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6/13/03:

Subtextures

Language Removal Services studies the phenomenon of erasing words from recorded speech and leaving the natural vocal sounds - the umms, ahhs, grunts, sighs, breaths, etc. - that are not considered part of language intact. The claim, according to their FAQ is that language removal creates a static characterisation of a person's speech, uncontrived by language, and presumably more natural and more identifiable.

Apparently LRS lie somewhere between proprietary science and a joke on the faith invested in science (or doubt derived from words and mediation), at least that's what I make of it all from the similarly ambiguous NPR story[cmd+F "Language Removal Service"] from which I first heard of this. Certainly that's what I gather from LRS's shoddily made web site.

However, I am overwhelmed by the aesthetic response that these recordings induce. Their page of real audio samples, with recordings of speech from the disparate likes of Henry Rollins, Susan Sontag, Jorge Louis Borges, or Sylvester Stallone equally sound strangley animal-like and oftentimes quite erotic.

They've also apparently collaborated on various media projects. One Hand Clapping, a show at Brooklyn's Smackmellon Studios, used LRS's work alongside that of John Cage, William Anastasi, and Paul Pfeiffer in an exploration of authorship, meaning, and the connotative spaces between the texts of recorded images. They also collaborated with Pfeiffer on The long count, wherein the artists painstakingly (and un-seamlessly) erase the videotaped figures of Muhammed Ali, George Foreman, and Joe Frazier leaving oddly supernatural ropes curving and snapping back from the weight of imaginary bodies and a background of heads watching the uncanny emptiness. Paul Pfeiffer describes this and other projects further in this interview[.pdf].

Aside from these conceptual implications, I'm most drawn to these sounds as music. The samples of LRS's Static Opera (available completely as a CD), wherein the librettos of early 20th-century operas undergo the same erasure, create the illusive effect of high spectacular culture removed to expose a seemingly more menacing and erotic subtext. If you're patient enough to wait through the RA file, the opera sample played at the end of the aforementioned NPR broadcast creates the same effect in a more complex and beautiful arrangement. I'm reminded of the music of Christian Fennesz, especially the album Endless Summer, who makes beautiful digitised reworkings of familiar pop songs by distilling them to a rich layer of static but somehow keeping the attraction of melody barely discernable but intact.

posted by jeremy @ 11:05 PM