The Twin Cities has a long history of local music and sonic arts. But does it have its own sonic landscapes? As part of the Walker Reader series Sounds of Space, that considers the relationships between sonics and the built environment, we invited local artists to create original scores for sites across the Twin Cities.
Available as a free online interactive map, this collection, guest curated by John Marks, founding member of MirrorLab and Operations Director at The Cedar Cultural Center, presents a small sampling of the many ways our local spaces inspire local artists.
Experience these works as well as read an overview by John Marks below.
Nikki Pfeifer: Nectar for Walker Reader, Walker Art Center
Matthew Hiram: Garden Music, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
Dameun Strange: AquaSonos: TetrachordXPetrichor, Frogtown Park and Farm, Saint Paul
IOISIS (Alex Bissen): Owámniyomni, Saint Anthony Falls
Mary Hanson Scott: Newell, Newell Park, Saint Paul
In 2017, I had the great pleasure of co-curating a program of media objects from the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. The program included a new commission of 16mm film projections and live sound performance for Expanding the Frame that I created alongside my dear collaborators, Sam Hoolihan and Crystal Myslajek. One selection from my research was a live recording from May 1990 of Pauline Oliveros’s performing a durational piece for amplified and processed accordion, which took place in the former Cowles Conservatory. Underneath Oliveros’s repetitive and elongated accordion tones, incidental sounds from within the conservatory make their way to the microphones embedded in the instrument. Water flows from a fountain, and children laugh. An ambient din reverberatesoff the glass walls and ceilings through the body of the instrument and is heard by tiny microphones designed to reproduce the detail of wind through reeds. Where and when the recording was made are preserved. The recorded piece acts as a kind of electroacoustic carrier for time and space. The sound of the accordion and sounds from the space synthesize a sonic landscape.
It felt both natural and intimidating when asked by the Walker Reader to curate a selection of artists working with sound to create pieces in response to, in conversation with, or inspired by locations within our metropolitan landscape. Natural, because the intrinsic connection between sound and place are so critical to my experience as an artist and Twin Cities resident that this proposal made such good sense to me. Intimidating, because there are just so many great artists working with these considerations in the Twin Cities. Contemporary experimental/ambient/drone music is having a moment, and the communities of artists making it span a broad spectrum of aesthetic sensibility. Right now the Twin Cities is undoubtedly a site of concentrated cultural production in this field.
Within a week of writing this, the 10th annual Drone Not Drones Festival, a 28-hour concert of contiguous sound to benefit Doctors Without Borders, will happen at the Cedar Cultural Center; over 50 artists and ensembles will offer a testament to just how dense the experimental music scene is here right now. The recent American Composer Forum showcase of its 2024 McKnight Composers Fellows was full of drones, field recordings, and synthesis of all sorts. On any given week multiple events at venues, artist-run spaces, and DIY basements make the Twin Cities a place for artists of all ages experimenting with sound to build community and sustain their practice. If you are like me, this is a good place to be right now.
It’s clear plenty of artists are making sounds in this place, but what are the relationships between this place and the sounds being made? The artists selected for this series draw on those relationships in myriad ways. Either consciously or subconsciously, they demonstrate the influence of Deep Listening, a meditative practice of intentional listening led by Pauline Oliveros in the late 20th century and active today through many practitioners. There are nods to the architecturally and environmentally aware Ambient and New Age music of Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Susan Ciani prominent in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as contemporary artists such as Lawrence English and Norman Long, whose site-specific approach is heard through both representational and metaphorical ends in recorded formats, performance, and installation settings.
Similarly, some sounds made for this series are quite literal in their response to a location; others are much more figurative. While pieces by Mary Hanson Scott and Dameun Strange represent a deep, long-standing connection to a specific site, IOISIS’s piece reflects a new perspective of an often-overlooked place on a well-traveled path. Matthew Himes’s and Nikki Pfeifer’s works enter a conversation with the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, places made for artworks to be experienced within and communities to be built around. While disparate in form, these individual sonic threads weave a fabric of place interconnected by the networks laid out by the built environment and given identity by the community of artists working in this place at this time.▪︎