This elegant, milky white vinyl box by a new label in Cambridge, Counter Audition, includes two wonderful 12 inch vinyl records. A digital edition edited by Line from Los Angeles is also attached. After some research, we discovered that Six Microphones is the moniker of the designer and composer Robert Gerard Pietrusko, who has released an eponymous project whose seminal frequencies originated from audio feedback experiments. The material was recorded live at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, where he also focused on the specific relationships between the sounds, the space and the audience. Though we can’t begin to explain in more detail how every sound was produced, we can say that the minimalist vibes are produced by a dynamic system, a resounding feedback state spreading around a specific architectural space. The listener’s perception is forced to an extreme state of attention – the deaf passages and the homeostatic adjustments constantly impose themselves on our senses. The work is divided into six parts and an overture, evoking an abstract and refined psychoacoustic approach. In short, this seems to be a release which needs to be listened to only with headphones, when the listener can themselves in an all-embracing and meditative experience, pushed into a dimension without time or space. The opposite happens with the live performance, where the acoustic response of the space is the focus. Arguably the sound installation works well out of context too, because the feedback models are well done and always changing. The fact that the idea is not new and others in the past have already used sounds made in a similar way is not important. Thanks to the crosses and differences of resonance, the quality of the recordings give life to many different passages, made possible only with few basic instruments (only six microphones and speakers). The result is extremely engaging.
(neural.it)
This impressively ambitious double album documents (in necessarily excerpted form) a month-long installation that ran during NYC’s Storefront for Art and Architecture’s 30th anniversary celebration back in 2013. Its true roots go much deeper than that, however, as Six Microphones is the culmination of a project that Robert Gerard Pietrusko has been fitfully struggling to perfect for almost two decades. It is easy to see why it took so long to realize, as Six Microphones is the sort of complex, process-based experimental music that only an electrical engineer or a rabidly gear-obsessed noise artist could hope to fully comprehend. Thankfully, grasping the intricacies of Pietrusko’s system is not a necessary prerequisite for appreciating the resultant sounds, as Six Microphones is a quietly hypnotic symphony of drifting feedback that deserves a place alongside Nurse With Wound’s Soliquy for Lilith and Toshimaru Nakamura’s No-Input Mixing Board experiments as a significant and inspired work of self-generating sound art.
In a broad sense, “six microphones” is a very succinct and accurate description of Pietrusko’s installation, as it is almost entirely and exactly that: six microphones were pointed at a pair of speakers in a room with very deliberate spacial relationships to one another. The intention, of course, was to create feedback and that set-up did not fail in that regard. While it may seem elegantly simple on the surface, however, the system is quite fiendishly complex in the details of how those microphones interact with one another (and with the room that they were in). In that regard, Pietrusko (an associate professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard) approached the project with a focus and rigor that would befit mapping DNA or engineering a particle accelerator. A score and some diagrams are helpfully presented with album to illustrate how the system works, but I only fully grasp the general idea: there are twelve controllers that manipulate the amplitude settings of the microphones, which keeps the resultant feedback in a continuous state of flux. I am a bit fuzzier on how Pietrusko alternates between “on” and “off” settings, but the gist seem to be that there are sixty-four different configurations of active/inactive microphones and each individual piece systematically cycles through them all. Impressively, all of that is just one of the factors that dictates the shape of these “compositions,” as the sounds are further transformed by both the physical space that the microphones are in and the movements of the people within the room. Consequently, there can be no definitive version of Six Microphones, as the installation will yield significantly different results every time it is set up. That said, I suppose this album might be the definitive performance by default, as it will be the only one that most people get to hear.
From a compositional/sequencing perspective, Six Microphones is divided into six numbered parts and one overture, yet those delineations are fairly meaningless from a listening perspective. While I am sure someone who has spent a lot of time with the installation (like Pietrusko himself) can become attuned enough to discern the subtly different moods and tones in the various sections, the entire album is essentially a lazily shifting cloud of feedback, so it makes more sense to view it as a whole rather than a collection of discrete movements. The beauty, of course, lies in how the sustained feedback tones bleed together, transform, and converge into oscillating pulses. Given the nature of the sound sources, that is exactly what I would expect: someone who has a long familiarity with challenging music may be able to see some beauty in Pietrusko’s feedback blossoms (akin to time-lapse photography), yet I suspect most listeners (like me) will find these sounds to be disorienting and uncomfortably hallucinatory. That certainly has its appeal, as My Cat is an Alien have made a career out of expertly plumbing those depths. At times, however, Six Microphones transcends the expected and such unpredictable interludes and unplanned set pieces are what makes this a compellingly unique album beyond its innovative compositional technique. On each of the four vinyl sides, some kind of phantasmal form takes shape at some point that sounds nothing like feedback: sometimes it sounds like the submerged whirring of a submarine or the hum or heavy machinery. Other times, it resembles a mysterious subterranean throb or an unexpectedly rhythmic series of oscillations. At those moments, patient and close listening almost feels like it reveals ghosts in the shifting fog.
Obviously, a double-album assembled from nothing but pure microphone feedback comes with some caveats. The primary one, of course, is that this is an unapologetically difficult tour de force of sound art. While Pietrusko put an incredible amount of effort into creating the system that made this possible, the form that these pieces take is guided primarily by chance (along with some math and electrical engineering) rather than a composer interested in achieving a satisfying dynamic arc. Microphones do not care how long it takes to get to an absorbing place, nor do they care whether that place occurs at the beginning, middle, or end of a piece. The flipside of that, however, is that these pieces get to places that they never would have gotten to if they were consciously steered by a human artist. Also, it is always genuinely refreshing to encounter adventurous work from someone who has thought extremely deeply about frequency, harmony, the intricacies of the human ear, or complex acoustic phenomena (for me at least). Six Microphones is the kind of album that is all-too-rare these days: an experimental music album that is actually is truly experimental in its aims. In that regard, this album belongs to the same continuum as works like Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room” or the landmark works of early musique concrète: it could not be further from music-as-entertainment, yet it opens up intriguing new vistas in what is possible.
(brainwashed.com)
The premise is incredibly elegant: six microphones are pointed at a set of loudspeakers, while an algorithm adjusts the amplitude of the microphones over time. Hums of feedback thicken in the air, negotiate a constellation between themselves, then reform as dictated by the change in microphone sensitivity. No players are physically present. It could be said that nothing is “performed” per se. Rather, Six Microphones is the amplification of circumstance; an aggregation of the chaos that bristles imperceptibly in the air, collapsing the infinitesimal tides of air pressure into a deceptively tranquil ballet of tones and pulses.
Due to the volatility of microphone feedback, even the smallest changes in the environment can cause gigantic shifts in the profile of the sound. An audience member leaves the room; the temperature drops by half a degree. These minor instigations of imbalance would be drawn into the loop and amplified, causing the feedback to flail and recoil as though the floor beneath were quaking open: new tones seeping into life from the altercation between frequencies, new throbs emerging as two pitches press together. Whether triggered by changes in the environment or an adjustment in microphone amplitude, these moments of recalibration are beautiful to observe. The system tumbles out of equilibrium, releasing its constituent vibrations into disarray before a new homeostatic formation is established. At these moments, the system feels alive. It perceives the change, quivers with the uncertainty of thoughts and instincts in conflict, and then settles into a new solution. I have to remind myself that this is merely the environment rebalancing itself, and not the audible strains of a conscious entity solving a problem.
Pietrusko remarks that there is no version of Six Microphones outside of its spatial context, nor a definitive iteration of the piece. The process of composition here isn’t the preparation of musical gestures, but the construction of a situation: the design of the loudspeakers, the exact placement of the microphones and speakers, or the definition of those 5376 amplitude set points. Perhaps it extends to the space Pietrusko chooses for the performance, or how many audience members are permitted into the space. Yet it’s astonishing to think that, with Pietrusko’s years of painstaking planning, the sonic outcome is just as influenced by his choices as it is the idle tweak of the gallery thermostat. As far as the system is concerned, the forces of intention and accident hold equal precedence.
(attnmagazine.co.uk)
Massachusetts-based landscape architecture professor and composer Robert Gerard Pietrusko has created something of an anomaly of feedback for installation and it’s quite unique in terms of its minimalist vibration. Stunting and dynamic logarithmic scaling, the work is split into six parts over four tracks.
A lone tone, bright, extended, eventually circumnavigates into the abyss, leaving a residual echo where a secondary low-hum buzz begins to form from its ashes, but fades. And in this way these tones sort of mimic light in the way it shifts over the daytime hours from East to West.
As a lover of all things minimal I must say, this goes farther than most, and as such may require an extremely patient ear as it is excruciatingly slow in transition of tonal quality. But therein lay the tension, the relationship of human to spatial sound source. In fact when it is stated that the piece “senses and responds to its environment in a deeply embodied way—it contains no representational model of music or of space” the truth is in black and white. If I stretch my imagination I could say this emotes, but is far from emotional. It is however, impeccably symbiotic – I just crave to actually “be there” to experience this as spectacle, first hand. To my ears (trained as they are) it’s more like listening to a beloved copy of Cheap Trick Live at Budokan than being in the stadium among a sea of people. A teaser.
At any higher than moderate volume you will start to feel this in your gut, it’s low and slow with a trickle rather than a flow. One would imagine this type of work is hard to separate from its visual components as a pure listening experience it’s more of a disembodied set of psycho-acoustics than most out there at the moment. But if you are into deer-in-the-headlights hypnotic cadences this is a home run. With Taylor Deupree mastering here you get the sense of sound pressure/equivalence, living and breathing Hz.
With over 70 minutes of dB frequencies there really is no need to consider the six parts separately as it’s really a longplayer. It certainly casts the relationship between sources (loudspeaker and microphone) in an interesting light, sometimes like oil and water, other times like a reflection upon the R.E.M. cycle.
This selection of works has more in common with the robot painting work of artist Roxy Paine than it does with the musings of the great-grandfather of electro-acoustic minimalism, John Cage, in that much is left to improvisation, to happenstance. And sure, along the way Pietrusko seemingly is present, physically manipulating, shaping these sound waves like a sculptor. Though in the end it’s really the sonic reaction in space that is the complex kernel between the cadences.
(toneshift.net)
Six Microphones is a set of recording excerpts from a 2013 installation by Robert Gerard Pietrusko, a designer, composer and educator (professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University) living in Somerville, Massachusets.
A “site-determined composition of audio feedback, which explores the mutually constitutive relationships among sound, space, and audience.”
‘Site-determined’, by the way, is not exactly the same as ‘site-specific’: “No sound is generated, it is only amplified. All tones and modulations emerge from the space itself and are dependent on the interaction of three elements: (1) the composition as it unfolds in time, implemented as a changing combination of microphone amplitudes (2) the particular geometry and materiality of the space in which it is sited, and (3) the physical presence of listeners within this space.”
The installation setup may look relatively easy – (six) microphones placed before two speakers – but the resulting feedback definitely isn’t, even more so when you look at the ‘score’ with all 5376 amplitude set points that is included in the 2-LP version.
It’s a highly conceptual, almost scientific approach to feedback music, that can probably be best experienced ‘live’ (wrong word here – maybe I should write ‘in real time’). But the recording excerpts – mastered by Taylor Deupree – do a great job in representing the experience at home, provided you listen on a decent sound set of course. It’s a captivating, inescapable sound, almost physical since the frequencies and modulations are impossible to ignore and feel like they come from the inside of your skull. …This is clearly not just ‘music’, it’s what we call ‘sound-art’.
(ambientblog.net)
