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.

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Repository of Music and Sound Works:

Virvelns trädgård (The Garden of Verticils)

The garden at the Moderna Museet is a garden for a future – even a post-future! – which had already passed into history when I arrived in 2011. I spent much of that summer contemplating this paradox through the lens of the presence and resonating echoes of Frukost i den Gröna and Paradiset. Even more, the colorful story of the Bucky Dome which had been erected in the garden illuminated the recently past century, as I both programmed and played concerts with Fylkingen, Bengt Carling and the collective that formed to celebrate Don Cherry’s music that year. That former future’s gardens gave brutalism a momentarily kind hand. The kaleidoscopic was spun into minimalist tetrahedra for the building of a new kind of world. Nostalgia has been rightly classified as everything from illness to dangerously folly. But perhaps there is more subtle ore hidden in the same complexities that looking to the past sometimes refutes, to be wrested from its beguiling flowers, winnowed and carried into imagined futures to come. Here, then, is a sonic garden to echo the physical one, built from recordings of Stockholm’s few remaining marks of industrial life, together with choirs, violins, harpsichords, plant life and other moments in the fabric of the city where the garden lives, utilizing Supercollider and the Buchla and Serge synthesizers at EMS (the Elektronmusikstudion, or the Electronic Music Studio in Stockholm)

Audiorama commissioned this installation as part of the 2016 Stockholm Music and Arts Festival.

Three art history students, who were working at the festival guiding the public through the art exhibitions came and spoke to me for an hour about the installation. I was overjoyed to find that they understood exactly what I was trying to convey. We talked about gentrification, the shift away from industrial places in cities, nostalgia, the passing of the old century and Detroit (which is an hour away from my hometown by car). It was an enormously positive experience, and convinced me to continue to pursue work with the Ghost Installations.

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Virvelns trädgård (The Garden of Verticils). Tracks bounced from Supercollider program used to model the installation.

IMPORTANT: This version is made for HEADPHONES, not for a pair of speakers; please use headphones to listen!

This installation was built with mp3 players and consumer-grade speakers, water-proofed in case of rain during the three days it would be up. Instead of batteries, we had dedicated electricity, and the mp3 players were enclosed in plastic food containers sealed with duct tape. This meant that the speakers were much better than those I was able to use for the Ghost Installations, and the volume was exactly where I hoped it would be.

The sound files were all from the library of field recordings I have collected in and around Stockholm over the last years. This was a conscious decision- to go more deeply into material I already had, rather than generating more. The only new sounds I created were violin and synthesizer phrases, meant to evoke the same nostalgia for 20th century modernism as the garden itself does.

I divided the sounds into the following categories: Archaic, Choirs, Gold Seeds, Metallic Flowers, Nautical, Sad Piano, Stone, Trains, Violin. Some of these categories had additional separations where some of the files were processed with Buchla, Serge, or a program containing cascading envelope generators in Supercollider. I then used another program in Supercollider to structure the groups using different random weighting for the sound-files in each group’s selection and occurrence. This second program was based on my first attempts to write a supercollider program to run ghost installations, which was then taken up and generously re-written by David Granström. This new (and better in every possible way) version was originally made for a collaborative installation we both participated in elsewhere in 2014. I have been using that program to model Ghost Installations ever since.

I made four ”players” in Supercollider to emulate each of the four mp3 players. Each category of sounds had its own routine, controlling how often sound files would be selected and played, and how their volume, pitch, envelope, panning and direction would be altered. I then tried to work out on paper how many extra copies of each file and how many silences of which lengths would be needed on each mp3 player to at least partially emulate the program. After arriving at numbers that seemed right, I wound up with a combined total of 1433 sound-files and empty (silent) files on each player. The players were each connected to two speakers, and set to loop on random shuffle. Since many of the sound-files were spatialized in stereo, and they were duplicated on all four players, this was a ”poor girl’s” way to mimic both supercollider’s randomization capabilities and a kind of primitive spatialization.

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