Beacon

RNL

Interview by L. Valena
March 20, 2023

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was a couple of photographs that looked kind of beachy. It was something that looked sculptural, made with driftwood and other things that seemed like they could have washed up onto the shore.

I grew up relatively close to the ocean, but now I live in a mostly landlocked country, Germany. I seek out opportunities to be near the beach when I can. The prompt was very evocative right away. Being near the beach is sensual. You have the sound, the feeling of the sun, and the smells. Salt water. Picking stuff up off the beach is also something I tend to do. I don't go to the beach without coming back with something interesting that might be inspiring to me in my studio. It felt very evocative, and very open about how I could respond, because I work with different media. I had done a sound piece the last time I contributed to Bait/Switch, so I thought I would do something else.

Two years ago I was on the beach in Riga, in Latvia, on the Baltic Sea. The beach there is really pretty, and it's also right next to the forest. The Baltic has this pattern in a lot of places where you have a strip of forest right next to the beach, and they're just parallel to each other. I have a lot of photographs I took at the beach, and I thought this would be an interesting way to use some of that material. It felt like that idea was reawakening, and it was a good time to connect with it, but in the end it didn't make it in. Funny how the creative process works.

Right. We just have to chase it the best we can, right?

That's what's nice about a project like this. It's a nice opportunity to experiment, and there aren't so many strings attached. Basically, the plan was to use these images I had, which were a whole bunch of pictures of things that had sort of washed up into certain formations on the beach. Driftwood mixed up with commercial detritus. But I also had auditory ideas, because sound is such a big part of being by the ocean. It creates this weird acoustic environment that changes how things sound. Sometimes you can hear things from very far away. But then you're also inside this envelope of the sound of the surf and waves, which blocks out a lot of stuff. So I had these two ideas at the same time, and I thought I would do some kind of slide show with a soundtrack. But in the end, the sound piece felt so complete to me, that it seemed sort of like gilding the lily to add images.

I'm trying by the end of this month to finish an album of sound pieces that I've been working on. This piece came together very easily and naturally. I hadn't expected to have another piece for this album, but it happened very effortlessly. So I'm really glad that I did this again.

That's awesome. It really speaks to that idea of flow. Isn't it awesome when things just come together like that? It's pretty wild.

Yeah. In terms of having these types of practices, this is kind of what you live for. That's what we're chasing after. A lot of times, if you have the beginning of an idea, the second phase is learning that your idea was not as clear as it seemed. Or that it's difficult to express it in a way that seems ambiguous, or leaves something open-ended. When you try to pin it down, give something form, put it together, it's not always so easy. This was one of those cases where the transition from some vague thoughts to a finished piece was very natural. It's just a joy when that happens.

Tell me more about how you made this piece.

Similar to the last time I contributed, I dug into some older material -- stuff I had on these tapes. It was this material that was really worked up, but it also didn't have a use. There was a piece I did with a friend of mine. This was a really long time ago, like in the '90s. We were at my parents house, and I think we did it all in one day. I’d just had this vague idea to layer a lot of the resonating sounds you can make on a wine glass, to make lots and lots of layers of these for a very sustained time, so you could get something that slowly evolved in an uncoordinated way.

We did a lot of separate layers and put them together, and it came out really well. I was recording to tape, and I had this very primitive setup with a boombox that could play two tapes at once. I didn't have access to studio equipment, and I didn't know how any of it worked. I just knew that I could do this one thing. So I would take two recordings and "bounce" (or layer) them together. I could only combine two layers at a time. I was trying this process where I would record a bunch of segments of something, and then put them all together two tracks at a time. You'd end up with a lot of tape noise because of this. Every time you were recording a recording of other recordings, you would get more and more tape hiss. That was just built into the process.

When I started responding to this prompt, I remembered that I had these leftover parts. It was already layered, but it was stuff that didn't quite fit. We kept having giggle attacks when we were trying to start, so there were all these outtakes when we were cracking up. But also sometimes someone would make a sound that didn't fit, or someone was trying to get the sound of the wine glass started and it didn't take. I’d layered all of these pieces of sound that didn't otherwise fit.

The idea I came up with to synchronize how the recording would start was to ring what sounds like a gong at the beginning of each layer. It's actually the lid of a pot. When I layered those together, they sounded much bigger than you would expect. It sounds huge, and kind of slow and drawn out. Whenever the sound started to lower in volume, all the tape hiss came over. It's just the way the tape compression works. So as long as there was a loud sound, you wouldn’t hear the hiss, but as soon as the sound faded you would hear this wash of hiss. The interplay between what sounds like this bell, and this hissy washy sound, felt very much like the ocean. It could evoke being at the seaside, with the waves and surf. I feel like there's always some sound of bells or clanging things... from ships, maybe?

Yes! Those bell buoys?

Maybe that's what I'm thinking of! I just have this vague idea that the sound of the sea involves the surf and a lot of things bobbing around and clanging into each other. I like the idea that these sounds are not related to the sea, but that they can evoke it in this synthetic way. So that was one part of this. The other part is a sound that's sort of strummy. It sounds like strings being strummed very slowly. It actually comes from a set of maracas that I had, so it's a very transformed sound. I thought that I wanted this rattly sound of the maracas to fill in something else. And then I played with it, and slowed it down, and put a weird echo on it. Eventually, it didn't sound anything like a shaker or a maraca at all, and this weird strummy sound emerged. To go through a process like that and end up with this sound object that you can't tell where it came from is very typical of my process. A big thing that I'm doing when I'm working with sound is to push things until they're something else.

So this was really about the call and response between those two sounds. The bell and washy sound, which was tape hiss. And then the slow strummy sound. I thought about being at the ocean at night, when it's quieter, and you just hear a bunch of things bobbing around. Maybe ships that are further away at different distances.

I'm really struck by this idea of pulling together two different things that seem different from each other and making a third new thing out of them. Is that something that you play with in general, or is that more novel for you?

That is almost the foundational cornerstone of my approach. When I work with visual art, it's a process that's very related to collage. Then I do this sound stuff that feels like almost the same process, but transposed onto another type of material. In both cases, I'm intending to create a cohesive space that seems to make sense, without necessarily being identifiable. No matter what it is, or how I'm working, it's always this approach of starting with material from somewhere, and seeing how different pieces of material, if changed enough and stripped of their original identity, might start to turn into other things. Especially when you put them together. They form a new context in which they allude to other things entirely.

This finished sound piece had that ocean sound that I wanted, but all of it is coming from other places. It's coming from a maraca, from the lid of a pot in my parents' living room in the late ‘90s. None of it is what it was. Because everything has been mutated, to hear it means to know that you're hearing things that have been transformed, which affects how you hear it. And because none of them are exactly what they present themselves as, they're all a bit strange.

I think it's so cool that your process involves pulling from this catalog of stuff you've made over time. It's like you're collaborating with your younger self! Not enough of us have figured out how to do that.

When I made these things when I was younger, I was really private about it. I felt a little bit embarrassed. I thought that most people I knew wouldn't really get it, so I didn't play it for many people. It tended to be that the audience for these pieces was the other person I was working on it with. It's very challenging to work with material that's finished up in a certain way. But when you have the distance of time, it makes it very easy to start cutting things apart without being hung up on the vision of how it was supposed to be. It's a lot easier to look at this stuff as raw material. It has a certain depth to it that's built in.

There's a rhythm in this piece. It wasn't done with loops, but certain segments were used more than once to create a kind of rhythm. I think that's where the idea of a beacon came out. To me, a beacon is something with a periodicity; it happens at a regular interval. But also, it was a way to draw the focus of this thing being kind of a bell that might have a function. When this was done, I was a little bit concerned and hoped that it evoked the idea of being by the ocean in the way it does for me. I felt like I needed to use the title to give a little bit of a hint.

I really wonder if the person after me will hear the ocean at all in this, and I know that they very well might not. This piece is pretty abstract. It will be interesting to see if there is any shred of the ocean left in the next response.

This is your second time participating in this project. Do you have any new advice for another artist approaching this process for the first (or second) time?

It's funny, because you really don't know how something like this is going to go. I find that these kinds of projects can really open things up, especially in this case since you stress not worrying about making a masterpiece or something really finished. It's just about getting the idea out. You feel freer to experiment, and don't feel like you have to 'get it right.' What that all boils down to is to take the opportunity to just make something.

Call Number: Y98VA | Y100MU.rhBe

RNL is Jesse Farber’s collaborative and solo project for sound, art, and performance. Founded in the early 1990s, it initially focused on tape experiments, collage flyers, and performative actions. Little of this original work was shared outside of a handful of group members, some of whom never met each other, or even realized they had participated. In 2019, Farber’s VONCONFLON label released RNL’s first public work, Conquering King Kong. A new album, The Living Things, is scheduled for release in late 2023. RNL has been featured worldwide on radio broadcasts, podcasts, and film soundtracks. As of this writing, present and past RNL members include Fleawig, Nøsferatu, Ms. Anthropy, Un-D.T., Loopis, Rusty Pipewater, and Mr. A/B, at least one of whom is Jesse Farber.