12
A Tree Falls In The Forest
When we music lovers think of vinyl, we perhaps have an elitist notion about it. We have come to consider (or rather re-consider) it as the superior format in which to listen to music. This may or may not be true. Certainly, the question of its truth isn’t that important, at least insofar as this article is concerned. What is important about our nostalgic and rather rose-colored insistence in the superiority of vinyl is that it points to the much larger obsession we have with the past generally, as a place that is more desirable to live than our own present moment.
If the first decade of the new millennium were a screenplay or a film, then the overwhelming narrative arc would center on a culture fixated with its own recent history. One where it imagines prior decades as having been better, more interesting, and more alive than the year 2000 et al. This is particularly true of music. The aughts were a decade in which “vintage” and “retro” became more than just adjectives but an aesthetic sensibility. Bands were lauded for their similarity to other bands, for example Interpol’s constant comparison to Joy Division when they first exploded into mainstream markets. While some were praised for music that seemed to evoke other times and other places. A glamour has been attached to the past via things like Mad Men, Hollywood’s constant barrage of remakes, and, of course, the re-emergence of vinyl as the hip medium for recorded sound.
Bartholomaus Traubeck’s multimedia art piece “Years” plays with similar concepts of time, memory, and music as those that have infected our larger cultural aesthetic. Using a record player with a camera instead of a needle, Traubeck “plays” slices of wood from trees. The camera eye reads the rings of the tree, converting that information into data images that Traubeck then translates into piano tones. What results is a strange merging of technological engineering, musical composition, and ecology that riff on the traditional analog record player and its vinyl albums, not only as objects we idolize, but as a way of hearing the world.
Let me ask you guys this question: If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Apparently, it does. But that sound doesn’t necessarily echo at the moment the tree falls. In Traubeck’s piece, the rings of the tree become the grooves of the LP and what he—and we—discover is that the tree always made a sound. It was simply inaccessible to us until now.
Traubeck doesn’t make the claim that his record player actually plays the tree rings in the same way any other record player would play, say, a Janis Joplin album. But what his player does do is to interpret the inarticulate growth of the tree, its life as it lived it, as well as the sense that all living things speak, into the more familiar sounds of a piano.
The result is a haunting exploration of the shifting boundaries among analog and digital mediums, music and sound, and nature and artifice.
This summer—which is now—Traubeck plans on releasing both vinyl and cd versions of “Years” through Cargo Records. You can order a copy through Traubeck’s website.