The finer things in life

Listening is the whole deal

Thursday, July 25, 2024

Adam Moss in the afterword to The Work of Art:

THERE IS A PHRASE, variations of which many of the subjects of this book ended up uttering at some point. As they were describing why they did this or that, they would say they “listened” to the work, or the work would “tell” them what to do; the work would “speak” to them, as if a character in a book or a color on a canvas could issue orders. Tony Kushner asked his Angels alter ego, Louis, to explain the play to him; Cheryl Pope waited for the mother in her picture with no face to tell her whether she wanted a face. For a long while, I dismissed this phrasing as cliché — more of the empty language people often employ to describe how they work because creation is so hard to describe. Eventually, however, I began to think that no, maybe listening was the whole deal.

Listening to what the poem or song was telling them was another way of describing how they listened to themselves, taking whatever their imagination spewed forth, recognizing it and translating it back—simplifying it, usually—so their conscious self could go about manipulating it. And this attending (“I was just taking dictation,” said Kushner, a common sentiment) was really, I realized, at the heart of the project of this book. That’s what the exhibits they shared are about. The studies, notes, doodles —they are all ways the artists have of talking to themselves.

Or, as Anni Albers put it: “the listening to that which wants to be done”:

Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents at End of an Ear. I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

This one started out a little differently than the others: I asked my 11-year-old son and composer Owen (check out his album TECH) to trade tracks with me in a collaborative playlist. See if you can tell whose tracks are whose:

This was enormously fun — we had a little iMessage window going and our Spotify windows open and could see our changes in real time. Some of his picks really impressed and surprised me.

Only trouble was, I misjudged the length of the tape, so I had to cut it down and rearrange it a bit — I started side B with “Funkytown” (we both love that song) and wound up adding Yukihiro Takahashi because we’d been listening to so much Yellow Magic Orchestra:

SIDE A

– yellow magic orchestra, “firecracker” (with a snippet of Martin Denny’s original at the beginning)
– daft punk, “motherboard”
– four tet, “lush”

SIDE B

– lipps, inc., “funkytown”
– yasuaki shimizu, “kakashi”
– yukihiro takahashi, “drip dry eyes”
– toby fox, “ruins”

I’ve made 7 of these mixes now and I wound up buying another dozen 99 cent cassettes when I was at End of an Ear last time, so it looks like I might just do this indefinitely?

If you’d like to listen to them all in one big batch, I made a 5-hour playlist out of them.