A bull market for bananas…

Almost all of the work I’ve made in the past five years or so has been in some way collaborative. That’s perhaps most obvious in long-running projects like the bands Bridges of Königsberg and neural goldberg, or the LV2MKRT podcast, but it’s equally true of the one-off performances of improvised music, animations created to serve as videos for other artists’ music, and just about everything else I’ve been up to. There’s still no shortage of solo activity (and/or solitude) in my work - I spend ludicrous amounts of time “behind the scenes” creating the instruments that I play onstage and on record. But collaboration is a powerful source of motivational undertow (“I promised Dennis I would get this done”), an extraordinary form of artistic stimulus and challenge (“J. just played what!?!”), and the innermost circle of relationships within the fundamentally social nature of music (and here I think instantly of the many hours Scott and I spent not recording music for LV2MKRT in favor of simply hanging out together).

With that preamble complete, none of those collaborations much resemble Learning by Listening Vol. 9: Learning to Make Noise: Toward a Process Model of Artistic Practice within Experimental Music Scenes, a newly released album by Dr. Peter J. Woods featuring Shanna Sordahl, Matt Taggart, Dr. Bryce Beverlin II, Bucko Crooks, Hal Rammel, and yours truly (and you bet your bippy I am credited on this record as Dr. Christopher Burns). The double-colon monstrosity of a title is your first hint that this a “soundtrack album” designed to accompany a screen-reader recitation of Dr. Woods’ scholarly article “Learning to Make Noise,” originally published in Mind, Culture, and Activity in 2022.

LbLV9 (as I am henceforth going to abbreviate it) is an exquisite corpse-style project - Dr. Woods invited each of the collaborators to choose a section of the article (and its attendant digitally synthesized, stereotypically / hilariously inaccurate screen-reading), we each created music to accompany that section without any reference to one another’s work, and then Dr. Woods stitched everything together, layering in his own interventions as he saw fit. The result is easily the most bonkers thing I’ve been a part of - part academic satire, part throwback to the educational-programs-on-audio-cassette I remember from elementary school, part sincerely-experimental music with a flavor of weirdness that I genuinely haven’t encountered anywhere else. Dr. Woods has a remarkable knack for taking pranks so seriously that they become elevated into art - but he’s outdone himself here with an extraordinary set of prompts and provocations. I am genuinely proud to have contributed to this absolutely mental production. Give it a spin.

PS I picked the “Methods” section not least because it was particularly dense with citations to other scholarly material. You’ll see.

PPS Dr. Woods’ article “Learning to Make Noise” is well worth a read.

For no reason that I can explain, the second project I have to announce this time around… also has a volume number. Now That’s What I Call Short, vol. 7, from Bridges of Königsberg’s recent release Peak Time and Its Malcontents, has a newly released music video. Bandmate David Collins described this one as “neo-psychedelic” and while that description was a surprise to me… he’s not wrong. My thanks once again to the mighty Blorpus Editions for shining a light on Peak Time (and making it exist as a tangible object!)

I mentioned in a previous post that comrade Kyle Bruckmann was coming through Philadelphia - which proved to be an opportunity not only to play a neighborhood show (thanks again, Lowpass crew!), but to make some new recordings, and even to dust off an old project.

In 2021 we made a video piece together (with a substantial assist from Amadeus Regucera) titled Hide self, view. We then started on a follow-up project… and somehow lost track of it entirely. I’m genuinely not exactly sure how that happened, except to say that life is complicated (and was perhaps especially complicated, ‘round about 2021).

In my own practice, projects that are set down somewhere in the early-to-middle stages almost never get picked back up and completed. (Ask me about the file cabinet full of sketches… on second thought, no, don’t ask me about the file cabinet full of sketches). But while Kyle was in Philadelphia, we spent a few minutes rewatching some of the rough materials and… it was stunningly clear to both of us how the piece could and should move forward.

So, we executed on that plan. (I can’t remember the last time a project has come together so swiftly). color x theory x practice will premiere on a solo recital Kyle is presenting this October, after which point we will share online. Like Hide self, view, cxtxp is an exploration of high-intensity generative editing - one stretch of the video, about 160 seconds long, includes nearly 600 jumpcuts. (In keeping with the academic flavor of this particular newsletter, the average duration between cuts is left as an exercise for the reader).

That said, other sections of the piece step away from manic editing and combinatorial madness in favor of long durations and superimposed shots. I’m delighted by subtle and ghostly layerings of Kyle’s performance like the one below, and looking forward to sharing the whole thing when the time is right.

I’ve moved this newsletter from the Substack platform to Beehiiv. Hopefully this is more or less a seamless transition for any (most?) of you who were reading via email. But if you were reading via the Substack app, that mode will no longer be available. I’ll probably push one more newsletter from Substack announcing the change, and I apologize in advance for that extra bit of communication.

Substack’s content policies (or lack thereof) have been questionable for a while now, but things there are getting worse instead of better and… I’m out. As always, it’s my intention that this newsletter be infrequent (i.e., you’ll hear from me when I really have something to write about, and only then) and free (you’re not “subscribers to monetize,” you’re readers who care about the music and artwork that I’m making). I remain incredibly grateful for your interest.

Cartoonist John Granzow presents the twelve ospreys of the aeronautic scale.

Thanks as always for listening and reading - yours,

Christopher

Christopher Burns
sfsound.org/~cburns