense space through sound and resonating with some of the thinking, certainly, behind Analogies. When I showed it, upon a fortuitous occasion, to Ornette Coleman he summarized the film in the most marvelous way. He said:

“I see what this film is about…..It’s about the Open”.

In all of this I’ve been immensely impressed and inspired by the work of many: Michael Snow, Peter Greenaway, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Hollis Frampton, Harry Partch, Sid Caesar and Maya Deren.

Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time (1977) Peter Rose