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  • Travelers inside Pianos:Spurious Landscapes
  • Brett Ian Balogh (bio)

Sound examples related to this article are available at <www.clairaudient.org>.

As I prepare to listen to a recording, I may form assumptions about the impending venture into uncharted territory based on other travelers' accounts. My actual experience will most likely deviate from my expectations, but it is ultimately this discrepancy that makes the first listen such a joyride. However, the one thing I do know is that when traversing the worn tracks again, the experience will only mimic the first. The recorded event has already passed and is now familiar terrain interred in bits and plastic.

My experience as an improvising performer stands in contrast to this type of predictability. I perform with pianist Stephen Hastings-King in the sound collective Clairaudient, specializing in long-form improvisational environments. As I tweak knobs, buttons and sliders, I may find myself floating in the midst of a haunting melody, only to be jarred by a saturated feedback loop in the next. The following performance is sure to bear yet another set of surprises. So how can one maintain this novelty in a recorded format?

On the occasion of Hastings-King's artist's residency at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, Illinois, he and I embarked upon a project entitled Spurious Landscapes(Fig. 1) in an attempt to address this question. The goal of the project was to integrate traditional studio recording with improvisational performance practices, the ultimate result being a series of super-imposable/interchangeable recordings. The residency's 40 hours were divided into approximately eight studio sessions, and with each new session, physical elements, performance techniques and compositional strategies were rearranged. Each session ended with a CD-length recording, and the residency culminated with two live performances during the 8th Annual Outer Ear Festival, presented by the Experimental Sound Studio.

In the past, Clairaudient employed the use of piano, radios and electro-acoustic instruments side by side in the performance space. Coupled with improvisational structures, aggressive playing techniques and high volumes, we sought to generate space-filling sonic structures. The elements conspired to fuse the disparate sound sources through their interactions with the room acoustics. The end result was a mass of sound without center, permeating the space. Listening beneath the surface revealed clouds of harmonic, melodic or voicelike structures, and it was these vapor-borne elements that became the vocabulary for our aural conversations.

Spurious Landscapes represented a departure from Clairaudient's traditional practice. We assembled a collective platform for improvisation that allowed a wide range of expressive possibilities and adaptation to changing situations. A hybrid electroacoustically prepared piano resulted, bearing elements from each of our practices and having the ability to be played by the both of us. Hastings-King's preparations consisted of various pieces of metal, rubber and glass placed in or on the strings. The piano was played via the keys or by manipulating the strings and/or inclusions with other instruments (metal spheres, glass vases and electric fans, etc.). My preparations included permanent and electro-magnets placed above the strings in the mid-range as well as two bass transducers placed upon the strings of the low end. These elements [End Page 42] audibly and inaudibly vibrated the strings and soundboard, thereby transducing the signals from my rig: two wide-band radio receivers and a MIDI synthesizer. They were, in turn, processed and matrix-routed through a Max/MSP patch to the transducer's amplifiers.

Improvising on such an instrument is less like conversation and more like being in the same head. Each performer's actions inside the piano affected those of the other, reinforcing, negating or bending each conversational element such that the resulting utterance was not a completely individual event but rather a composite expression with a singular, hybrid voice. At each moment, the acoustic parameters of the instrument changed, and actions did not always have the predicted outcome. The nature of the preparations and the resultant modes of interaction engendered an organic, living piano that was both a challenge and a pleasure to play.

In order to maintain the life of the instrument and the performances, the resultant eight recordings...

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