Wolf

Notes
Volume 1, Number 2, June 2011

Michael Pisaro

Jason Kahn

Simon Reynell

Adam Sonderberg

Jeph Jerman



















Published by Compost and Height
Please do not reproduce content without prior permission from contributors.

wolf notes

Image: Trevor Simmons

How can we outsmart the sense of continuity
That eludes our steps as it prepares us
For ultimate wishful thinking once the mind has
ended
Since this last thought both confines and uplifts
us?

Contents

Michael Pisaro 6- 11
Prepared Piano (sketchbook)



Jason Kahn.12 - 32
Notes on Unheard Delhi



Adam Sonderberg.33 36
Tick Mark Studies: Ramones - Ramones (Sire, 1976)



Simon Reynell...37 - 40
Thoughts on not being a musician



Fantastical Zoology.41 42
By Jeph Jerman


Cover Image..43
Trevor Simmons

John Ashbery

An object, a space, an infinite number of
measurements. Wolf Notes is an attempt
at an open platform, each individual is free
to refashion the composition devised in
our approach, we initiate, they initiate.
Found in juxtaposition, in harmony, at the
base and summit of potentiality.

An openness is inescapable within any
media, it is to be embraced, to be realised.
All and any degree of interpretation will
fall within myriad rooms of disposition. So
to inhale and exhale, to move towards a
positive sense of production, Wolf Notes in
its totality is hope to the impossibility of
maximum openness.

This work, and the works contained, are
not objective fact, they are in a constant
flux of interpretation, of feedback and
feedforward, we respond by not
responding by responding.

Patrick Farmer


Prepared Piano (sketchbook)
Michael Pisaro (19972000)

1. Prepare a piano.

2. They found the point in the room most distant from the piano.

3a. The inside of the piano.
3b. The outside of the piano.

4. The piano mirrors the clouds moving above. We watched the blue-white film
projected on the polished black screen.

5. A birch tree, split long ago, as it fans out like a crooked white V written on the
shoreline, demarking the sky.

6. We open the lid and then close it, repeating as necessary.

7. I rolled a die, and stayed silently at the piano for the number of units indicated.

8. She visited the piano of a friend on an evening he was not present.

9. They select, using some procedure, 90 sounds. After arranging these sounds in a
random order and numbering them, they play a numbered sound when indicated with
a dot, do not play it when indicated by a space, keeping a pulse of 30 seconds.

!

"

&

'

+
!'

!!

!"

!#

!$

!%

!&

"!

""

"#

"$

"%

"&

"'

#!

#"

##

#$

#%

#&

#'

$!

$"

$#

$$

$%

%"

%#

%$

%%

%&

&"

&#

&$

&%

&&

+
%!

+
&!

+
+

'!

'"

(!

("

$&

(#

'%

($

(%

'&

!*

!)

"*

")

#*

#(

#)

$*

$'

$(

$)

%*

%'

%(

%)

&*

&'

&(

&)

'*

'(

')

(*

((

()

)*

'$

!(

+
"(

+
+

+
'#

''

+
(&

('


10. The pianist recites into the piano, at a pulse of 5 seconds per number, all of the
numbers in his address book.

11. A sound is selected and played on the piano 84 times in a row. This is done once a
day at the same time, from December 12 to March 5 (March 4 in a leap year).

12. A long rope hangs straight down from the ceiling, directly above the piano.
(It does not move.)

13. Five Rooms
Ceiling by Turrell.
Walls by Mauser.
Mirrors by Reinhardt.
Space by Martin.
Piano by Lewitt.

14. A repertoire:
Embryons Desschs by Satie (played 4 times daily).
One page selected each day at random from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book.
Beethoven String Quartets; or, once in a while, a Bagatelle.
John Cages Sonatas and Interludes (played without preparation).
Im a King Bee.
Poems by Robert Creeley.
Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti.
The Goldberg Variations.
The Coo Coo Bird.

15. They find an old, dead piano, and clear out the insides. They fill the body with
evergreen needles, continuing to replace the needles with fresh ones as they turn
from green to brown.

16a. Main Street.
16b. The Village Green.
16c. The Library.
16d. The Train Station.
16e. The School.
16f. Shop Windows.
16g. Lights.
16h. Your street.
16i. Your house.
16j. Your room.
16k. Good night.

17. The wound strings, removed from the piano and unwound, are strung together,
the direction of the line changing each time a new winding is addedthis is a path
through the city.

18. She will have disabled one hammer in the central octave of the piano and then
played the entire Well-Tempered Clavier I & II.


19. We have found a way to add one tone between E and F. (Not a microtone.)

20. A white roomfour walls, a ceiling, a floor. No shadows; light filling the space. In
this room is a completely white piano of the exact dimensions of the room.

21. Zither.

22. Three pianos are lined up side by side. (The second is missing.)

23. Using your fingernail, you lightly scrape the lowest piano string, starting at the end
of the string farthest away from the keyboard, moving towards the keyboard, once per
second, allowing extra time to maneuver through the supports. (Pedal down.)

24. He will have placed a microphone gently on the piano strings, turned it on,
keeping the amplifier at low volume. Waiting.

25. One morning the doorway was obstructed by a toy piano.

26. She played one or two pieces at the piano of 2 to 5 seconds length every day. Most
involved two or three note clusters played in an ascending or a descending series.
There was occasional vocal accompaniment. (for Cocoa)

27. The piano imagines a greater or final piano. It believes that in the future there will
be a piano that exceeds the potential of present day pianos. All one hears now is faint
singing. Someday there will be a piano of pure singing, the pianos idea of itself.

28. A film of a piano, projected on a pinkish-white screen. The music comes from
behind the screen. Shown at the Champs-lyses theatre with the lights on, the film is
barely visible. The music, played on a broken violin, is barely audible. Someone leaves
in disgust: This is not a piano. As reported in the Paris papers the next day, the
showing was attended by at least 100 people, 14, or no one at all. A riot did or did not
ensue. Refreshments were or were not served.

29. One note played on a piano with the pedal down. All the other strings resonate in
proportion to their proximity to the original.

30. They imagine, in as much detail as possible, the notes Eb and E, as played on the
piano. After five minutes, they play these tones. They repeat this until they can
anticipate every sound to be heard.

31. Two pianos are in precisely the same place at the same time. In the next moment,
they are gone, and there is nothing but a shimmering of the air.

32. The very sophisticated machinery perceives exactly when the chord begins and
exactly when the chord ends. No words will have been used to describe the precise
duration.

33. We live in the distance between the beginning of the sound and the hearing of
the sound, says Antoine.


34a. All pianos.
34b. The pianos of America.
34c. This piano.
34d. Not a single piano.
34e. (blank) It is not yet named, but is always there.

35. The piano is a single material, which for its use requires division into secondary
materials. Its sounds are those of material unfolding in time. Time only carries them
to the full extension of the material. Beyond this lies an area uncounted by time.

36. (Materials)
Sound 1
Sound 2
Sound 3
Sound 4
Sounds 1 and 2
Sounds 1 and 3
Sounds 1 and 4
Sounds 2 and 3
Sounds 2 and 4
Sounds 3 and 4
Sounds 1, 2 and 3
Sounds 1, 2 and 4
Sounds 1, 3 and 4
Sounds 2, 3 and 4
Sounds 1, 2, 3 and 4

37. From 88 possible:

!"

#$

%$

&'

!'

!%

!$

(&

"&

($

)(

(!

$#

%%

"$

"*

!&

)(

$#

"%

##

!(

#%

%*

)&

$"

"&

$#

&$

((

!!

#$

$%

!!

&!

$(

($

##

#'

$(

#"

$'

"&

#*

(*

(#

$#

(!

#(

"(

#&

#"

%#

%*

($

('

("

&

#$

%*

)#

!(

$(

%)

%#

&)

%&

"$

$)

$#

!"

(!

%#

"#

%#

()

!#

")

#*

"#

&$

$)

#)

"!

#)

"!



38. Left hand: F, Gb, B, e. Right hand: g, bb, gb1, ab1. (Or any other sound.)

39. A piano is something to touch. (to John)




Michael Pisaro is a composer and guitarist, a member of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble and
founder and director of the Experimental Music Workshop.
Several CDs of his work have been released by such labels as Edition Wandelweiser Records, Compost
and Height, confront, Another Timbre, Cathnor, Nine Winds and others, including most recently
"transparent city, volumes 14", an unrhymed chord, hearing metal 1, A Wave and Waves and
"harmony series (1116)".
He has performed many of his own works and those of close associates Antoine Beuger, Kunsu Shim, Jrg
Frey and Manfred Werder, and works from the experimental tradition, especially John Cage, Christian
Wolff, James Tenney and George Brecht.

10

11

Notes on Unheard Delhi
By Jason Kahn



For the month of November 2010 I was an artist in residence in Delhi with the Swiss Arts Council
Pro Helvetia and the media research center Sarai. One of my proposed projects for this residency
was a continuation of my Unheard Cities series of works, which I've been realizing since 2002.
Unheard Cities explores how we perceive urban sound environments in the form of installations,
musical performances and, in the case of Unheard Delhi, works for radio. In Unheard Delhi I
interviewed eight people with the question, What is your favorite sound or sound environment in
Delhi? I recorded all the answers and then went out in the city and recorded the corresponding
sounds. The resulting recordings and interviews were then mixed together for an approximately
60-minute long audio portrait of the city. I produced an earlier version of this piece, Unheard
Zrich, in 2007.

The piece works on several levels, perhaps the first being that the interviewees come to reflect on
the sound environments of the city in which they live. Many of the people I interviewed had great
difficulty in answering the question. The idea of a favorite sound, let alone any sound at all, is
fairly alien as this seems to be a topic most people don't think about, especially in Delhi where the
sheer density and volume of sound often makes ignoring the surrounding sounds a prerequisite for
getting through the day. If someone does think about the sounds of their city then it is inevitably
the sounds which disturb that come to mind. Asking about the sounds which please is therefore a
double challenge. On another level, the answers provided by the interviewees creates a kind of
sonic map for me to find my way through the city with. These peoples' sounds lead me through the
city, in search of where these sounds occur and on the way I quite naturally encounter other sound

12

environments which I otherwise might have never come across. Finally, the sound of the
interviewees' voices provides another image of the city in which they live. Not only do the
recordings of the sounds they designated but their voices themselves lend a sonic mirror to the
greater urban soundscape in which they live. My hope is that people hearing these pieces will also
come to reflect on the sounds of the places in which they live, and not just the sounds which
disturb them but also the sounds in which they find solace, shelter or joy.
As a side note, it occurred to me much later after finishing the piece that the word sarai
translates in Hindi to An enclosed space in a city or beside a highway. Where travelers and
caravans can find shelter, companionship and sustenance. A tavern, a public house, a meeting
place. A destination and a point of departure. A place to rest in the middle of a journey. For many
of the people I interviewed it was clear to me that the sounds they chose created for them a space
of shelter, a sense of companionship or even a place of destination, where they would go for
enjoyment or rest. In this sense, Unheard Delhi is not just about sounds but about social spaces
and how sound contributes to the creation of these spaces.
In the following texts I give the name of each interviewee, their vocation, an excerpt from their
interview and notes about how the recordings of their sounds were made. These texts follow the
order of the final version of Unheard Delhi.

13



1. Alankar (student)

People coming out on the streets marching together, trying to bring out a collective voice,
sound.

Alankar's sound designated a collective space symbolized by the sound of people demonstrating.
As such, this meant that I had to find a demonstration in Delhi. In fact, there are often
demonstrations in Delhi but, like many things in India, it is not easy to find out when or where they
are. As a side note I should mention that I was in Delhi with my partner and three of my children
(at that time ages three years, six years and seven months). This made me far less mobile and
flexible than if I had been in Delhi alone. We often all trooped out into the city together, the whole
family in tow behind me, searching for these sounds. And it was often a matter of pure luck or
coincidence that I managed to find the sounds to be recorded. In several cases, the sounds
designated by the interviewees were already sounds I had recorded during our previous
wanderings through the city, in which case I didn't have to seek these out. But this was seldom the
case.
But in Alankar's answer I was presented with a particular challenge. Time was also very short for
this project. I was only in Delhi for around one month and I was not just producing Unheard
Delhi but had given a concert (of recordings made in the city) and exhibited a new installation.
Some of the interviews were done near the beginning of my stay, which gave me more time to
record the sounds, but some, like Alankar's, were made closer to the end, which put me under
additional time pressure to find the sounds. I would've rather had the luxury of many more
leisurely wanderings through the city, but this just wasn't possible.
The recording used for Alankar's answer was made one day before our departure, near Connaught
Place in the center of New Delhi. We were actually in search of gifts to bring back for family and
friends and were on our way to a huge emporium for traditional handcrafts. As we came closer to
the emporium, I heard the sound of what seemed to be a demonstration in the distance. The
sound was loudest right in front of the emporium but no demonstration was in sight, though police
in full riot gear with automatic weapons stood at each corner of the intersection. It finally dawned
on me that a demonstration in another part of the city was being transmitted at a blaring loud
volume over loudspeakers mounted on each corner of the intersection. It was strange to think that
this was the demonstration I had looked so long for, but in fact, it was a demonstration, albeit a
disembodied one. The police were there, the traffic was snarled and people stood around on the
street, as if waiting for the demonstration to appear around the corner any second.
The best place to record this was right next to a group of police, who kept eying me suspiciously.
Although my recording equipment was rather unobtrusive, I still felt a sense of dread. My worst
fear was to be questioned and to have my equipment confiscated. Even worse was the idea of
losing this recording which I had searched so long for. In the end everything was OK.

14



2. Shweta Upadhyay ( journalist)

During that gap between wakefulness and sleep you really feel like you are connected to
something beyond.

This was a case of me having already recorded a sound which an interviewee had chosen. Shweta
Upadhyay responded with the sound of the muezzin's morning call to prayer. Like Alankar, her
sound connected her to a specific space. In this case not of protest but a sense of spirituality
infusing that place where one is neither awake or asleep.
Near the beginning of my stay I had made an early morning trip to the Jama Masjid, Delhi's main
mosque and one of the city's most important cultural and historical sites. I sat on the steps leading
up to the main entrance and the muezzin began to sing. For anyone who hasn't experienced this, it
certainly does have an otherworldly feel to it, instantly transporting one to another place.
During my time in Delhi I never left the house without my recorder and microphones clipped to the
collar of my jacket or shirt. I was constantly recording and on this morning at the Jama Masjid I was
able to capture the sound of the muezzin, though I hadn't been planning on recording this.
Many of the sounds chosen by the people I interviewed had a certain clarity to them, the ability to
cut through the dense environment of Delhi's sound fields and create a space of their own. The
muezzin's call was like a knife, penetrating the relative early morning stillness of Old Delhi. I also
experienced this call later during the day and, surprisingly, it still had the same effect, piercing
through the city's wall of noise.

15

16


3. Iram Ghufran (film maker)

That delicate crackling kind of sound.

Iram Ghufran was responsible for Sarai hosting me and I spent a lot of time speaking with her
about her experiences with sound in Delhi. It was initially very hard to interview her as she
couldn't think of any sound whatsoever in the city which pleased her. Her initial response to my
question was, The sound of my hard disc when I turn it on each morning, which I couldn't quite
accept as an appropriate answer as this sound could have occurred anywhere in the world where
she might have had her hard disc with her. Although another interviewee (Chandrika Grover, see
below) gave a similar response about the sound of water flowing from her tap, I considered this as
more specific to Delhi and therefore pressed Iram for other sounds. In the end, she actually gave
me more answers than I could use. It was as if once I planted this idea, something which she
admittedly never had given much thought to, the trickle became a flood.
Her first answer was then the sound of food frying at a roadside stand. I loved her description of
this sound and how it created this sense of intimacy and shared experience with all people who
came from Delhi. I just couldn't for the life of me imagine how I would be able to capture this in a
recording. Aside from the fact that the city was virtually always too loud to record something this
quiet, I couldn't see getting close enough to the frying food to record it even if I did by some
miracle find a quiet place with a food stand.
A few days later after her interview I was going through recordings I had already made in the city
and stumbled across the very sound she had described! This had been recorded on my early
morning trip to the Jama Masjid in Old Delhi (see above). On my way to the mosque I stopped at
one of these stands to drink some chai. It was still dark and the city was very quiet. A man was
preparing samosas and pakoras in the hot oil. I drank my chai standing very close to the frying food
and was thus able to record this sound, though at the time I remember being more entranced with
this early morning atmosphere than with the sound of the frying food, which was in fact more a
byproduct of the whole recording experience. I think this was one of my favorite recordings of
Unheard Delhi.

17


4. Chandrika Grover (director of Pro Helvetia New Delhi)

When you turn on the tap in the morning and water flows from it, it's sweet music to my ears.

Chandrika's answer was at once very simple and for me very understandable. In the short time
living in Delhi we had experienced daily water problems. Water came from a reservoir on the roof
pumped by an incredibly loud and old water pump, which more often than not did not pump or,
rather, only pumped in the mornings, but not in the afternoons. And then only one of our
bathrooms in the apartment had water flowing to the toilet and one to the sink, and the water
heater wouldn't always fill...and so on. Chandrika's answer made more than perfect sense for me!
And, of course, our problems paled in comparison to those many people in Delhi who perhaps
didn't have any running water at all.
Living in Zrich, where crystalline rivers gush from the mountains and lakes, one easily takes for
granted the value of water. But in Delhi, even in the more affluent parts of the city like the one we
were staying in, the availability of water is a daily uncertainty.
The sound of water for Chandrika therefore defined a state of mind and a portent for the day's
arrival. I made this recording in our apartment on a day when the water was in fact running. I only
had to make sure the water pump was off before starting the recorder!

18





5. Ish Shehrawat (musician)

You can really enjoy these complete moments of silence and complete chaos.

Ish was one of the interviewees who I didn't have to prod for an answer. Maybe because he is a
musician or maybe because he was born and raised in Delhi, but he seemed to have no problem in
connecting with what I was after in my interview.
His first answer referred to the parks in Delhi, which created a context and a contrast to the city's
magnificent chaos. For him, it was important to have these quiet places to reactivate the process
of hearing again. The city's dense, churning sound environment tends to blot this out. Though I'd
have to say that, like Ish, I also found a certain sense of enjoyment in the city's noisiest areas.
There was something incredibly invigorating, when not at the same time utterly taxing, of being in
the Chawri Bazar Road in Old Delhi on a weekday afternoon with the streets too full to move
through, clogged with rickshaws, taxis, the odd cow and this incredible mass of humanity inching
its way forward through the dust and exhaust fumes. I felt at times like I was trapped in a television
tuned between stations, spewing white noise and an endless flicker pattern of snowy static and
abrupt glitches.
Finding a place to record Ish's sound proved to be no problem at all, as right around the corner
from where we lived was the Kamla Nehru Ridge Forest, a huge national park full of monkeys and
dense clusters of screaming birds. Being somewhat of an anomaly for Delhi, the park was often full
with joggers, hikers or people picnicking. It was therefore somewhat difficult finding a quiet spot in
the park which could somehow capture what Ish was referring to. During the recording the birds
gradually grew in intensity. At first my presence frightened them away, but after a few minutes
they seemingly decided I posed no threat and resumed their chorus at full volume. Near the end of
the recording you can hear a man in the distance singing on a squeaky swing.

19

20


6. Iram Ghufran (film maker)

They go on making the sound and it's dying in all the noise that is around it.

In her interview Iram discussed one of the archetypal problems in urban sound environments: the
drowning out of small, more subtle sounds. Here she was referring to the bell on the bicycle
rickshaws. Although I would tend to agree with her in general about these small sounds getting
drowned out, I would in particular disagree with her about the rickshaw wallah's bell. Even in the
noisiest depths of a hopelessly traffic-clogged Old Delhi street, these bells always seemed to
magically appear, ringing clearly above the din. I began to ask myself if there perhaps wasn't
something in the design of these bells which made them specially suited to this most hostile of
environments. If anything, I didn't hear them dying in all the noise around them, but ripping this
noise asunder in the most subversive of ways, almost, it seemed, working on a subconscious level.
I always knew to get out of the way when I heard the ring of a rickshaw wallah's bell.
As with many of the recordings in Unheard Delhi, recording a rickshaw wallah's bell posed a
number of problems. I couldn't imagine just recording this on the street, even if it was practically
always going on. Registering this on a psychological level was one thing, but somehow transferring
this experience to a recording was another. And I didn't feel right just walking up to a rickshaw
wallah and trying to explain that I wanted to record his bell. Even if I did feel right about this I still
probably couldn't have done it as most of these driver's don't speak much English and I figured it
would be near to impossible to get my point across.
In the end, I hit upon a very elegant solution. Every morning different vendors visited the courtyard
of our apartment complex. There was a man selling bread, another man came with the milk, and
yet another who brought vegetables. The vegetable vendor arrived on a large flatbed bicycle, piled
high with all kinds of vegetables. And he had a bell, the same bell that all the rickshaw wallahs had.
We had already gotten to know each other over the several weeks that we had been living at the
apartment. I just came out one morning with my microphones and recorder and asked him if I
could ring his bell a few times. He seemed to understand, or at least not care, and I made the
recording. And then I bought our vegetables for the day plus a tip for his bell.

21

22

7. Priya Sen (film maker)

It becomes like this little communal space.

Priya Sen's answer really hit upon my idea of sound defining a social space. She chose not an
unique sound but the sound of a place, a small roundabout near her house in Jongpur Extension, a
quiet residential neighborhood in southern New Delhi. It was here at this rotunda placed in the
intersection of four streets that people in her neighborhood met to sell their wares, wash and dry
their clothes or to just relax and talk with the neighbors.
The idea of recording an entire environment, as opposed to going for one particular sound or
event really appealed to me. The trek out to her house proved to be another of our Delhi odysseys,
consisting of a long train ride, a very long walk and a couple eating stops on the way. When we
finally found the roundabout I was a bit disappointed. There was nobody there! No women
washing, no people selling anything, not even anyone sitting there. We walked a bit further and
found a small playground and let the kids relax and play for a while. I gave the situation some
thought and decided to go back to the roundabout and make a recording. Maybe someone would
arrive while I was there, maybe we were too early.

I left my family at the playground and went back to the roundabout. It was still empty but I went
ahead and took a seat and started the recorder. Almost as if by magic the vendors started to
appear from different directions, circling the rotunda and calling out their wares. Neighbors walked
by, staring at me curiously. A pack of stay dogs approached me cautiously and sniffed at my shoes.
Nobody actually entered the rotunda but I did get the sense that it was the heart of this
neighborhood, that sooner or later everyone converged here. The sounds I recorded represented
the vortex of this small community and I felt that the recording, even if it didn't capture Priya's
precise description, did impart that sense of this particular place.

23



8. Sajid Akbar (musician)

Like a concentrated wave of sound of these people just enjoying these rides.

Sajid Akbar contacted me out of the blue while I was in Delhi. He'd been to my installation at the
Bhuta Gallery in the Crafts Museum and had a few questions about this. I asked if he would be
interested in doing an interview for Unheard Delhi, to which he readily agreed. I only mention
this here as one of the great problems facing me in producing this piece was finding enough
people to interview, especially when working under such pressing time constraints. I had, in fact,
interviewed several other people for the piece but some of their answers, though perhaps very
interesting, for various reasons couldn't be recorded. For example, one person liked the sound of a
specific truck horn that had actually recently been outlawed in Delhi and which therefore no
longer existed. Or some people gave the same sound as others. The sound of trains, either their
horns or of the actual train passing by, or of birds singing, were sounds several people mentioned.
And then, some sounds I just couldn't track down. So, the more people I could interview, the
better. But it was difficult to find enough people and to find the time to interview them. Delhi is
huge and it sometimes took me well over an hour to meet someone to make a five-minute
interview. I couldn't very well expect people to take time out of their day and come to me. I did
manage to make several of the interviews which finally ended up on the piece at Sarai, which,
luckily enough, was just a ten-minute walk from our apartment.
Sajid's answer referred to the World of Wonders, an amusement park out on the absolute nether
reaches of Delhi, in an area devoid of name, only designated as Sector 18. Which all sounded very
mysterious to me. The train ride out there was really long, passing through vast swathes of Delhi
slums, an incredibly dense landscape of tightly clustered apartment buildings and narrow streets
packed solid with people. When we reached the Sector 18 metro station the scene outside was like
a riot with this fantastically loud wall of traffic noise echoing between the road and the train
station above. It took us around ten minutes just to cross the street to start on our way to the
amusement park. Anytime we tried to cross a road in Delhi without traffic lights we were virtually
like sitting ducks, but we miraculously always manged to avoid calamity.
We continued on through what seemed like an endless area of shopping plazas and came to
another perilous road crossing to a huge, even by Western standards huge, shopping mall. I felt like
I was suddenly back in Los Angeles. The only difference was that in Los Angeles they would never
have allowed such massive sound leakage from the mall's ventilation system. Two ten-meter air
vents exhaled spent air from the mall's ventilation system. It felt like two jet engines warming up
for take off, though the sound itself was much much deeper, fairly rumbling my stomach with its
vibrations.
We moved on and finally came to the World of Wonders which, as one might expect, was far from
that. It was a rather sad affair. Something like an abandoned carnival attraction in a JG Ballard
novel, re-animated by a small group of people who had survived some unspeakable calamity and,
yearning for a connection to their decimated world, managed to get some rides and a semblance
of wonder running again.
Due to lack of visitors, many of the rides were not running. Luckily enough, though, one pendulum-
like affair was working and people were riding it, yelling and screaming in ernst. This provided a

24

great recording, with their peals of laughter panning back and forth across the stereo field. I could
very well imagine Sajid's amusement at passing this ride each day on his way to work, which was
perhaps the greatest wonder of this sad amusement park.

25


9. Iram Ghufran (film maker)

A sound which is really exciting, fun and just very vibrant.

November is the month for weddings in Delhi and there is probably no bigger celebration for a
family than having it's son or daughter joined in holy matrimony. Iram refers here to the baraat
procession, which is when the bridegroom travels on a horse to the wedding ceremony at the
bride's house, accompanied by his friends and family and a troop of drummers.
I thought to myself, Great, this will be an amazing recording but where will I find this? When I
asked around the inevitable answer was, Oh, everywhere. November is the month of weddings.
But everywhere was for me nowhere in Delhi, as I couldn't find myself traipsing around the city
on an endless search for a wedding procession. But then, as was often the case during our stay in
Delhi, the answer came almost as if by magic. Someone from Sarai told me the day after Iram's
interview that there would be a wedding right next door that evening. Incredible!
Things started to get going around nightfall. I went back to Sarai with my daughter Josephine and
we stood outside the bride's house trying to record the music, which didn't really seem to be
happening yet. Suddenly, a huge roar of drums erupted and the procession spilled out on the
street with horses, a throng of people in all their finery and several men bringing up the back with
generators in tow to power all the lights.
We stood by the side of the road and recorded the procession as it meandered back and forth
between the bride's house and a Hindu temple not far away. The drums panned back and forth,
receded in the background, pushed to the foreground. It was a pulsing mass of buzzing, snapping
snare drums supported by deeper tuned dhol drums. As Iram stated, just vibrant.

26

27


10. Ish Shehrawat (musician)

All the trains going by, taking out different intervals. It's almost like a song.

I found it interesting how Ish tuned into environmental sounds as musical statements. It probably
should have come as no surprise to me, as Ish is a musician, but then, I seem to know many
musicians who wouldn't consider these sounds as musical. For me, though, Delhi proved to be one
of the most musical cities I'd ever spent time in. And here Ish came up with a good example of a
sound environment which probably only exists in Delhi. He had lived near a train station for some
time and became entranced with the incoming and outgoing trains tooting their air horns. The
description sounded great but I couldn't really imagine what this actually could sound like nor how
I would be able to find this. I'd already been at the Old Delhi train station and, though there were
in fact trains sounding their horns there, it lacked the density and clarity of Ish's description.
Several days before going home to Zrich, we made our way to one of Delhi's classic tourist
destinations, Humayun's Tomb, the so-called little brother of the Taj Mahal. After having a look at
the tomb, we went down to the surrounding park to fly some kites we'd bought for the kids on a
trip to Varanasi. It was a warm and windy day. I took a break from kite flying and went over to sit in
the shade to cool off. Suddenly I heard in the distance what sounded like a train horn. And then
another. I realized that this was the sound Ish had been referring to. The wind carried the sound of
these horns over from the Nazrat Nizamuddin railway station, about nine kilometers away from
Humayun's Tomb. It was in fact a beautiful sound, like a song and a bit mournful. Perhaps I had
been reflecting on the fact that we would soon be leaving Delhi, a city which could in equal parts
drive one crazy and be utterly captivating at the same time.
This was another case speaking for never leaving the house without my recording equipment.
Given the time constraints I was working under, I most certainly would have never found this
sound no matter how hard I had tried.

28


11. Iram Ghufran (film maker)

Every bell is like somebody praying, somebody asking for something.

Iram answered here with one of the most ubiquitous sounds to be heard in India: temple bells. In
an intensely spiritually conscious country like India, there are temples everywhere and most of
them have bells. Even in the courtyard of our apartment building the neighbors had erected a
small Hindu temple, complete with its own priest who spent the days there, sitting in a space not
much larger than himself.
And here again, an answer where a sound is appreciated not just for the pleasure of it in and of
itself, but as a symbol of something else. As in Shweta Upadhyay's link to the muezzin's morning
call to feeling you are connected to something beyond, so too do the sound of these temple bells
represent a connection to a place or force beyond, something all powerful, benevolent and
nurturing.
Though in her interview Iram referenced this sound to a park near her house, I felt that the real
issue here was the sound of the bells and what they represented, not the park near Iram's house
where she sometimes heard these. And for this reason I decided to make the recording at a Hindu
temple near our apartment. Once again I was amazed at how many of the sounds recorded for
Unheard Delhi were either found in the neighborhood where we were staying or from sounds
which I'd already recorded before the actual interviews had been made.

29

30

12. Sadaf Raza (projects organizer, Pro Helvetia New Delhi)

You can hear when the city is still not up and awake but it slowly is waking up. And that's when
you hear different sounds.

Sadaf Raza was in fact the first person I interviewed for Unheard Delhi, and this when she was in
Zrich on a trip for the New Delhi office of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. I felt that this
recording would be a good way to end the piece, in stark contrast to its beginning with the
storming sound of people demonstrating. Sadaf chose not a specific sound but, rather, a time of
day where one could hear different sounds at all. Much as Ish spoke about being able to reactivate
the process of listening by visiting parks in Delhi, so too did Sadaf find solace in the early morning
hours, when the shops were just opening and the day had yet to fall into the vortex of Delhi's mass
of nearly 17,000,000 people trying to navigate its way through the city.
Sitting here in Zrich as I write this, the idea of being able to hear different sounds seems like
nothing remarkable. I can hear the wind blowing through the trees, kids playing down in the
courtyard, a street car rolling by, the church bell ringing out the time of day and birds singing. But
then I think back to Delhi, to Connaught Place, which is the area Sadaf gave for being able to
experience this early morning silence. And I remember now that, really, aside from the occasional
rickshaw bell or the piercing, snarling buzz of motorcycle horns, all I really can recall of this place is
a dense wave of traffic winding around and around a hub of seven major thoroughfares, all
converging on a circle of upscale restaurants, boutiques and tourist traps. I like to think of myself as
a trained listener, which means I've developed a sensibility to listening through years of practice,
but in Delhi, and perhaps like no other city I've spent time in, my so-called trained ears often
came up empty, try as I might. Perhaps, though, empty is the wrong word. Maybe overloaded
would be more accurate, as the density of this city's sound environment was like no other I'd
experienced, just in terms of the sheer amount of different sounds potentially happening at any
one moment. Of course, there are places of less sounds or quieter sounds, like the parks, but these
are few and far between. When one wants to hear more then, as Sadaf so astutely summed up,
one must be up at the crack of dawn.
Still, I found Connaught Place early in the morning not as she described it. Perhaps I wasn't there
early enough, or perhaps the city has already outgrown her memories of it. In any case, I decided
to make a recording of this early morning environment not far from the Sisganj Gurudwara, a large
Sikh Temple in Old Delhi on Chandni Chowk. I had to make several trips to this area before finding
the right time and place to capture what I thought best represented Sadaf's words of being able to
hear different sounds, but when I finally did make the recording I knew that perhaps more than
anything else I'd heard in Delhi this was the best. Normally, during the day this knot of winding
alleyways and narrow streets is a high pressure zone of every conceivable sound, all at seemingly
full volume. Yet in the early morning it almost felt like an abandoned city. This was the time of the
day when the cows wandered listlessly through the streets and the snap of door locks clicking
open and store shutters being rolled up thundered like explosions, so distinct did they sound out in
contrast to the slowly waking city around them. And precisely these were some of the unheard
sounds of Unheard Delhi which I had been looking for.

31

Jason Kahn. Born 1960, New York, USA. Composition, installations, percussion, electronics. Based in Zrich, Switzerland.
Exhibitions and concerts in museums, galleries, art spaces, festivals and clubs throughout Europe, North and South
America, Australia, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia,
Singapore, Turkey and South Africa. Sound pieces for film, dance and radio.

http://jasonkahn.net

32


Tick Mark Studies
Ramones Ramones (Sire, 1976)
By Adam Sonderberg

The albums we love have it easy. If theyre within earshot they can luxuriate in the
praisebe it ham-fisted, needlessly abstract or recklessly passionateheaped upon
them. Its a relationship complicated primarily, if at all, by extra-musical associations:
various and sundry hormone- and/or adrenaline-churning experiences involving love,
loss, theft, success, or abject failure.

I cant remember when I first heard the Ramones debut album, but my relationship
with these fourteen songs is doubtlessly mirrored in the lives of countless other
listeners of all ages, thereby rendering a rhapsodic appreciation of its power to excite,
inspire, and transform largely superfluous (and also outside the purview of Wolf
Notes).

The Tick Mark Studies came about as an attempt to frustrate my experience with this
and other beloved records. In the process, I hoped to interrogate my listening habits
and, as a result, cultivate a new form of active listening. The following pages consist
of two attempts to graphically represent all of the single snare hits present on
Ramones. My idea of active listening consists of a passive body (usually sitting
comfortably or recumbent) and active mind. By transcribing the activity of the snare
drum, my body played an active role in listening, and this made for a physically tense
hour. The resulting document draws inspiration from, and is indebted to, the visual
aesthetics of Minimalism; it attempts to transcribe, embody, and acknowledge the
aural and visual rigor that comprised the foundation of the Ramones masterfully
executed craft.

33

34

35




Adam Sonderberg is a composer, one-third of Haptic, and former co-director of the Dropp
Ensemble. He is the author of the recently published American Hours with German Efficiency
(Entracte) and maintains a blog by the same name.

36


Thoughts on Not Being a Musician
By Simon Reynell


Theres a note on the stairs: Things are not very good. He refuses to eat because of
diarrhea so juice, coffee, tea (in red canister). My mothers gone to a rehearsal for
an Easter performance of the St. Matthew Passion, and Ive come back to the house
where I grew up in Bradford to look after my father for the hours while shes away.
Hes 93 and has been subject to debilitating infections for much of the past year. Hes
had trouble swallowing for some time, and from his bedroom upstairs I hear an ugly,
phlegmy cough every minute or so as he tries to clear his windpipe. His balance is
poor, and several falls have left his skin marked with countless dark bruises which
refuse to heal. Intellectually hes still pretty much there, and he listens every day to
the news in French and German as well as English, but the constant ailments make
him miserable and hes ready to die.


In my late teenage years I hated him and we had furious futile arguments about
politics. But by the time I started to have children, wed learned to step round our
ideological differences. He retired from his job as a cardiologist and mellowed, and I
managed to control my Oedipal rages. So for my children as they grew up he was a
lovely granddad: kind, supportive, non-judgmental and quietly loving.


[Ive just been up to check on him, and hes asleep now, curled up with only his
wrinkled face and unruly grey hair poking out of the covers, looking wizened and
horribly vulnerable]


My mother is still active, playing viola in several amateur orchestras and chamber
groups. For her 80th birthday a few weeks back 16 of her musical friends came and
spent the day playing chamber music in various formations in four rooms round the
house. When I was young she was just a housewife, but my fathers sister who was
an inspirational music teacher encouraged her to take up music again, and it
became first a passionate hobby, then a means of earning an independent income as
she started teaching violin and piano at a local school.


Culture and academic achievement were the two most highly valued things in my
parents house, and classical music was the constant soundtrack as we grew up -
Radio 3 in the kitchen, and records on the gramophone in the living room. And there
was always a piano in the corner first an upright, then later a rather beautiful baby
grand. Yet neither I nor my two brothers ever learned to play. My fathers belief was

37

that if we really wanted to do something, wed do it anyway. Im sure that if wed

asked for lessons, hed have happily paid for them, but none of us ever did, even
though as teenagers we spent most of our pocket money on LPs and listened to music
hard and seriously. I often say that not learning to play the piano is the biggest regret
of my life, but I still struggle to understand why I didnt.


* * * * *


When my father had a stroke about 10 years ago, he knew exactly what was
happening as he fell to the floor and started vomiting, but he didnt know if hed
recover, be paralysed or die. In fact he regained virtually all his mobility remarkably
quickly. My mother rang me and my brothers to inform us ten days later, when he
was out of hospital and it was clear he was going to be alright. For ten days she
hadnt rung because she didnt want to worry us and make a song and dance about
something that might turn out to be nothing.


Shes a musician, but she doesnt like to make a song and dance. I dont know if its
just our family, or typical of a subsection of the middle class of my parents
generation, or a feature of social life in a northern industrial city where Methodist
attitudes linger even amongst non-believers, but you dont want to make a fuss or risk
looking stupid by over-dramatising things. You get on with life, which usually involves
serving other peoples needs whether as doctor, teacher or musician. And you
instinctively distrust people who are showy or have pretensions.


My mother plays music every day, but she hasnt ever composed anything. Shes
content to play other peoples compositions, organise concerts and write programme
notes about the works of great composers. Creativity is for other people a
privileged few who you revere, but without being foolish enough to imagine that you
might ever become one of them. They exist somewhere else London perhaps, Paris
or Berlin or Vienna, but not Bradford. And they live another kind of existence: riskier,
more precarious, and more prone to tragedy. Its a post-Romantic vision that I can
critique intellectually, but is actually quite hard to shake off. I am after all my parents
child; I run a CD label, recording and producing discs of improvised and cutting edge
contemporary music, but I leave the creativity to others, not wanting to make a song
and dance - or a fool of - myself.


Singing and dancing: I pretty much stopped singing at the age of 12 when I decided I
was an atheist. Thereafter I stood through the hymns at school assembly with my
mouth firmly and defiantly shut. After my voice broke, I found that I could no longer
hit the right note, so I stopped singing altogether for fear of sounding stupid. And
dancing.well, I sometimes wonder if part of the reason I embraced avant garde
music so fervently in my late teens was so that I wouldnt have to go to discos and
either be a wallflower hanging round the edges, or else embarrass myself with my
ungainly arrhythmic stumbling on the dance floor.

38

For decades Ive told myself that Ive left starting too late. How can I envisage playing
the piano without having already done years of practice? My hands will never be
supple enough. In my Methodist-infused consciousness, music like everything else
worthwhile - should be the product of hard work and studied application. And the
fact that I like atonal music shouldnt exempt me from many hours of practicing
scales.


But with some of the music I love, instrumental virtuosity is no longer important, let
alone essential. Anyone can make interesting sounds with digital electronics. Then it
becomes even more terrifying, because theres no longer an excuse to hide behind.
Whats to stop me composing a great piece of electronic music except my own
mediocrity? I fear that Ill be found out and just confirm that Im not creative at all,
for all my secret hopes and pretensions. Self-consciousness and timidity are mixed
with sharp self-criticism; I was a high achiever academically, so I can quickly pick holes
in and dismiss any creative project that I tentatively try my hand at.


[Hes woken and has stumbled to the toilet. Incontinence would be the ultimate
humiliation for a man whos always been proudly independent, and would, Im sure,
prompt him to take the pills that would end it while my mothers away playing music.
Thats why she wants me here, so I can refill his glass of grapefruit juice, and keep him
listening to the radio and the ticking of his bedside clock until shes back to continue
the vigil]


* * * * * *


So am I stuck? Condemned to endlessly serve other peoples creativity instead of
exploring my own? Its all too easy to blame my parents for the way they brought me
up. And its also too easy to chastise myself in a pattern of self-criticism that does
nothing to break the circle.


My fathers dying is inevitably a time for self-reflection, and perhaps thats the jolt I
need to start doing as well as serving. Im already 55 and the clock keeps ticking. Im
sure that at first my voice will warble embarrassingly, and my early steps will be
gauche and clumsy, but perhaps its time at last to risk making a song and dance.

March, 2011

Simon Reynell has worked in television for 25 years, mostly over the past 12 years as a documentary
sound recordist, in 2007 he founded Another Timbre Records and in 2009 curated the Unnamed Music
festival in London and Leeds.

39

40


Fantastical Zoology

by Jeph Jerman

I would postulate an animal that lives at the far reaches of the atmosphere, "hanging"
in space and moving by electric/mechanical energy originating in its thought
processes. Doesn't need to eat, as it exists in a state of not quite becoming, a
nebulous almost-form caught at the transition stage between consciousness and
form. Very difficult to see, but occasionally they do dip closer to us and can be
witnessed with infra-red cameras or goggles. When seen, they resemble slightly jelly
fish without trailing tentacles or more accurately giant cells that constantly change
shape, as the edges are continually shifting back and forth between thought and
energy. They can be called down by attracting attention to oneself.


Jeph Jerman is an American sound artist who has recorded under the name Hands To and as a member
of many groups including Animist Orchestra and His Masters Voice.

41

42

Cover image: Trevor Simmons

Trevor Simmons is based in South London, has a studio in Camberwell.

More of his work can be seen at www.okya.co.uk/trevor_simmons

Recent sketchbook work at www.mountainofsign.blogspot.com/

43





















www.compostandheight.com

44