Multi-Falsing

Jesse Farber

Interview by L. Valena

Can you start by telling me what you responded to?

I got this cue, which looked like a drawing that was embroidered with light and dark thread, of two broken payphones. It was a very evocative image, especially for a sound piece. I felt like I could really kind of hear something. It felt very auditory- the sounds of ringing, and maybe the crackle of the receiver. Things like that are really fresh in my mind, even though I haven't used a phone like that in many many years. It was a cool cue- very evocative.

What happened next?

It was sort of typical for my working process- I work both visually and with sound, but the process is very similar. It's not exactly collage, but I start with some existing material that I've collected or created myself, and gradually I start to change that material, and try to draw something out of it that was a little bit hidden. I do this with a number of different parts until they seem to want to come together around something that was maybe latent in those pieces. They start to make sense together in a way that was different from what they started out as.

Right away when I saw the phones, and I was hearing the sounds of them, there were some fragments I had lying around that I thought could be cool to try out. All of them came from natural sources- naturally recorded sounds. In the finished piece, there are no synthesized sounds at all- all of them came from recorded sources which were manipulated. So some of them are exactly what they originally sounded like, and some of them have no resemblance to what their starting point was.

Can you say some more about what these parts were that kind of presented themselves to you?

I had just finished working on this other project which was a soundtrack for a video artist friend of mine. It was modular, in the sense that it generated a lot of material that was able to fit together in a lot of different ways. We decided on one configuration, and then there were leftover pieces of it that were really cool, but didn't really quite work with the rest of it. Those were fresh in my find, and I wanted to put them into play with this project.

To me this sound piece has kind of three parts. It's almost like when you hear the overture to some long orchestral piece or something. It's short, but it's more like a sketch. It describes these different ideas, and a possible condensed way that they can fit together.

The first of those three parts was this sort of ringing sound, which was leftover from the film soundtrack. I thought that would be interesting to mix in with actual telephone sounds that I had collected on tape a really long time ago. I often work from a huge box of tapes that I have, which I collected as a teenager and young adult. A lot of it was stuff I thought was really interesting at the time, where I had some specific ideas about what might happen with it. More recently, I started looking at those tapes again, and seeing how much more open for possibilities they are to me now that time has passed. I had collected quite a lot of recordings of the phone, recorded to the boombox microphone, kind of thing. So there's a lot of tape noise, and that created a lot of atmosphere. And that ends up being kind of the last part- it was made up of some of those recordings just directly off the phone. It was something from a long time ago, where I'd already layered it in a way, and was now looking at it as new raw material. And then there were some other sounds. Actually, at one point I thought this was going to be very long, like 20 minutes long or something, because of this material I used in the middle section, which came from a very long chunk of recordings of static sounds. A lot of things related to these broken receivers, this idea of broken communication, and the telephone too as kind of inherently glitchy.

My memory of payphones is that they were often glitchy. They didn't sound great, and there were weird little clicks, the volume would change suddenly, weird things like that. The way they were supposed to work involved this whole system of click signals, and tones, and sometimes you would get a little window into some of that, when you were making a long distance call and the operator was patching something through, or you could kind of hear these weird noises, which you knew weren't for your consumption but were part of this system communicating.

Right! Remember how, when your call was running out of money, this voice would come on and let you know to add more money? Even though you were connecting with just one other person, as far as you knew, suddenly there was this other voice that would just show up. It was very disconcerting.

It wasn't sensitive enough to wait for a break in the conversation- it would just blurt it right out. And there was also this sense that you were interacting with something that you knew humans and machines were involved in, and it wasn't totally clear which you were involved with sometimes. So there was also that element. It seems less out of place now, when we're used to engaging much more with machines, but at the time it was different. Dealing with an electronic system that works on signals, but is not passive like when I'm watching TV- I have to engage with it. I had a friend who was into this whole thing. He knew that if he played certain tones from a tone generator he could make the phone do weird things. So there was also this idea that there was some sort of magic way that you could hack into it.

I do remember when cellphones became more widespread, and how different the sound quality was. There was so much less static- it was almost shocking.

Yeah. Looking back at these tapes- not only were they recorded through the air, on a boombox microphone held up to the earpiece of the phone, but also, I was doing sound on sound to layer them. At the time that I was taping stuff like this when I was younger, I knew that I could play two tapes on my boombox at once, and then I could put a line out from that, and record that onto another tape. That's how I was layering stuff. And when you do that, the sound quality degrades really quickly, because there's a compression that happens to the sound that's inherent to tape. The good thing about that, though, is that it kind of instantly creates this hazy atmosphere, which I think has a really special quality. So the little snippets that I used from these old tapes already had a few layers, and then I layered a few of those on top of each other- there was some of that air in there. It's a superimposition- that space that I was in, my bedroom, and it's late at night, and the air is there sort of multiple times.

Did you say ‘superimposition’?

Like when things are superimposed. You can imagine if it was a visual image, and you took a film of me with the phone, and then you did a double exposure. It's like an audio double exposure. I guess that word is ambiguous- it could be about imposing, in the sense of being scary or something.

You said when you received the prompt, it immediately evoked sounds. Did it give you an emotional response as well?

It was very evocative of sounds, and right away I starting thinking of these particular ideas, and that was very immediate. But there was definitely an emotional quality as well with the phones, especially since there were two of them. I was thinking about communication, and a breakdown in communication. A distance- one of them is kind of fading. It felt like a very symbolically heavy image. I didn't want to signify those things literally. I knew that they were there, and I thought that would be impossible to avoid. We have so many associations to what happens on the phone, so I felt that stuff was going along for the ride no matter what I did. As long as I'm keeping my eye out for what it's doing, then that's okay.

For me, there are three distinct parts to this piece. That last part is just phone recordings. There was a very strong emotional quality to those original recordings. I felt very freaked out by layering all this- there's something very alienating about the sounds of the ringing, and the tones, and I had gathered a lot more of it originally than what you hear in the piece. But also just hearing lots of people saying hello, it felt like there's a way that you reach out when you say hello. It's interesting, because I'm an American, but I'm living in Germany. People here answer the phone really differently, which I'm still not used to. The standard way that you answer the phone here is you say your last name, and then 'hello' as a statement. You don't say "hello?" In my case I say, "Farber, hello," which I always forget to do. And things like that kind of make you look at your own norms a little differently.

You're right. The American norm is definitely to say hello with a question mark.

Yeah. And when you hear a lot of that at once, which is what happened when I layered all of those tapes, it felt really creepy, because of that kind of reaching out, the questioning and that unknown. I'm not trying make it sound overblown, but when you hear too much of that at once, it starts to feel overwhelming.

Like there's nobody on the other line?

Yeah. Or you just hear the sound of people not knowing. The prompt had some of that quality to it to me. Te breaks in how it's physically describing the image suggested that break in communication- it was a very clear symbolism to me.

What's the scene like there in Germany? I know that a lot of us over here, because of the pandemic, are feeling really isolated. We're very dependent on the phone right now. Do you feel like that has any resonance with you in connection with this piece?

That's a good question. Obviously, for everyone this has been an isolated time. You might know that it's been a little more gentle here. We've had it pretty good, as far as being able to get out a little bit more. We're not quite so cut off. But yeah- in some ways, there are still limits to that. Everyone is a little more isolated, everyone is aware that we're living with a constant sense of threat. That encourages people to limit their contact with other people. I don't think it came into my thinking in terms of the piece- but it could just be in the air.

I did think of this, because the piece uses actual ring tones. Well, actually, I learned that the tone you hear when you call someone is called the ring back, as opposed to the ring tone that your phone makes. The ring back from an American phone is in the piece, in key places, that sound that you hear when you call somebody. It's not the sound that we have here. I didn't feel the need to use a European ring back sound here, I don't feel that strong of a connection to it. The prompt was a bit retro, in a sense, and so were the sounds.

This way of working, in a way that responds to a certain starting point, was really natural for me. I usually start with a bunch of things I've gathered together, or generated myself, and then I start to let those things interact together, so their main identities can shed away and something else can start to come out. So to use that prompt as a starting point felt very natural. I think that also made me feel really relaxed and comfortable. I didn't have to feel too self conscious about the image. I just saw it, and had a bunch of ideas, and was ready to just move forward.

Call Number: Y35VA | Y37MU.faMu

Jesse Farber’s sound and visual works suspend the distinction between natural and synthetic, opening space for questioning this division. He has exhibited and been a resident artist throughout the US and Europe, and his audio works have appeared in album releases, film scores, live events, and broadcasts. Jesse lives and works in Berlin.