Music From The Other Room
Multimedia lab experimenting with image and sound. We try to do things as they are not supposed to be done.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
It's been a while since we have updated.
We have not forgotten you.
On this our 12 year anniversary as a company (really, 12 years, that's it - I suppose we have been around longer, just under a different name we don't really reference) we could write some long winded piece about the longevity of a company and how all these pieces keep going. Instead, we will go with brevity and a wordsman who sums it up better than we can.
“It’s not a method so much as an act of faith.” —Paul Auster
Truly. We keep going. We keep putting out work. More people our appreciating the perspectives of audio and video. So, here we are. That's about all there is to say. Thanks for sticking with us, and please help keep it going.
Cheers.
.
by John R. Barner
About midway through mixing down the tracks on Hikikomori, the machines began to “talk back.” This is the only way I can describe the mixes beginning to augment relatively independently in the computer software. Often I would spend several days away from a mix, either getting busy with life outside of recording or taking time to think about a particular song’s structure or sound. When I would return to the song, there would be changes that I didn’t remember making in the recording process. Sometimes subtle—a bit of echo on a beat, for example—that was easily explained when in the midst of tweaking levels of effects. Others, however, were drastic and many of the songs on Funayūrei contain elements that I genuinely don’t remember adding or enhancing. It was actually quite creepy at times! The phenomena occurred enough that I began to research technical reasons why it could be happening, but turned up nothing to explain everything I was hearing. I did, however, revisit a few creative instances where sounds ended up on a recording without easy explanation. During the recording of Joy Division’s final album, Closer, producer Martin Hannett remarked once to Rolling Stone magazine that the piano line on the song “The Eternal” would be heard through control room monitors when there was no one playing the piano or even in the recording room.
John Balance and Peter Christopherson of the band Coil recorded a side project entitled ElpH. The central creative conceit of the resulting Worship the Glitch, is described in band’s Wikipedia page as “random musical compositions that were generated from their own equipment, either by itself or as an unintended yet pleasant byproduct of their own work” although Balance and Christopherson would often say that they felt these “random musical compositions” were anything but, and seemed to be “transmitted” by somewhere or something. After uncovering these examples, I let the machines (or whatever force was using them) take over and much of what made the final mixes remains unedited. Funayūrei was intended to be the darkest of the records and the most evocative of the traditional ghost story. In Japanese mythology, the funayūrei are the spirits of those who have drowned or died violently at sea and are seen as acting malevolently so that seafarers will join them in their watery afterlife. Reading these myths and legends were incredibly inspiring to both realizing my vision for the music and the recording process itself, which evolved to sampling and making field recordings of water in various forms and incorporating electronic voice phenomena or EVP—static field recordings said to capture ghostly voices.
For the latter, I was able to access several publicly available archives of EVP first broadcast on the Coast to Coast AM radio program once hosted by paranormal enthusiast Art Bell, which I first heard many years ago on a road trip to California. From these disparate elements, the final part of the Yōkai Trilogy was born.
LINKS:
Coil vs. ElpH, Worship the Glitch: https://youtu.be/WUp8tUlftW8
Art Bell on EVPs from Coast to Coast AM: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA0978912DC43800D
We released the cover art for John's third act tonight. Album is set for release Tuesday and as per the other releases we have films lined up. Next few weeks should be exciting as we send all this material out in the world.
This has been a long road and it's not over yet. The podcast has lots more material to cover - we just introduced this album, but we're going to travel back a bit so we're nowhere near the end. There are the upcoming films too.
And...John has talked of a special edition Trilogy release that would feature additional material not on the separate records.
We'll see what happens, but while this is an end in some regards, it's also just a beginning.
by John R. Barner
My second story idea revolved around the amount of what I call spiritual investment in our online presence. I use the word “spiritual” in a very general sense, and not indicative of faith traditions as such but rather those emotions that seem to define who we are as people: our personalities, hopes, dreams, needs for attention or consolation, our ups and downs, what we value and what we hope is valued in us by others. Hence, the great amount of time spent on “investment” in tools like computers and social media, which, if all is well, we get a “return” on, be in the form of “likes” or “retweets” or “friends.” But often we seek that kind of return, that “connection” and sense of community at the expense of real human interaction. What if that was all that was left? Only those digital traces cast adrift in the void of cyberspace—incorporeal and disembodied—that are today’s technological ghosts in the machines that connect our world.
I remembered immediately the Kate Bush song, “Deeper Understanding” from her amazing 1989 album The Sensual World (and later revisited on 2011’s Director’s Cut). The song was so eerily prescient about today’s technologically-informed social life and laid the foundation, in many ways, to the story I wanted to tell.
Another burst of information and inspiration came again from Rutledge’s Kūhaku. The hikikomori are the socially isolated youth of Japan. Government figures from 2010 suggest there are more than 700,000 individuals, most under the age of thirty, who live completely isolated lives, rarely, if ever, venturing out in the world and completely cut off from many forms of social life like family, friends, school or work. Many hikikomori get family support or are able to earn a living or have a solitary social outlet through computers, be it gaming, e-commerce, or virtual living spaces such as Second Life, but their lives are often filled with debilitating depression and psychic pain and the phenomenon can last for years, decades, or potentially the rest of their lives. I felt a tremendous resonance between what I was developing as a story idea and the tales I heard of the hikikomori. I was particularly impacted by a story I heard from a young woman who was the older sister of a hikikomori. In an interview, she stated that she empathized with her brother, and even respected his isolation, even if it meant he would not attend the funeral of their grandmother, but admitted that she herself suffered from an acute anxiety that the world itself might go out of existence and her brother would never know. It was as if, she said, he was already gone, already a ghost.
LINKS:
BBC News: “Hikikomori in Japan”: https://youtu.be/dr5y1iP9TfU
Kate Bush, “Deeper Understanding” (1989): https://youtu.be/q2HsN9WLQhI
Kate Bush, “Deeper Understanding” (2011), Official Music Video: https://youtu.be/nzqF_gBpS84
By John R. Barner
Around the time I had set for myself to start recording music for the first story idea, I happened to be reading a book called Kūhaku & Other Accounts from Japan, edited by Bruce Rutledge. In the book, I was introduced to Aokigahara, a dense forest at the base of Mount Fuji that was a popular spot in Japan for suicides. Within a few days, I saw a link for a short film produced for Vice magazine in 2011 that followed Azusa Hayano, a geologist researching formations around Mount Fuji, who regularly ventured into the forest and often returned having either successfully counseled or recovered the bodies of any of the 50 to 100 persons who travel to Aokigahara each year to end their lives.
What I was reading and watching was both profoundly moving and disturbing, and I took my inspiration from it and the music came together in a short span of time. The final mixing sessions also corresponded to the birth of my son, which added to the already dizzying flurry of activity. As I continued, I was mindful that the topic of suicide is a tender one, for myself and countless others. In no way did I want to cheapen or glorify the subject matter. I read more, researched, and tried to compose the music in a thoughtful and respectful manner. In this I was and remain deeply indebted to the thought of Simon Critchley, the philosopher and ethicist who said that suicide “introduces the possibility of an encounter with some aspect of experience…not reducible to the self” (from his Very Little…Almost Nothing, Routledge: 1997, p. 74).
In a way, that remains my hope for not only my fictional character that “haunts” these five pieces of music, or, rather, goes from living to ghost in the space of them, but also for those actual troubled persons that inhabit the very real woods of Aokigahara.
LINKS:
Kūhaku & Other Accounts from Japan: http://www.amazon.com/Kuhaku-Other-Accounts-Japan-Rutledge/dp/0974199508
“Suicide Forest in Japan,” a Vice film: https://youtu.be/4FDSdg09df8
Simon Critchley’s “Suicide – A Defense” given as one of the Durham Castle Lecture Series, Durham University, in December of 2014: https://youtu.be/SO5bBtO26Cw
by John R. Barner
Yōkai, in Japanese, means “ghost” or “apparition” and the distinction holds a particular pride of place in Japanese folklore and literary culture. The earliest beginnings of this project had to do with ghost stories, or telling stories with ghostly or supernatural elements in them. So the name fits, I suppose, but it is stripped of almost all the rich cultural history and color, reduced to its most literal sense. When I first started this project, I did not even know it would involve music but I remained committed to the idea of conceiving of one or more stories (written, recited, or performed) that had ghosts in them. And not just any ghosts, but particular ghosts that haunt us now. Before even starting, I had thought that the very idea of the ghost story was a tired one, lacking in color, creativity or anything I felt was unique or engaging. Everything seemed to have been done. For five months I mostly railed against what I saw represented in mainstream American and European popular culture around the idea of the ghost or ghost story. I re-read Poe, Hawthorne, James, Blackwood, Machen, Collins, Lovecraft, Doyle, Dickens, Shakespeare, and many other literary and dramatic representations. I watched films like Paranormal Activity and television series like Ghost Hunters—and still nothing felt right. Most often, I was left with versions of the same questions. Why was it, even in today’s modern conception of the ghost story, that the spirit in question either an unseen force of some kind, or some representative of a bygone era—the Victorian “woman in black” or avenging Civil War-era soldier? What would a ghost be like who had just become a ghost yesterday? Someone who surfed the Net, listened to Top 40 radio, and watched YouTube videos. I frequently asked myself if such questions were themselves silly and I more than once felt like The Maitlands, the young couple played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis in the 1988 film, Beetlejuice who are repeatedly chagrined to find their quotidian afterlife is never interesting or scary enough, in the traditional sense. Played for laughs in the film, I think it really says something about the Western conception of death and what lies beyond death that we, as a society, don’t really want to explore on some level, but are drawn to just the same. We want to be scared (and entertained by our fear, as it were) but we certainly don’t want to confront death on any level, therefore relegating the more frightening aspects always at some remove. For the Maitlands, it’s found in the more traditionally ghoulish and grotesque title character—for us it’s the invisible monsters, or the vestiges of the ancient, historical or unknown. It’s never us we should be afraid of. I think it was these persistent questions that finally led me to try to tell a series of ghost stories using only contemporary, mostly electronic, music and sounds. I reasoned this would, at least, be an attempt to answer the question. At the end of five months of research, I had three ideas, roughly sketched, and I started to work.
It's been a few weeks since we have written. We've been busy getting new content out in the world and it's limited the time to write a proper update.
The White Whale season 1 is in full swing as of yesterday with the first episode introducing John Barner properly and the ideas that have built his trilogy. Brimming with tales of ghosts and mechanical malfeasance - this should be a pretty great ride.
You'll recognize music from the catalog and certain approaches to sound unique to the games we play. The storytelling will keep evolving as the conversation evolves and grows richer so stay tuned for some impressive arrangements.
Any of the original material we bring into the mix will also get a certain mixtape remix - as we've done in the past, though this obviously being the first with music original introduced in a podcast. So, what you hear will come back around again. New shapes and forms to embrace the ideas we come upon through this journey.
We're always looking for a way to give you new work and new perspectives.
Release of the final album, Funayūrei,is also fast approaching. Album is ready, though release date has yet to be set. We are working tirelessly to finish up the films first so you will have the full experience from get go.
Other adventures are in the mix, but for now listen to The White Whale.
The White Whale is an audio production of CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records. Built upon the ideas of Residual, the blog of CyNar, each episode is an extension of the blog offering visions behind the curtain of art collaboratives in video and audio. CyNar Pictures is a multimedia lab experimenting with image and sound. It's owned and operated by Garrett D. Tiedemann. http://www.cynarpictures.com
For those who check out the site regularly rather than just our social media outlets, you may have noticed some changes in the last few days. Some were necessary as we identified certain elements that were not working on all platforms. However, this need also brought about opportunity to better emphasize what's becoming a big focus of our time - podcasting.
The Yōkai Trilogy page has gotten some attention as we are continuing to build toward the release of the third record and where the story will go after - look to The White Whale as a good starting point. We are currently producing the films to coincide with the album release and are recording some conversation with John to better investigate how this year's work came about.
“Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.”
We've also got some terrific music videos in the works and maybe some film ideas developing out of the amazing audio work we have been producing lately. So, the section devoted to these highlights might get some more attention in coming months as we are trying to not only highlight the product of hard work, but the process as well. This has always been of significant import for us, but with The White Whale we are seeing possibilities to better pull back the curtain a bit without completely unveiling the mystery.
All to say that we are ever evolving. We want to keep highlighting our many productions without creating a mess of a site. We've taken off the direct links to various writing platforms for the moment - if that is annoying let us know. But, Minnesota Public Radio being the current highlight for our cultural critique, a direct link to MPR can be found in Transistors with the podcast presentation.
For now we are off - to the races.
Be looking for us on the airwaves and video screens wherever you find them.
We've finally launched our podcast! It's exciting. We were planing to wait a bit on these as we are in production on content right now, but we got the name and did the artwork and just couldn't wait.
First episode may seem light on content, but considering the development of CyNar and the various ideas we tend to embrace it felt like the right way to get things started.
Take a listen and subscribe on Soundcloud. We should be in iTunes soon as well. There is lots more content to follow soon.
You have to start somewhere. Seems a guitar feed was the best way for The White Whale to make an entrance. Stay tuned for more episodes shortly. The White Whale is an audio production of CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records. Built upon the ideas of Residual, the blog of CyNar, each episode is an extension of the blog offering visions behind the curtain of art collaboratives in video and audio. CyNar Pictures is a multimedia lab experimenting with image and sound. It's owned and operated by Garrett D. Tiedemann.
Brief bits of news.
First off, the Hanan shoot is delayed. Rather than create a video for something already released the band is back in the studio working away on something new. The great thing about this is we can develop the video together as the music comes along for a really unique collaboration and experience.
We're going to be shooting some footage of the band performing to provide you all a taste of what's to come. So, look for that in the coming months.
Secondly, CyNar is going to be venturing into podcast land for the first time. We've been thinking for a while what kind of podcast we might do and the Yokai Trilogy has provided a perfect conduit. We're going to develop a look into the process with John as our guide. Talking about each song in depth and the project as a whole. From initial discussions before putting this on tape it's an incredible process and one that will make for good radio.
So, our first adventure into the art form will be a mini-series of sorts. Test the waters with a 15 to 16 episode run. After that, who knows. We'll see where the wind takes us.
We also may have a film up our sleeves...
This space is typically reserved for CyNar related materials. However, something recently came our way that needed some highlighting.
Marc Streitenfeld has a new score. Most notably known for his impressive work with Ridley Scott on films like Prometheus and Body of Lies. He also worked extensively with Hans Zimmer for years and his abilities as a sound constructor are well known.
Working as a composer he is quite versatile. Very much a chameleon of sound who can go where the narrative takes him, he also is quite adept at minimalism - as exemplified by his work on films like The Grey and Killing Them Softly. He's stunning when minimal and doesn't receive enough credit for an ability to pull back and yet create something complete.
His most recent work is for the film After the Fall and it is in line with this more minimalist approach. In times when music is more often than not needing to prove its reason for being, After the Fall is refreshing for not. It's lightly touched, utilizing a few themes to organize the ideas.
Check it out when you have time.
Lastly we have Hikikomori 5. Nice way to end the week.
The final film for us to complete - Hikikomori 4 - took shape when a particular focus was discovered near the end. This allowed a certain amount of re-cutting to elevate it's presence and discover something buried deep in the frame.
This film was released quite a bit ago, but with the new films coming out this week it seemed fitting to re-highlight the first two for the sake of continuity, and because why not?
As said before, the point of this work with John has always been to create unique pieces that would stand alone, but within the context of the larger structure create something valuable. Hikikomori and the larger Yokai Trilogy is becoming something quite wondrous and unique. We are hoping to do more with it, but this is the start.
With that said take a look (or re-look) at Hikikomori 3.
The point of this work with John has always been to create unified wholes for the entire album without sacrificing the standalone quality of each piece of music and each film. Hikikomori proved to push this to a certain limit. There is a complexity to the music that in some ways pushed the visual away and required more from the films to justify their existence.
With that said take a look at Hikikomori 2.
Happy to say we have finally completed films for the second album in John's Yokai Trilogy Hikikomori. We got a couple films out at the time of the film's release, but these last three films have taken us a while. We will release each of the last three films here first this week.
We present to you Hikikomori 1.
This week was really busy in the land of Minnesota Public Radio with new interviews coming out every day. Monday brought about an interview with the great Daniel Hart whose work was covered last year in a piece about under-recognized scores of 2013. His upcoming work, both for the film and the record, is fantastic and he offers great insight into how he does what he does.
On Tuesday we put out an interview with Christopher Lennertz whose work you have almost certainly heard. As discussed in the piece, he has worked with an incredible amount of gold standard composers and it offers great insight into how his stylings are becoming entwined with modern-day comedy.
Wednesday was a surprise with a really quick interview of Mark Henry Phillips from Serial fame. His work is a huge part of why that podcast series has become so popular. With insanely fast production on every episode, he didn't have time to try and make things 'perfect' and that restriction adds to a sensibility that greatly benefited the show's reception.
Lastly, something different. Our friend Silas Hite was in town last year and we were able to get him to sit down for a terrific interview that became the newest episode of Top Score; Emily Reese's terrific podcast that is working really hard to broaden how we think about video games and music. Please take a listen and share it around.
Next week we should finally have three new films for the John Barner album (sssh, don't tell him. we have as yet to let him know) and Hanan is kicking into high gear with shooting of the music video taking place shortly.
Stay tuned. Keep a look out over at Minnesota Public Radio and Happy New Year to everyone! It's so far gotten off to a great start at CyNar.
It's Christmas day and here at CyNar we are thankful to the many who have kept this whole experiment going over the years. Two significant figures being John Barner and Doug Julien who have watched, debated, and written the text. Keeping our promise of re-releasing these materials written in response to KliKt is a thoughtfully rich engagement with the experience of watching (embedded in a photograph - so click the image to read the text).
It's this sort of dialogue we always aim to incite and looking back it's a wonder what this film accomplished.
Cheers to you all in your celebrations and thank you for the continued support with your eyes and ears wide open.
Semblance, Reproduction, and Simulation: On Garrett Tiedemann's KliKt
by Douglas E. Julien & John Barner
(Click image for article.)
The following is what John Barner wrote about completing the score to KliKt.
A Thousand Words on Composing the Score to KliKt
by John Barner
It is a rare thing to sit and write about composing a score. Rarer still is to do so without some recourse either to describing the recording process or the style of the film itself. The latter is, in the case of Klikt, the easier of the two, and can be dispensed with most economically. Klikt is, to me anyway, a film firmly ensconced in a cinematic legacy that has close ties to the earliest exponents of absurdist or Surrealist cinema, such as Dulac and Artaud’s La Coquille et le clergyman (1928) and Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou (1929), and the more recent “budget” tradition of supernatural thriller and early horror genre films of the 1950’s (the work of Ed Wood easily being the most recognizable—and critically lauded—of these). But to engage in these kind of comparisons is ultimately a limiting exercise, as KliKt also strikes me as having strong stylistic ties to the early films of Morris Engel, juxtaposing its absurdist anachronisms with a quotidian “realism,” i.e., “real time.” Again, any viewer wishing to peg down just where KliKt is coming from stylistically through adding this comparison to an already heady mix may find themselves just as stymied as one who would dismiss it out of hand as simply an absurdist homage or Surrealist-inspired film experiment. My own sense of unease with the all-too-easy labeling of KliKt’s style is precisely what led me to develop a unique recording process in scoring the film, which requires a bit of explanation.
I had seen an early short film version of KliKt prior the score being commissioned, and knew it to be a silent film, albeit a noisy silent film. The diagetic sounds that dominate the film, that act almost as characters-in-themselves, are constantly bombarding the audience, especially the omnipresent sound of a whirring fan, doors slamming and opening, the lazy mechanical din of a contemporary scanner/printer, and, most of all, the sound of the archaic manual typewriter that acts as the protagonist’s companion/adversary throughout the film. In considering recording music for KliKt, I knew that I would, much like the film’s protagonist, have to wrestle with these noisy intrusions, to strike a balance with them in producing a score that built and applied dramatic tension, engaged directly with the action on the screen, and operated equally as foreground and background. This last common duty of non-diagetic music proved especially difficult in composing the score for KliKt. In the full-length version of the film, the act of repetition constantly shifts audience attentions—the tension is always being applied somewhere different in each of the successive “days” of the film, although it would seem as if “nothing is happening” internally to suggest such a narrative advance. Producing music that would have to simultaneously appear not to be moving the action of the film along, but rather “freezing” each moment to allow the viewer to catch what was different this time around required an eschewing of some common elements of recorded music. Melodies, for example, needed to be slight, and rhythms had to capture the repetitiveness of the action, and not run counter to highly repetitive diagetic sound cues (like the typewriter). Screening a rough cut of the film, I immediately instituted three simple (though a little startling, at the time) “rules” that would govern the recording process. The first was that the music would be entirely electronic, with sampling of live instruments. The second was that the samples needed to be rhythmic, rather than melodic. Finally, samples could not be more than ten seconds in length, to ensure that the music would mirror the mechanical nature of the diagetic sounds heard in the film.
I had been experimenting for some time with creating a series of themes using only Nord Lead and (in at least one instance) Fairlight synthesizer tones recorded at variable lengths and layered, one atop the other, either backwards or forwards, and then married to live instrument samples recorded especially for the film (of piano, cello, clarinet, banjo, and, as heard in the trailer for the full length film, the internal sounds of an antique grandfather clock) to provide a rhythmic accompaniment. The result diminished the more characteristic sounds of the synthesizers while retaining the overall tonal quality, making the loops less beholden to the “glitch” inherent in much of contemporary looped electronic music (such as dance music or hip hop). In the final version of KliKt, these themes were further edited into the film by the director, Garrett Tiedemann, shifting their entrance and exit, with each of the successive “days” or perspectival shifts. Again, repetition of key ebbs and flows were crucial to advancement of the narrative. This is in marked difference to a film with a simplistic narrative through-line, wherein the music would begin or end concomitant to a particular moment or “cue” in the action. Given the subtlety of the action in KliKt, and the inherent variance in the presence or absence of such cues from one “day” to the next, the overarching mood to the score was one of lurking, or lying-in-wait. A traditional dénouement common to the thriller is a noisy one, and KliKt here is no exception, so the music is less about emphasizing that the door has been slammed, but, rather, accentuating the length of time spent considering when that
slam will happen.
To conclude, I think it is safe to say that KliKt is a difficult film. It requires considerable attention on the part of the viewer and consistently raises the level of complexity both in terms of what is seen and how one interprets what one sees. From the position of composer, it is my sincere hope that I have not only aided and abetted the stylistic choices on the part of the director and those involved with the film’s production, but also offered, through music, a helping hand to the audience on their journey to understanding.