Rock Record: Flint Magazine, Issue 1

Rock Record: Flint Magazine, Issue 1
Joe Reinsel
[6] Flint Magazine Issue 1+2
04/2024

When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.
— Bleak House,
Charles Dickens

This collection represents five artists that are connected to the ideas of rocks and stillness. Each of the works on the disc manifest ideas that came from our first meetings for Flint Magazine.

This is collection is about change, time, pace, evolution, and decay.

The artists’ approach to time and place through sound demonstrate their flexibility within these constructs. Time can be a personal or strictly objective experience and can take on multiple meanings. While there is a overall running time that is determined through the physical format of the disc, I feel there is also a secondary time that flexes and changes as you listen to each piece.

– Joe Reinsel

Rock Record: Flint Magazine, Issue 1
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Produced by Maia Asshaq, Benjamin Gaydos, and Joe Reinsel
Mixed by Warren Defever

Note: The vinyl record is available for purchase here.

SIDE A:

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1. Warren Defever / Them

I’ve been recording my neighbors who are very loud seven days a week. I’m not exactly sure what it is their doing that causes the sound but my walls vibrate and paint chips fall from the ceiling. The sound is distant, even thunderous, as it travels between the walls and shakes the foundation of the building. Before the slight processing I’ve done, it reminded me of mountains crumbling into the sea or shifting tectonic plates, more so with my electronic treatments.

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Warren Defever is a musician and producer, originally from Livonia, Michigan, now based in Detroit. He is most known for his chameleonic project His Name Is Alive, though he is active in numerous other circles. He produced, engineered, and or remixed recordings by Iggy and the Stooges, Easy Action, Low, Ida, Michael Hurley, Califone, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, the Gories, the Go, Nomo, Saturday Looks Good to Me, Ethan Daniel Davidson, Faruq Z. Bey, the Von Bondies, Reba Fritz, Destroy All Monsters, Jenny Toomey, Slumber Party, John Sinclair, Elizabeth Mitchell & Lisa Loeb, as well as HNIA offshoot Velour 100.

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2. Francisco Lopez / Untitled 331

Created at ‘mobile messor’ (Bere Island), July 2015

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Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. For almost forty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion. He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in over seventy countries of the six continents. His extensive catalog of sound pieces -with live and studio collaborations with hundreds of international artists- has been released by nearly 400 record labels / publishers worldwide. He has been awarded four times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival and is the recipient of the Qwartz Award 2010 for best sound anthology.

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3. Matt Klimas / Ge [Locked Groove: SIDE A] & Si [Locked Groove: SIDE B]

Ge and Si are diminutive meditations, products of a fixation on the sonic properties of elemental material. Each track is a looped phrase fed through a diode-based distortion box, one germanium and one silicon, while varying the soak and intensity. They are micro-studies of physical matter translated into auditory color and character.

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Matthew Klimas is a designer, illustrator, and musician residing in Richmond, VA. He is a long-time fuzz-fiend, the driver behind the noise pop of The Snowy Owls. Klimas’ visual explorations of the abstract, the surreal, and the feline can be found at mattklimas.tumblr.com.

SIDE B:

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1. Mike Bullock / Duxbury

This piece is a mix of several recordings I made using condenser hydrophones at different locations on Duxbury Beach and Duxbury Marsh in Massachusetts. In each case the hydrophone was either buried in an inch or two of rocky sand, or resting on the floor of a river. The sounds were produced directly by the fluid motion of the water, as well as the movement of rocks and sand on the surface of the mic along with the scritchings of curious crabs.

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Mike Bullock is a composer, intermedia artist, and writer based in Philadelphia. His work encompasses electroacoustic improvisation, modular synthesis, field recording, intermedia installation, contrabass and bass guitar, porcelain making, illustration, and critical writing.

Bullock has been performing since the mid 90s at venues across the US and in Europe, including Fylkingen in Stockholm, Sweden; Instants Chavirés in Paris; Café OTO in London; Experimental Intermedia and ISSUE Project Room in New York City; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and EMPAC in Troy, NY. In June 2015, Bullock received a Performance Grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage.

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2. JT Bullitt / The Great Tohoku Earthquake

Listening to Earth: The Great Tohoku Earthquake

We live upon the dome of a great sonic cathedral. Right here under our feet, an endless chorus of natural vibrations sweeps across the Earth’s surface, imperceptibly lifting and swaying our bodies, our homes—even entire cities. They come from distant earthquakes, from ocean waves, and from passing storms, traveling thousands of miles and echoing for hours within the solid Earth. These vibrations move much too slowly for human ears to detect, but can be recorded by sensitive seismometers and converted into audible sound. What does this grand terrestrial chorus sound like?

In this recording we hear about two days of the Earth’s seismic sounds, as captured by a research seismometer in the Australian outback.[SEE FOOTNOTE] I’ve speeded up the sounds by a factor of 500 to make them audible to our ears. The recording begins on March 10, 2011. About ten seconds into the recording, a loud bang signifies the arrival of seismic waves from an earthquake in the Bali Sea, about 2,400 km from the recording station. Earthquakes this size (magnitude 6.5) are commonplace, occurring somewhere on the planet every few days. For several seconds (almost an hour in Earth time) you can hear echoes from the earthquake reverberating through the Earth’s crust. They eventually fade into the Earth’s natural background—the restless planet-wide hiss generated by waves traversing the world’s oceans.

At about 1:40 into the recording, the relative quiet is shattered by the arrival in Australia of the first seismic waves from a catastrophic earthquake near Tohoku, Japan. This earthquake tore through several hundred kilometers of the Earth’s crust and generated a tsunami that would claim more than 15,000 lives along Japan’s east coast. For hours afterward (the remainder of this recording), the Earth booms and crackles from hundreds of aftershocks, as the crust fitfully readjusts to the violent dislocation of the main earthquake. Gradually the aftershocks dissipate, slipping away into the ever-present oceanic background. The damage done, Earth returns to its normal state of uneasy equilibrium.

FOOTNOTE

The raw data for this recording were provided by Project IDA, which operates a global network of broadband and very broadband seismometers for the IRIS Consortium.

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Formerly a geophysicist (UC Berkeley and MIT), JT Bullitt turned to art when he could no longer find satisfactory answers to his questions about waves, motion, change, and time using the language of science. Since then, Bullitt has been exploring the invisible fields of energy and vibration that permeate the world around us, through sound (natural field recordings, altered found sound, audification of infrasonic geophysical processes), alteration of found objects, and drawing.