Eleanor Balson, Greg Jacobsen and Thyme Jones | Frump! Strumpet! Strife!

A delightful radio program that aired on WZRD, CHICAGO 88.3 from March-October 2000.  The show featured 3 swishy sophisticates (Eleanor Balson, Gregory Jacobsen, Thymme Jones) and their very special friends.  Expect no bad 'radio theatre'!  Only expect to have your night ruined!  NO FUN HERE!  No 'Laughs'!  No, er, 'Gags'!  ...but we have been practicing our smiles!

Recorded live in performance on October 18, 2002 at 1926 Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
with:
Lucy Baldwin - voice
Mark Booth - voice
Daniel Borzutzky - voice
John Corbett - voice, slide guitar, prepared guitar, bells
Matthew Goulish - voice
Sarah Guernsey - voice
Lin Hixson - voice
Charles King - electronics, turntable, short-wave
Lou Mallozzi - voice
Kathleen Odell - voice
Terri Kapsalis - voice, violin, accordian

"Observer" is a verbal description which rapidly shifts from one viewer's perspective to the next through the eyes of the person last seen. The listener is caught up in a potentially endless description of passing glances:

...seeing a critic entering a museum and watching a ticket taker who was observing a curator noticing a visitor examining a guard seated at a surveillance monitor spotting a truck driver at a loading dock who was looking into an apartment window at a student on a computer viewing a video stream from a night club seeing a dancer glancing at a bouncer watching a drinker staring into the eyes of a date noticing the bar tender peering over the tap at a DJ looking around a loudspeaker at a sailor watching a comedian glance back with eyes fixed on a band member seeing a singer catching sight of a groupie leaving the club and spotting a television personality climbing into a cab while observing the neck of a driver who was examining a pedestrian...

Paul Dickinson talks in his sleep. Since 1986, he has documented this phenomenon with the aid of voice-activated recorders. This CD is a compilation of recording collected from 1986 - 2000: ninety-nine hits spanning a fourteen-year period.

A complete transcript is provided in the accompanying 12-page booklet.

The term Back masking refers to messages hidden within musical recordings, which can be heard only when playing the recording backward.  Many claims have been made regarding the legitimacy of back masked messages, and most arguments rest on speculations about the intentionality of the performer.  Some believe the messages are placed purposefully by musicians or technicians, some believe the messages appear by accident, and some believe the messages are placed by supernatural or subconscious forces.  They reality includes all of the above, and can be separated into to prevailing categories: engineered reversals and phonetic reversals.

Engineered reversals are created purposefully in the recording studio by musicians and technicians. Information is recorded normally, and is intentionally reversed and incorporated into the final "mix."  When the finished recording is played normally, the information is abstract and indecipherable; when the entire recording is played backwards, the reversal is clearly audible and the primary performance is abstract and indecipherable.  Some examples include "Darling Nikki" by Prince and "Fire is High" by Electric Light Orchestra.

In contrast, phonetic reversals result from subjective interpretation of reversed phonemes.  This interpretative process allows for accident and influence from subconscious: the music is played backwards, and listeners strain to discern recognizable words.  This method of interpretation is highly dependent on the predisposition of the listener, who is usually looking for particular type of content. 

he selections on this CD are all reversed and are presented in their entirety, allowing the listener to discover backward content at their leisure.  The selections represent a "greatest hits" of back masking, and were selected in response to widespread claims alleging backward content.

27 people answer the question: "What is the most violent thing you've ever done?"

The majority of participants have chosed to remain anonymous so no names are included.

Melinda Fries: melinda@ausgang.com

We have created a compact disc featuring remixes of the soundtrack from West Side Story. Our public demonstrations of our inflatable forms may be accompanied by this CD which updates Sondheim's lyrics by incorporating parallel ideas in the West Coast gangsta rap of N.W.A. along with a kitchen sink of other sonic turmoil. 

In search of an explanation and a solution for my own relationship problems, I began the Free Relationship Advice telephone-based hotline in December 1999.  My original intentions were to create a forum for exploring the language of American self-help culture as a (im)practical approach to harnessing gender differences.

Updated daily (well, almost daily), snippets of personal conversations, 
infomercials, talk shows, motivational literature, and other cultural 
artifacts were recorded as voicemail messages that were accessible to 
listeners when they called the hotline.  Thousands of cards advertising the phone number were distributed publiclyóleft in taxicabs, on the subway, in restrooms, by payphones.  Callers were invited to leave messages, questions, and comments after the tone.  As the project gained momentum, Free Relationship Advice took an unexpected turn.

SURPRISE!  Citizens with real, immediate problems--people not necessarily interested in theatrical performances and cultural analysisówere picking up the cards and needed Free Relationship Advice!  Though I began as a satirist rather than relationship expert, I felt obligated to lessen my focus on critiquing self-help culture and instead shifted my attention, ironically, to finding valuable information hidden within teensploitation shows and between the pages of self-help books.

After providing advice for approximately ten months, I decided to take a break from Free Relationship Advice in October 2000.  I hope to re-launch the project in the future as a 1-800 number.

Lucky Pierre and 40+ friends listen to B-96 on headphones for twenty-four hours straight. We repeat everything we hear into a microphone and record twenty-four CDs. >>>

This project was a month long broadcast over CB radio using prerecorded tones designed to be mood altering.  Four different tones responded to common emotions experienced at the scheduled time of day.  These tones were transmitted 4 times a day for a 5-minute duration, creating a sedative or stimulating affect.  There were no voice-overs or songs.  The broadcast was amplified to 225 watts to increase the chance for shortwave skip and reception over long distances. 

Schedule:  8:30am morning coffee, 2:30pm afternoon break, 5:30pm evening/rush hour, 10:30pm bedtime/rest-stop

Personnel:

Travis Anderson: Bass
Dave Grant: Vocals, Trumpet
Jared Sheldon: Drums
Woody Sullender: Guitar, Electronics, Banjo

Service Anxiety is a hardcore band from Chicago.  Our choices for organizing sounds into rock and roll music reflect similar structures we find in the world.  We are struggling to balance our desire for true freedom with our need to live within a larger social network (free improvisation vs. hardcore; illegal venue vs. legal venue).  Still, methods of organizing often follow preexisting molds to maximize predetermined effects (the dancy verse; another Food Not Bombs). 

We consider some formulas within no wave and hardcore punk of the early 80s to be quite efficient for rocking appropriate audiences. However, for such highly politicized genres, they are too often the most conservative of music forms. We strive to maintain the energy of these subgenres while also remaining concious and critical of their social and musical structures.

Our work attempts to serve a more pragmatic purpose of offering support and comfort to anyone who desires freedom from fascism within all aspects of public and private life. A transmission of energy-a statement of solidarity.

Dave (vocals) formerly sang for the hc bands Action Patrol and the Episode.  Woody (guitar) has helped organize the Transmissions
experimental music festivals since their inception in 1998 and runs the
tiny Dead CEO label."

Service Anxiety >>>

The Guitars Project sound piece is constructed from the recordings made during a project involving six electric guitars and six older women with Alzheimer's or other age-related disabilities. Using experimental approaches the women generated sounds on the electric guitars, finding ways in which to interact with what is predominantly a male, youth and pop associated object. Meeting for five months twice a week the women each found her own way of interacting with the instrument.  The symbol of the electric guitar and all it suggests is what I was interested in placing within the context of the image of the older woman. The older woman and all she signifies seems to be in conflict with the symbol of the electric guitar. This project is an exploration of such multi-valiancy.

The other issues that compelled me to start this project was the role memory plays in the perception of sound. How does one whose memory does not function optimally experience or construct sound. Would the temporal reality of a person with Alzheimer's be heard in the sounds she produces? Also, with the problems many women have communicating verbally due to Alzheimer's, what role would sound play to form a group dynamic? The play between the women in this group served to make up for much of the dynamic that is lost in groups of women during old age.

I composed Iconic Distortions from over 20 hours of recordings I made while working with the women in The Guitars Project. Many of the sounds have been manipulated, looped, distorted or mixed. It gives a false picture of what these women are capable of on their own. It is a re-animation of the sound produced by them and  a map of suggested connections, imagined or real. It is a fantasy portrait of the group.

As the vinyl picture disc (the final form the sound piece will exist in) suggests with its idealized portrait of Alice with her guitar, it is the making of a new kind of icon, (and icons are always part truth, part fiction). One that I need to exist.
 
 

I excerpted and rearranged the soundtrack from my video "In Order Not To Be Here" (2002, 16mm, 33 min.).   Audio sources include location ambience, CNN news reportage, police scanners, helicopter pursuits, and electronic music by Kevin Drumm.  The original film is an uncompromising look at the ways privacy, safety, convenience and surveillance determine our environment. Shot entirely at night, it confronts the hermetic nature of white-collar communities, dissecting the fear behind contemporary suburban design.

Power/Exchange is an unconventional survey of the infrastructure and architecture of transmission. In particular, the transmission of electric power and the transmission of human thought a.k.a. the telecommunications industry.

The Power/Exchange Tower is publically accessible, user-operated radio tower being erected in Wendover NV/UT.  The user operates the tower via a self-standing operations kiosk at the tower base.  By turning a notched dial, the user may choose to receive one of 10 pre-determined local frequencies:

1. AC power transmission (60 Hz  - VLF)
2. Citizen's Band (27.185 MHz)
3. NOAA weather (162.4750 MHz)
4. Local Police (154.7500, 461.3500, 461.9500, 866.7875 MHz)
5. Union Pacific Railroad (160.1100 - 161.5650 MHz)
6. Taco Burger Drive Thru Window (TBA)
7. Flyover & Airport Traffic (121.500, 122.100, 123.600, 135.075 MHZ)
8. Tones and Morse (155.1300, 855.2125, 952.0125, 954.5500 MHz)
9.  Local Casinos (461.0250, 461.2750, 461.4000, 461.4250 MHz)
10.  Atomic Clock (10 MHz  - shortwave)

The user may also choose to transmit signals onto Citizen's Band.  He/She will be able to communicate with other CB users by speaking into a microphone embedded into the kiosk while pressing the TRANSMIT button.

Every time a user turns on the kiosk POWER (a wind generator supplies a battery bank wired to a timer), a pre-recorded loop will be broadcast on to low wattage FM.  The loop functions as a kind of PSA, and relays, amongst other things, the following information:  "Frequency allocation is a federal construct.  Corporate conglomeration of media leads to a conglomeration of ideas.  Advocate for a diversification of voices.  Low power to the people."

The recording lasts 60 seconds before repeating.  It will continue looping for 10 minutes at which point the kiosk power automatically switches off until the user presses POWER again, or until the next user visits the tower.

An informational Power/Exchange Booklet is dispensed at the tower site, at various places around Wendover, at the Center For Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, and at Quimby's in Chicago.

1 - pipsqueek: 2001

2 - salted fruit: 2001

3 - she was reading an obscure novel by my favorite author but our love never bloomed: 2002

4 - 35 syllable system: 2002

TINY HAIRS is:
Mark Booth
John Devylder
Chuck King
Jim Lutes
Jonathan Liss
Peter Rosenbloom

Tiny Hairs >>>

It was around 1988 that the Compton based crew Niggaz With Attitude (NWA) came out with their track "Fuck the Police."   "Fuck the Police" threw NWA into mass popularity and simultaneously set the blueprint for the West Coast's "gangsta" hiphop politics and propelled the issue of police abuse and brutality into the spotlight.

The problem of police must be understood in a larger social, economic and political context. The police are the armed shocktroops of the State.  The U.S. government has a conscious policy of dealing with most social problems by criminalizing people.  Drugs a problem?  Make their use, sale, and possession illegal.  Homelessness a problem?  Make sleeping on the street, squatting abandoned buildings, eating out of dumpster's illegal.   All these "solutions" mean more money for police and prisons and little or nothing for policies and programs that promote social, economic and racial justice for people of color.  We get cops instead of food and meaningful work, prisons when we need a place to sleep.

Major industries now count on the quasi-slave labor available in prisons and as de-industrialization has ravished much of the economic base of the country, prisons have become the only economic option offered to communities in need. As community based organizations, civil rights / human rights organizations and public interest advocacy groups struggle against police brutality and misconduct, it is essential to understand that huge numbers of people now have a vested interest, a critical economic stake in expanding police forces and the prison / jail industrial complex.

Our goal must be nothing short of creating a just, humane and peaceful  society. Fuck The Police (Hits for the streets) the CD was created as a celebration of speaking out against the cops and to document some of the widespread influence that the song
"Fuck the Police" has had.  And why wouldn't it, everyone hates the cops, right?

All songs were taken without permission from the Internet or recorded specifically for this project. Again, fuck the police and think about it. Get involved; check out Stolenlives.org and other police brutality projects.

CD includes tracks by NWA, the Imagine Agents, Ryan Thurbur, Warren Johnston, Dope and several others...

Pear is an experimental sound piece for radio that consists of a series of narrative and sonic vignettes.  The piece is concerned in general with how despair and desire effect the creation of a self that is mediated by personal and cultural experience.   The text material for the project was produced by answers to fill-in-the-blank workbooks, as well as writings influenced by sections of St. Augustine's Confession, Soren Kierkegaard's A Sickness UntoDeath, and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, in light of genetic engineering, a psychobiography, along with language and computer systems.

Written and directed by John Wanzel Featuring the Voices of Anna Benavides, Brian Taylor, and John Wanzel. All sounds produced by John Wanzel. Mixed by John Wanzel and Pete Wenger. Recorded / Engineered by Pete Wenger at Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago, IL)

Dave Whitman has been homeless for over fifteen years. We first met Dave when he started attending the exhibitions and projects we presented in our former office space in downtown Chicago. Dave continued to visit us informally and all of us gradually got to know him. 

We developed a friendship with Dave and found him to be unusually generous, ethical, and trustworthy. He often kept us company  while we maintained office hours during exhibitions - frequently engaging visitors in discussions about the work on view. 

Salem, of TS, gave Dave a tape recorder and provided him with replacement cassettes and batteries. The recorder allowed Dave to document the incredible stories he'd been telling us. It gave him a space to recount his many astute observations about how public space is regulated, unusual social behavior, and his endlessly revealing and entertaining stories about other homeless people.

Dave recorded over six hours of stories for us. Here are just a few. We hope you enjoy this introduction to one of our city's dearest urban nomads.