To rewind is to re-listen and re-engage, and it is also to remove and reduce. In my work with sound, to rewind is the basic process and substance. It is the generator of compositional intent. Arbitrary, improvised and stochastic sound events are captured and then analyzed through multiple re-hearings and close examinations of waveform features. Reduced listening opens potential for non-narrative formal and timbral connections, building out from contingent structures. A sequence of haphazard or unknowing procedures multiplies places of accidental alignment. Small folds, perturbations and disruptions in the soundfield can provide an anchor for aligning sonic events. Ungridded layers of micro and macro events slip against each other and produce clouds or flocks of sonic activity, with degrees of porosity. At undetermined points in time, sound events with separate causes and acoustic signatures share transparent time. Occasionally, alignments are further emphasized through additional, conscious placement of materials. These detailed microstructures are far more careful than their surrounding fields.
A continued rehearing of sound materials allows accumulative strategies of construction. Getting caught in small moments, focus spirals around minor moments – event-to-event conflations and hybridizations – and then zooms out to hear macro-structures and longer arc forms. And then, beginning again, getting stuck in new “problems” where the unknown lies just beyond the known.
To re-listen is not a process of working toward the known, carving away the “not-thing” a la Michelangelo. Instead, reactions to existing situations insist upon disturbance, and force alteration – outwards, inwards, or sideways. Experimentation and obtuse decisions open the structure again and again, in ever-smaller windows of shifting relationships.
To rehear is a means of giving attention, a most powerful tool.
This track is a remix of a small section from the album Furl. It utilizes processes of layered mimicry, allowing arbitrary gestures to be a generative source. The initial recording of an improvising group followed simple rules for vocal utterances, inside a resonant concrete bomb shelter. This recording was then responded to by myself and Sara Mapelli, separately, several times, while laying in the grass at the edge of her garden. The original was then discarded. This remix considers the context of a self-starting loop.
Seth Nehil is an artist, performance-maker, and composer with a practice that crosses between sound, performance-events and the visual arts. He has been an editor of arts publications, an organizer of performance festivals and a curator of exhibitions. In recent years, Seth Nehil has created large-scale sound performances and has collaborated with choreographers including Liz Gerring (NYC) and Linda Austin (Portland, OR). His sonic works investigate dynamic impacts, material tangibility and stochastic structures. He currently teaches sound, video and art theory at Washington State University in Vancouver WA and the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland OR.