Selected Sound
Works
(1981-2021)
28
tracks on 60minute cassette (and Bandcamp)
retrospective
of Joseph Nechvatals sound art
Produced
by Pentiments Records
Released on October 15th,
2021
Available online
~ HERE
Joseph Nechvatal (1983) with head on his
sculpture Good and Evil (1983)
mixed media 22x36x21
at Brooke Alexander Gallery
20 West 57th Street, NYC
photo by Peter Bellamy
Tracks and track notes
1 Crown of Thorns (1981) 0:47
Crown of Thorns was first
published on the No Wave compilation anthology LP record Just Another Asshole #5 in 1981 that was edited and organized by
Barbara Ess and Glenn Branca. On it, Nechvatal drastically and humorously edits
himself with media snippets playing a Tibetan gyaling. A CD reissue of Just Another Asshole was released in
1995 on Atavistic Records.
2 Ego Masher (1983) 7:05
Ego Masher is a home
studio sound collage, audio sampler, musique concrte piece that first appeared
on Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine #1
in 1983, the year the cassette magazine was co-founded by Nechvatal. This track
was republished by Sub Rosa Label as the third track on An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music, Vol. 6 in 2010.
3 Announcing Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
Party at Paradise Garage (1983) 0:34
Announcing Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine Party at Paradise
Garage is a home studio sampler snippet Nechvatal
created for broadcast as part of his live mix radio show done with Tron Von Hollywood on WBAI in mid-December 1983. The snippet is
announcing the first Tellus club launch
party that was held on December 26th at the Paradise Garage in New
York City.
4 chOke (1983) 4:34
chOke is a sampler audio art, musique
concrte extract taken from Nechvatals cassette release Sleep (1983) (side 1) on the Sound Of Pig
cassette label (#140). On December 24th, 2020 The Institute For Alien Research broadcast chOke as part of its 433 |
| | _ _ _| | | CUT UPS
broadcast on Staalplaat Radio.
5 Excerpt from Sleep (1983) 1:47
Excerpt from Sleep is another
extract from Nechvatals 1983 cassette release Sleep (side I) on the Sound Of Pig
cassette label. Sleep was the
backbone of the DJ live mix sets Nechvatal played at The Speed Club, an
afterhours art club Nechvatal ran with Bradley Eros on Saturday mornings from
midnight to 5am during the summer of 1984 at ABC No Rio.
6 Excerpt I from Reckless (1984) 4:02
Excerpt I from Reckless is a plunderphonic
piece played by Nechvatal on synthesizer at Studio PASS (Public Access
Synthesizer Studio) at Harvestworks in New York City. It was released on
cassette by Sound of Pig (#217) in 1984. Reckless
was the backbone of the live mix DJ sets Nechvatal played at 8BC, a nightclub,
performance space, and art gallery at 337 East 8th Street in the East Village.
7 Excerpt II from Reckless (1984) 6:41
ibid.
8 Dalychtocracy (1985) 2:01
Dalychtocracy features Joseph
Nechvatal playing electric guitar that he then manipulated at Studio PASS. It
appeared in 1985 on Tellus #10: All
Guitars! that was curated by Live Skull founding member Tom Paine.
9 Excerpt from Absurd (1985) 0:17
Cut-up
appropriation excerpts by Nechvatal that appeared in 1985 on the Out of Context cassette that was
attached to a booklet by Velcro. It was reissued as a limited-edition CDR in
2010.
10 mOther :: Excerpt from Absurd (1985) 1:08
ibid.
11 Excerpt from TRUE and FALSE (1985) 1:30
Excerpt from TRUE and FALSE is
a 1985 excerpt ripped from side II of the XOX-001 cassette TRUE and FALSE with Nechvatal playing synthesizer at Studio PASS.
12 How to Kill (1986) 0:53
How to Kill is a plunderphonic
cut-up reduction of the Janet Jackson song Nasty
from her 1986 album Control. Nechvatal
published How to Kill on Tellus #13: Power Electronics; an issue of Tellus
he solo edited in 1986.
13 Psychedelic Hermeneutic (1988) 1:36
Psychedelic Hermeneutic is a
plunderphonic cut-up reduction of the first 17 seconds of The Jimi Hendrix
Experience song Are
You Experienced? from their 1967 Are
You Experienced? album. Psychedelic
Hermeneutic was published on Tellus
#20: Media Myth, the second issue
of Tellus Nechvatal solo edited in
1988. In his book Immersion Into Noise, Nechvatal writes about the impact that Hendrixs
feedback music had upon him at the age 17 when he saw Hendrix play live at the
Chicago Coliseum, on December 1, 1968.
14 Excerpt from Information Noise Culture
(1990) 1:07
Information Noise Culture (aka Ecstatic Product) is a 1990 15:51 minute
unreleased sound-loop that played inside a 5x5x5 foot square xerox-covered
sculpture (also titled Information Noise Culture)
by Nechvatal that was shown in Paris by Galerie Antoine Candau. It was made and
mastered by Nechvatal at Studio PASS.
15 Excerpt from Endless Entertainment
(1990) 0:47
Endless Entertainment is a sound loop
synthesizer piece published in1990 on the ASSEMBLAGE
compilation cassette by PBK Recordings, run by the noise drone composer Phillip
B. Klingler. In 2014 Nechvatal and Klingler teamed up to create the posthumous Miny book, cassette and CD (all edited
by Nechvatal) on Punctum Books and Records.
16 cOre (2000) 0:23
cOre is an unreleased
synthesizer noise piece tribute to the New York hardcore punk scene, much
appreciated by Nechvatal in his youth.
17 rainOnme (2001) 0:05
rainOnme is an unreleased musique
concrte sample Nechvatal recorded on the roof of his Ludlow Street building
while looking at the decimated site of the World Trade Center following the 9/11
attacks. The audio was to be looped and played continuously as part of
Nechvatals proposed 9/11architectural sculpture funerary monument, that was
rejected by the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition jury.
18 cOde flOw (2002) x0:32
cOde flOw is an unreleased
synthesizer piece Nechvatal made at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York
City in 2002 where he taught art and technology from 1999 to 2013. In 2005 he
used a slowed down version of cOde flOw
as the soundtrack for his virus animation portrait of French digital art
theorist Edmond Couchot, as part of his Computer
Virus Project 2.0 series.
19 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus-~~vibrator, even 01
(2003) 1:33
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus-~~vibrator, even 01
is the first track from an audio computer reading performed June 6th,
2003 as part of Nechvatals art exhibition vOluptuary:
an algorithic hermaphornology at Gallery Universal Concepts Unlimited in
New York City. The music on the audio was generated by David Lee Myers (aka
Arcane Device) and Arcane Device produced a limited edition audio CD. This CD
created an audio artist book of the 40,000word cyber-sex farce novella Nechvatal
wrote (by the same name) during his Cite des Art International artist-in-residency
in Paris in1995.
20 Excerpt from viral symphOny (2006) 3:00
viral symphOny was a result of
Nechvatals Computer Virus Project II
art project ~ developed with Stephane Sikora as a C++ a-life program ~ moving
into real-time audio production where sound is synthesized from the activity of
the constructed a-life virus. The algorithm used for it is a form of granular
synthesis applied to tiny audio files in which parameters are modulated
according to statistics extracted from the visual virus simulation: the virus
reproduction rate and resource consumption. Simulated audio viral attacks were recorded
during Nechvatals residency at The Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred
University in New York State and were subsequently worked on by him, Andrew
Deutsch and Matthew Underwood for the creation of the initial 28minute movement
of Nechvatals viral symphOny (the enthrOning) that was released in
2006 as a CD by The Institute for Electronic Arts. This extract was published
in 2006 in NME (The New Musical Express) magazine.
21 degeneratiOns (2006) 1:18
degeneratiOns is the captured C++ viral real-time field recording track
from Nechvatals DVD degeneratiOns
that was produced by The Institute for Electronic Arts in 2006.
22 Excerpt from cOncertO viral (2010) 2:26
Excerpt from cOncertO viral is a
collaboration between Joseph Nechvatal and Rhys Chatham recorded September 26th,
2010 at the cOncertO viral
performance Chatham gave in conjunction with Nechvatals art exhibition Art Rtinal Revisit: Histoire de lOeil
at Galerie Richard (Paris). Chatham performed electronic-manipulated trumpet
along with an excerpt from Nechvatals viral
symphOny (the enthrOning) (2006)
that he manipulated. Chatham and Nechvatal first collaborated in the mid-1980s on
XS: The Opera Opus, a no wave
avant-garde art music performance, and again in 2009, when Chatham contributed
to Nechvatals Viral Venture
projection with a soundtrack from one of his compositions for 400 electric guitars.
Viral Venture was publicly first
shown in 2011 on a large screen at the Beatrice Theater of the School of Visual
Arts in New York City.
23 trail Of tears
(2013) 0:49
trail Of tears
is the audio track Nechvatal made for his 2013 virus-modeled a-life animation trail Of tears in the Machine of Being.
The Trail of Tears is a name given to the forced relocation and movement of
Native American nations from southeastern parts of the United States following
the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
24 viral symphOny compressed (2018) 1:22
For viral symphOny compressed in 2018 Nechvatal
took the entire 28minutes first movement of his 2006 viral symphOny and compressed it down to 1:22minutes.
25 viral sympOny~~~~~~~~~~~~vibrator, even
(2011) 3:15
For viral sympOny~~~~~~~~~~~~vibrator, even Nechvatal
mashed up a part of his ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus-~~vibrator,
even recording with field recordings taken in preparation for viral symphOny that were also released
in 2006 on the CD published by The Institute for Electronic Arts.
26 viral symphOny redux (2020) 5:34
For viral symphOny redux Nechvatal and
Andrew Deutsch revisited unutilized sound material captured from the 2006
Institute for Electronic Arts viral
symphOny project. This material was subsequently used in the creation of a suite of
noise music audio tracks collectively called the Orlando et la tempte viral symphOny redux suite, published on
Nechvatals The Viral Tempest LP record by Pentiments
Records in 2021. viral
symphOny redux was conceived in connection with Nechvatals
art exhibition Orlando et la tempte,
held in the Fall of 2020 at Galerie Richard (Paris) and then grew to the six
movements 49minutes work Orlando et la tempte viral symphOny redux suite. It revisits
virus-modelled a-life audio material from viral symphOny (the enthrOning) (2006) integrated by Nechvatal with the voice of
an anonymous reading of the novel Orlando, written
by Virginia Woolf in 1928.
27 on the defeat of don the con (2020) 1:57
Coming full
circle, for on the defeat of don the con
Nechvatal celebrated the defeat of Donald Trump by mixing manipulated generic
Chicago house music with a slowed down re-visitation of his 1981 Crown Of Thorns
track.
28 pour finir avec le jugement de dieu viral
symphOny plague 1 (2021) 2:05
In early 2021,
Joseph Nechvatal picked up and read again Antonin Artauds prophetic text The Theatre and the Plague that Artaud
originally presented as a performance-lecture on April 6, 1933 at the Sorbonne.
In it, Artaud develops the foundations of his Theater of Cruelty by
establishing an analogy between the rupture of the civilizational order caused
by the plague and the convulsive passions triggered by the virulence of his
transgressive theatrical poetics. Re-reading the text within the context of the
2020-2021 viral pandemic, Nechvatal created an eight movement audio suite
called pour finir avec le jugement de
dieu viral symphOny plague ~ released on Nechvatals 2021 The Viral Tempest LP by Pentiments Records. pour finir avec le jugement
de dieu viral symphOny plague 1 is the first of
those tracks where Nechvatal remixed aspects of his full virus-modeled a-life
noise music composition viral symphOny
(2006-2008) with compressed and transformed and superimposed segments of
Artauds 1947 radio play Pour en finir
avec le jugement de Dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God).
Liner Notes
Nigredo of Sound
Art
by Laurent Fairon
This is an overview of post-conceptual and multimedia
artist Joseph Nechvatal's sound collages and experimental music, from 1980s
tape experiments to 21st century polymorphous, digital endeavors.
Born in Chicago in 1951, Nechvatal studied art and philosophy before relocating
to New York City in 1975. During the 1980s, he co-founded the non-profit
cultural space ABC NO Rio and avantgarde music series Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine, and took part in many experimental
cassette compilations, installation projects and avant-garde live events taking
place seemingly everywhere in Lower Manhattan at the time.
I got interested around 2005, collecting Tellus Audio Cassettes and later
archiving and documenting them on Ubuweb and Wikipedia, as well as on my own
blogeventually meeting Joseph personally in Paris around 2008, where he now
lives. In retrospect, Nechvatal's artistic career seems to have been a long
tight-rope walk over a variety of epidemics, from AIDS-ridden NYC in the 1980s,
to his viractuality concept coined at
the end of the century, to today's COVID-19 catastrophe. It is perhaps only
natural, then, that his art deals with viruses, and his music with aural
degeneration and sonic necrosishis own personal view, perhaps, of the transient
state of life on Earth.
The 1980s were a time of joyous, multifarious sound
experiments for Nechvatal, from no wave guitar explorations (Dalychtocracy, 1985), to analog synth
music (TRUE and FALSE, 1985), onto
multiple tape collages. While all three genres are documented in this
anthology, it is in rebus-like, caustic sound collages that Nechvatal reveled
and found a vehicle for the shit-loads of flotsam sound detritus in his
immediate vicinity. Whether coming from records, radio broadcasts, TV commercials,
or political speech, for Nechvatal these aural excreta deserved to be
transmogrified and dignified through sound art, just like Antonin Artaud
elevated caca, or shit, to mythical,
ontological status in his writings from the 1930s and '40s. It is in this sound
art Nigredothe dark, alchemical art of transmutation, according to Carl
Jungthat we might find a key to approach Nechvatal's recent digital sound
works as well.
During the 19922002 period, Nechvatal launched his Computer Virus Project for multimedia
works created with programming code and auto-generative routines, which led him
to exhibit corrupted data as art. From then on, all his work is deemed viral, being based on data manipulation,
data corruption and cellular automata. First applied to computer-assisted
paintings and video animations, his viractuality concept also ultimately
found its way into his music after 2000, with some sound works merely
consisting of the sound of a computer virus at work.
In 21st century works, Joseph Nechvatal's
sound art gained density and complexity as he composed longer and increasingly
ambitious works. In this respect, the first version of the viral symphOny in 2006 acted as a manifesto and a blueprint for
things to come. The viral symphOny is
a vast collage of recycled sounds and corrupted audio data given a life of its
own by cellular automata procedures and de-generative algorithms, assembled
into a constantly shape-shifting, multisonant sound work. A first version was
published on CD in 2006, then reworked and reprocessed at various stages in
subsequent years, and finally given a complete reshuffle in 2020 under the
title OrlandO et la tempte viral
symphOny redux suite. During this long incubation period, a team of
programmers, AI specialists and sound engineers contributed to the elaboration
of the music, which appears to have been cultivated
in a sonic Petri dish of some sort, rather than composed in a
traditional way.
The spoken word is also a common fixture in
Nechvatal's sound works from later years, be it found sounds, text-to-speech
readings by an automaton, or collaboration with readers in the flesh. Texts
include his own space-filling prose poetry, his own cut-and-paste word
collages, and excerpts from Classical literature, from Ancient Greek authors to
Virginia Woolf and Antonin Artaud. The last few years have also seen a renewed
interest in sound collage in association with found sounds and computer
viruses, culminating in pour finir avec
le jugement de dieu viral symphOny plague in 2021, a brilliant sonic
transmutation of Antonin Artaud's 1947 suppressed radio art piece. For Joseph
Nechvatal, there is still a lot of shit to turn into gold, and the dark art of
Nigredo remains a never-ending sonic process.
Laurent
Fairon, 2021
Comments about Selected Sound Works (1981_-_2021)
For me, these Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) tracks are sound stem chains, a
sonic inspirational tool, not unlike Peter Schmidt and Brian Enos Oblique
Strategies or even earlier, like the card deck by Marshall McLuhan called
Distant Early Warnings . . . [T]his dream listening takes me back to my
childhood experience of sound, kneeling on the rug spinning the dial on a
massive floor model short wave radio receiver that was marked with the names of
cities across the world; just listening to static and distant broadcasts
(DXing) in languages I did not speak.
Judy Nylon
The
apparent contradiction in the parallelism of musical and human expressions with
what appears as noise reveals in Selected Sound Works a thorough
metamorphosis into the state of sound art. The continuous surprise becomes a
coherent textural patchwork, an involuntary composition of fears, anxieties and
joy submitted to the treatment of a deforming and multi-reflecting mirror.
Recognizing or simply ignoring the sources does not change the result in the
mind of the listeners: subjected to a training of memory, theyre also urged to
instinctive reaction by the constant shifting of the acoustic stimulus.
Massimo
Ricci
Joseph Nechvatals Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) is a brain-jarring intermedia
collision of post-conceptual art and Minimalist subculture. Experience the next
logical step beyond the sustained drones and disciplined intonations of
freeform radicals like Cage, Glass, Reich, LaMonte, Maciunas, MacLise, Ono,
Jennings, Niblock, Flynt, Gibson, and Branca. This cassette-only package is
worth obtaining for its Laurent Fairon liner notes alone. Demanding,
commanding, and outstanding.
Steven Blush, author/filmmaker American Hardcore
Spanning plunderphonic cut-ups, gestural noise,
synthesizer improvisations, and bracing computational abstraction, Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) offers
a vivid account of the evolving strategies that have defined experimental
electronic music and sonic art across the millenium, showing how one of its
most committed artists and theorists - working across the analogue and digital,
aural and spatial, human and inhuman - has built a sonic world that seamlessly
connects late 20th century ferromagnetic/digital exploration, mass media
dtournement, and site-specific sound sculpture to contemporary explorations of
virality, artificial intelligence, and computational culture in the early 21st
century.
Charles Eppley
Selected Sound
Works (1981-2021)" documents forty years of musical experimentation by
Joseph Nechvatal. Writer, painter, composer- Nechvatal in the 1980's was an
integral part of the U.S. cassette network. Known not only for his own audio
works, but also co-founding the Tellus
Cassette Magazine where he curated such essential compilations as
"Power Electronics", "Media Myth" and "The
Improvisors", documenting the international tape underground at its peak.
I learned about a lot of sound artists from those compilations, but I also got
to know and love Nechvatals music too. Using disparate sound sources from
television, LP's, and tapes, he created irreverent audio montages, chance
happenings that were 'plunderphonic' before John Oswald even coined the term.
His loop compositions were particularly fascinating to me and he contributed
the piece 'Endless Entertainment' to my compilation, Assemblage, in 1990. Josephs work is a rich amalgam of elements
gathered from popular (and obscure) culture and fed back to us with broken
connotations and mutated subtext. Crucial.
PBK (Phillip B. Klingler)
To accept the easily palatable is the fate of the
mob. For the poet exists to marvel. Maglorie-Saint-Aude Like Nechvatal's
visual production, Selected Sound Works
(1981-2021) plunges us into the most veiled corners of the primal and energetic
beyond. They remind me of Gide's declaration, 'no new thinking enters the
temple of art in borrowed robes.' Regardless of its electricity, the various
discernable movements are auditorily Olympian in strength but emotionally
fragile and without ornament. Yet, the level of its organic coherence, its
language, and its intangible layering of abstract qualities illuminates an
eloquent disaggregate critique of the friction between the sublime and contemporary
society. Hence, the only durable works are those that circumstances provoked.
Goethe
Joseph S. Lewis
Sound snatches and samples, spoken snippets and
streams, ice floes of placid ambience that evoke Fripp/Eno bumping up against
screaming beats that signify James Brown via Eric B & Rakim, Selected Sound Works appears random at
the start then proceeds and develops according to an internal logic, gathering
energy and an elegant coherence across two old-fashioned cassette sides. What
seemed 'outside' or experimental in 1981, when Joseph Nechvatal starting
assembling these sonic collages, in 2021, after forty years of hip hop, techno,
industrial, EDM et al, just sounds like music. Or life. And its still more
interesting than listening to the radio.
Mark Coleman
Listening to Joseph Nechvatals Selected Sound Works, you feel as though you are eavesdropping
through snippets of time. Cut-ups and sampling tidbits have been captured and
compressed into filaments and arabesques of sound. Past and present tenses
transform into a chimerical unraveling of what we think we know -- into a
language of the unknown.
Aline Mare
A True Rollercoaster of the MyND. I am listening
writing a blurb. I am thinking of other needle droppers and the flow lifopsies
of the 20th and 21st centyr as I listen and wathc JosepHis release is quite Lin
EAR a marv squish s nquah needle
drops keep falling on my its the old dope peddlar drive away on a chevrolay it
cant be true is poof tis the magic draon n B See sea dragons clickety clak its
the hahhhhhahhhhh birthday tooamiliar
bah dah bah boom watch nat sound machine sound familiar bah dah dah boom
unfamiliar familiar in demi sec die
digestion. what would your mother say? - ghost of t t t t t kkkkkkk ahhhhhh X C-lected excuse
me while edit mm edit mm if
you edit 15 min ========================_____________________
ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh****** UH as the 2nd 2930" of the 59 min release
unfolded, my surgical urge to talk about the wish to have a full stop after
each piece! as they flowed into each other making acrobatic the coord with the
superb liner notes. JoseoHis
circus, Hooray.
Charlie Morrow
What fascinates me most about Joseph Nechvatal ~ Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) is
the attitude. There is a certain braveness that I admire, a sort of boldness.
An understanding that sound artifacts, that occur when recording and editing
tape, actually adds to the message of the music. Form follows function. Never
worry about the outcome. Just create!! And that attitude I find in all aspects
of Nechvatals work; the choices he makes in combining sounds and in the sounds
he chooses. His work with Tellus also
had a big influence on my life as a sound artist. We sold Tellus tapes at the Staalplaat shop in Amsterdam and I collected
most of them and learned from listening to them.
Radboud Mens, Staalplaat
Sound is subjective. When one hears an audio sound,
it cannot help be part of one's memory and senses. Joseph Nechvatals Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) is an
aural adventure within your head, which is lovely. It is a Proustian series of
moments to sit and listen to this landscape of aurally delights that takes one
to familiar places and mysterious locations that once may have had a map but now
undiscovered territory. The first listen will not be your last.
Tosh Berman
One wonders what is it like to step into a
time-machine, or better yet, to ask the question: what kind of sound allows for
time travel? These Selected Sound Works
snippets and excerpts by Joseph Nechvatal, covering his artistic creation in
the period from 1981 to 2021, are an answer to this question. These
time-slices, produced over 40 years, cover a polyphony of artistic creation and
express Nechvatals exorcism of relevant cultural tropes and historical events;
from Tibetan chants to a 9/11 sound memorial to a C++ viral real-time field
recording, this monumental work compresses time-travel into a cassette.
Dana Dawud
Listening to Joseph Nechvatals Selected Sound Works transported me to the sonic landscape I
discovered living in New York City in the late 70s and 80s. Every sound was
available to be heard, recorded, spliced, looped, slowed down, sped up, and
cut. The tape recorder was an instrument and everyone had their own unique
palette and position in space to convey. John Cage taught us that all we
had to do was listen. Listening to Selected
Sound Works is that kind of listening. Its all in there. Its the joyful
noise of sonic exploration and attentive listening to what we love.
Gen Ken Montgomery
Fantastic old-school industrial noise collage.
Gerald Xe Jupitter-Larsen
The Selected
Sound Works (1981-2021)
cut-ups take the listener on a journey through time; crossing both the cultural
references of Joseph Nechvatal and his interest in the encompassing power of
noise. This tape, which spans four decades of sound cogitation, explores topics
that also punctuated the artists writings (Immersion Into
Noise, in particular) and visual works. The track Excerpt II from
Reckless (1984) reproduces, for example, the sounds of detonations that
recall the issues of nuclear weapons that Nechvatal and Rhys Chatham raised in
their mid-1980s avant-garde art music performance XS: The Opera Opus.
This work crossed various historical and philosophical elements to criticise the massive and
disproportionate production of atomic weapons under the Ronald Reagan
presidency. As Nechvatal wrote in his essay The Look of XS in Unsound (vol. 3, n 1), XS resonates
not only with contemporary historical images, but also with faint visual
references to Pompeii, the cave dwellers, and the 60s. [] Here the mind is
wrestled away from Aristotelian logic by use of elaborate poly-structures, so
that we glimpse the image of mass annihilation wrought by militarized
technology which now provides the major context for our art and our lives. Nechvatal had
already dabbled with the theme of nuclear conflict in 1979, when he plastered
the walls of a group of buildings in Lower Manhattan with posters, proclaiming
Limited Nuclear War.
The symbolic power
of the nuclear weapon is addressed in Selected Sound Works through the
artistic practices of audio collage, instrumental performance, and sound
manipulation. That power allows us to appreciate Nechvatals more current
preoccupation with the notion of the virus. His viral symphOny, composed
over the years, focuses on his fascination with the virus; manifest in his
computer-assisted viral paintings, a-life animations, and sound works; that end here with an acoustic journey that pays tribute to Antonin Artaud, with a
reinterpretation of Artauds radio play, Pour
en finir avec le jugement de dieu.
Nicolas
Ballet
Ive always
felt that rock recordings were like scattered public monuments in the far more
expansive, atmospheric landscapes of electrically and electronically mediated
sound, the concatenation of machines, frequencies, channels and networks that
subtends whatever is called modern music. Joseph Nechvatals Selected Sound Works (1981-2021) seem to
recapture that feeling with stunning clarity, timing and musical sensitivity,
allowing a dispersion of familiar samples to appear as the effects of the vast
sonic grounds that nourished them in the first place.
Ina Blom
When Joseph
Nechvatal picked up Antonin Artauds Theater
and the Plague (1933) in 2021, he was surely looking for tools to
understand the social implications of the current plague, COVID-19 and its
variant, alongside the many different plagues of his lifetime, whether
HIV/AIDS, or the rising tide of computer viruses. All of these are connected by
many things (global travel, human/animal land competition, and resource
competition), but share a particular interest the structure of mutation. In
viral mutations, traces of the original contagion persist even as variants wipe
out the beneficial structures of resistance, whether they be antibodies,
anti-viral medication, or various forms of avoiding social contact. The
structure of this accelerated process of transformation is audible within
individual works on this cassette. How to
Kill (1986) audibly represents its source and its viral adaptation of
fragmented cuts (Janet Jacksons Nasty).
Psychedelic Hermeneutic (1988)
translates seventeen seconds of feedback from its source (Jimi Hendrixs Are You Experienced?) into a
minute-and-a-half exploration of feedback. The repetitions and feedings-back
performing a near perfect analogue for viral reproduction as well as the
bodies developing resistance through anti-bodies. By 2006, the viral had
jumped from recorded sound to a-life synthesis in viral symphony, whose visual
analogue, Computer Virus Project II was
developed with Stephane Sikora as a C++ a-life program. Without reducing any of
these to the direct translation model of data sonification, this cassette
perfectly frames the issue of contagion and variation as sonic perceptions.
Nechvatals lifetime of work in data manipulation, data corruption, and
multi-formatted AI/automata model for the past, present and future of viruses.
We live now in an era where going viral is desirable as a term of widespread
cultural imprinting. But usually going viral means the thing is unchanged as
it spreads. This view separates contagion from transformation, which is at the
center of Nechvatals practice. If you want to hear whats gained in the
translation, try listening to the source material (Jackson & Hendrix) and
Nechvatals transformation of it. Or, find the imagery of Computer Virus Project II and listen to its musical counterpart.
Hannah
Higgins
Pentiments
has also published the historically detailed audio of Joseph
Nechvatal's Sonic Archeology
conversation with Paul Paulun
~ HERE