The Ephemeral City: Songs for the Ghost Quarters

Katt Hernandez

Abstract The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the city. The aim is to offer those materials, wrought into music and sound works, for urban dwellers to deepen, remember, evoke and envision their own ephemeral cities. The themes in the project are drawn from urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city, aiming to empower a sense of place beyond commercial forces, through the fleeting, subtle and imaginary. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening. There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever- transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties. They are comprised of a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound. I have created them utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs; string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy, nyckelharpa or violin, and; sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to evoke the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–one possible version of The Ephemeral City–to argue that the evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers. The mechanism of that empowerment is the force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life. Populärvetenskaplig sammanfattning Kyrkspirorna och tornen på Stockholms horisont blandar sig med radiosändningar som flyger ut över staden bredvid privatiserade våglängder, driver ner genom atmosfären och sjunker ner i det övergivna underjordiska telefonsystemet. Stockholm har byggnader som funnits där i århundraden, men är också full av den mest moderna och samtida arkitektur. Allt konkurrerar om sin plats i det kollektiva minnet. Det här konstnärliga doktorandprojektet i musik tar upp och omvandlar stadsbildens grundmaterial, skapar bilder av staden, mer subtila än de starka krafter som är i rörelse; där staden förändras så snabbt och på ett sätt som ofta skapar maktlöshet. Syftet är att erbjuda material, bearbetat till musik och ljudverk, för stadsbor att fördjupa, minnas, frammana och föreställa sig sina egna efemära städer. Ämnena i projektet är tagna från urbana minnen och omvandlingar, psykogeografi och andarna i den efemära staden. Syftet är att möjliggöra en upplevelse av tillhörighet och hemmahörande som sträcker sig bortom kommersiella krafter och istället framhåller det flyktiga, subtila och imaginära. Projektet tar sig an tre frågeställningar: Hur kan musik och ljudkonst möjliggöra ett återtagande av tillhörighet och platskänsla genom kraften i individens fantasi? Hur kan alternativa inre bilder av staden förstärka en upplevelse av tillhörighet och platskänsla? När blir berättelser, minnen och alternativa framtidsvisioner kollektiva, när kan de delas med andra och när är de helt individuella? Det finns ett improvisatoriskt samspel mellan det levande och det materiella i staden vilket möjliggör subtila sätt för de boende att återfå inflytande över sin omgivning. De konstnärliga verken i det här projektet är gjorda för att belysa dessa subtiliteter, centrerade runt ett antal kompositioner, improvisationer, konstnärliga samarbeten och ljudinstallationer. Med användande av modulära synthesisers, fältinspelningar, piporgel, multikanaluppsättningar; PureData- och SuperColliderprogram, stråkensembler med vevlira, nyckelharpa eller violin och ljudinstallationer. Valet av instrument och material är en efemär metafor för Stockholms arkitektur. Slutresultatet är en samling musik och ljudverk, gjorda för att belysa den imaginära staden. Tagna som en helhet, skapar verken i projektet en imaginär stad – en möjlig version av Den Efemära Staden – för att kunna argumentera att detta frammanande av ett efemärt rum är ett sätt att stärka de boende genom fantasins makt, immuna mot de starka krafter som förändrar livet i Stockholm, med hjälp av det drömlika, omformande och flyktiga. Lika övertygande för det inre ögat som tegelsten och murbruk är i den yttre världen.

Walter Benjamin in Ulvsunda was commissioned, to be made for the 49 speaker, asymmetric acousmonium/surround system composer and improvisor Jacob Riis builds every year or so in Malmö for the Intonal festival in 2017. I began by playing double stops on the violin through Buchla patches. Some added pitches via frequency modulation, some via ring modulation. I then sent the output of these initial patches to the spectral resonant filter, which was doubly controlled by some of the same sources. I was searching for the difference tones produced by these intervals to appear on the Buchla. Violinists listen for and use for tuning double stops. I was trying to find the "ghost" tones behind the "real" ones, minimise the real, and bring forth the ghost; to isolate and amplify these difference tones, take away the fingered pitches and build back a ghost orchestra of difference violins.

The piece is arranged in static sections in Reaper that are either diffused in live performance through the multi-channel system, or played and sung together with live on the violin.The first section begins in a far corner of the room and engulfs the audience in the largest ring of speakers. The next section is two sets of materials, one made of grinding fourths on the lower range of the violin passed through ring modulation, one a much more "synth-y" sound generated with a sequencer playing over set of long tones passed through the clone of the Buchla Complex Waveform Generator clone at KMH. These two materials were diffused in and out of each other through a small square of 8 speakers at the center of the concentric circles and squares of spatialized speakers. The third section, rather short, is a chord of many "ghost" tones through the Buchla, moving from the front to the back of the room. In the ceiling, crossing overhead diagonally and into speakers behind the exits at the front right and rear left of the room, and sounds made from noise generators controlling the frequency modulation of the complex waveform generator, together with input from the Polyphonic Rhythm Generator, which I triggered by playing the violin into the portamento inputs to create these sounds. The fourth section is a kind of ballad of chords which, while it contains no unprocessed violin, has so many layers that it sounds very violinistic- the most prominent emergence of the "ghost" of the instrument from the many layers of synthesis. The fifth section is a gigantic drone cadence, where the three sub-basses in the set-up are played with diffusion techniques. And the sixth section is a very slow chord progression, very drone like, the tracks displaced against one another and coming out of most of the speakers in the room. Here I leave the mixing board, take up the violin and walk the perimeter of the room slowly, in a circle, I play three versions of a long phrase which always travels upward – the first on one string and as it rises, adding an upper octave as the melody rises, the second in fingered unisons, and the third adding a third unison with my voice. The violin is also coming out of the upper center speaker, so that it is both central and spatialized by the circular walking, adding a layer of beating and microtonal displacement to the gigantic drone coursing through the room.

This was my first experience working with mixer diffusion. Jakob Riis, a master of that technique, employed it in performances of both his own work, and in a rendition of Negativland's A Big 10-8 Place.x I was inspired by his work to try the technique. To be able to melt and re-form space in such an organic way with the hands was very much in line with the aims of this project.

Repository of Music and Sound Works:

Walter Benjamin in Ulvsunda

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Walter Benjamin in Ulvsunda. Live Concert performance, Intonal Festival, 2017.

Violin, Voice, Avid D-Show Mixing Board and 48 Speakers.

The Acousmonium was designed and built by Jakob Riis, Alessandro Perini and Kent Olofsson.

I made Walter Benjamin in Ulvsunda in December of 2017, and was working on the initial materials for my collaboration with Karin Johansson, Ghost Prelude, during the same weeks. The buildings were empty of nearly all human life, as most people had gone home for the holidays. This contributed to the communing with both ghosts and desolation. However, I began making the piece the preceding summer. At that time, I was reading Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street again. x The stark differences between the industrial area a little ways from my apartment in Solna and the human-scale street Benjamin traversed in his book was affecting as I first wandered through the ugly-scape. Stumbling on the clubhouse of a well-known motorcycle gang, I decided to return and walk the area while I conceived of a piece. It was a hot, dusty summer, which made walking slow and laborious. As I walked I sang a little with the airplanes lifting off for Visby or Umeå, marvelling at the abandoned grill, the half-built bridge jutting out into space, the open gravel pits and big-box stores in old industrial buildings and hastily thrown up malls. I thought of the kind of radio waves here: those sent from the airport control tower. And I thought about how the substance of life had been drained from this place; the same way I would remove the central pitch from all the violin material for the fixed media section of the piece, and build an orchestra from difference tones. I built myself, walking, into the second half of the piece, slowly, laboriously, singing with the planes. I chose this area because it represents such a disastrous end to the kind of streets Benjamin wrote about – and as dwellers on this newer kind of street, we have to find our tiny itinerant wonders in its midst all the same. So I walked, trying to commune with his frightened spirit in the mountains where he disappeared, by trying to find some trace of humanity – the delicate, the subtle, the complex – in this strange, non-productive wasteland. I looked at the dreary landscape in search of details – the friendly rave scene kid selling used computers at the Techno Aucktion; the little airplanes on the abandoned Flyggrillen hot-dog stand; the brickwork of the 1800s building by the cement mixing facility; the bridge leading to the sky. It is this walk I emulate when I circle the room, playing and singing.

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