concert brandon labelle | sirr017


Installation art is extremely difficult to commit to CD. There is always a
loss in meaning and impact, even when the audio component plays a
predominant part in the work. In that regard, Concert is an exemplary album of installation art. First of all, instead of proposing a single, album-long work, it offers five different installations presented in Italy, Brazil, Denmark and the US in 2002-2003. Second of all, the booklet supplies photographs and notes sufficient to give the listener a certain understanding of the installation without overflowing him or her with details and academic verbiage. “Automatic Building” which physically introduces the notion of “stutter” in architecture, consists, sound-wise, of treatments of sounds produced by the manipulation of furniture. It is the less interesting piece, lacking an audio component that ignites the listener’s imagination. On the contrary, the diptych consisting of “Transportation” and “Recycling” both relating to features of the city of Curitiba, Brazil, are fascinating sound works on their own. The first one broadcasts the sounds of found objects recorded throughout the city into one location conceived as a reversal image of one of the city’s bus stations. The second piece “recycles” the voices of several people reading back notes they were asked to write down as they perused the city.
Both pieces are highly evocative in drastically different ways. Physically built on the template of John Cage’s happening “Black Mountain Event”. “Event and Its Double” features a symphony of hammers and other construction sounds. “Learning from Seedbed” also takes its inspiration from an older work, this time Vito Acconci’s “Seedbed” and once again inverts its meaning, turning the “intimate space” created by Acconci’s wooden ramp into a social space. Four contact microphones are attached to the wooden incline, on which members of the audience are invited to walk,stomp and roll. The resulting sound work is much more arid than the previous pieces and recalls LaBelle’s own Music on a Short Thin Wire.
Nevertheless, Concert is one of LaBelle’s most listener-friendly albums.
François Couture, all music guide

As you are no doubt aware, a CD is not a concert. In fact it's not an installation either. And an installation is usually not a concert. Brandon Labelle plays around with all these notions on his CD called 'Concert'. This CD contains five pieces of music, which were all part of art installations, and I think in all cases the sounds were derived from the building process of the installations. Each of the installation is described in the booklet, so I will only state that each of these installation has a predecessor in time, like Cage's Black Mountain Event or Vito Acconci's project 'Seedbed'. There is some stuff to read and view in the booklet, but of course the listener is remote: he has no longer a connection to the installation (unless of course he was a visitor and decides to buy the CD), but an outsider, and will probably judge the CD by it self. So will I. Brandon's music is best described as musique concrete: music made out of various small sounds, amplified and extracted from their own environment, and together with Steve Roden (with whom Brandon has worked before), Brandon shares the love of small sounds, the small gesture. Things move in a seemingely random way and each of the track is limited to a few sounds. Were Steve Roden moved into carefully constructed compositions, I think Brandon is still behind - sometimes his music is more like a documentation of events, of social interactions, and the beauty of the compositions is not the main thing. This makes it, at least for me, not always enjoyable. The last piece here, 'Learning From Seedbed', is a mere banging on wood and simply lacks interesting sounds and composition. But that's the weakest brother, other tracks are much nicer, such as 'Automatic Building', with it's gentle moving of sound."
__FdW, Vital Weekly)".

Brandon Labelle CONCERT Sirr 0017 Concert is American composer Brandon Labelle's collection of installation soundtracks for works created over the past few years. On "Automatic Building" a wooden structure is assembled / disassembled, a slow dragging sound of planks scraping on concrete structures in a 15th Century Florentine villa (see the album cover) with organic echo full of musty cobwebs and soot. "Transportation & Recycling (proposal to the mayor)", the lengthiest track on offer at 22 minutes, was originally presented at the Ybakatu Espaco de Arte in Curitiba, Brazil, and speeds with the sounds of zooming motorcars and rush-hour traffic, Labelle's intention being to converse with his audience by mirroring the city outside by using sound and other elements including pieces constructed of PVC, fabric, wood and sound devices. In Denmark, he presented "Event and its Double" where a specially created structure replicated color and shape elements at the local Museum of Contemporary Art in a sonically spacious homage of sorts to Cage's celebrated "Black Mountain Event" (1952), while "Learning from Seedbed" refers to Vito Acconci's famous 1972 Sonnabend Gallery living performance sculpture/installation. Labelle uses the original ramped gallery floor, though allows the viewer to get one step closer to the unknowns below the surface: instead of Acconci's antics - mysteriously heard but not seen - Labelle contact-mikes the meandering of the audience itself and this crawling exploration of discovery is then relayed into the room as a broken, contorted and minimal collection of pops and excerpts.
—TJN,www.paristransatlantic.com

At first glance, the title of this album is remarkably straightforward and literal, evoking the standard live album designation that’s more often applied to rock than electroacoustic improv, where any recording is technically live, whether it takes place in front of an audience or not. Of course, as one would expect from a conceptual artist like Brandon LaBelle, there’s far more to this title than simple description. LaBelle plays with the multiple meanings of the word to poke fun at the very idea of the live concert, as well as creating deeper messages regarding art and music. All the pieces here were indeed recorded live at concerts, but more importantly, they represent LaBelle making music in concert with various art installations.
The first piece, "Automatic Building," was recorded in a Florentine villa, with LaBelle using wood from around the structure to improvise, while a set of speakers played "a prepared audio work based on the manipulation of furniture." Here, the combination of wood source materials, both live and pre-recorded, makes a sparsely populated landscape of scrapes and wooden clicks. The two sound sources flow into one another, but achieve the "spatial stutter" that LaBelle writes about in the accompanying notes; the sounds have a hesitant, skipping quality that may be the two wooden recordings trying to sync with each other, and not quite making it. It’s a rare and beautiful example of conceptual ideas being evocatively expressed in the music itself.
"Transportation & Recycling (proposal to the mayor)" comments on those two aspects of urban planning in Curitiba, Brazil. The former part complements the city’s black, tubular bus stations with white, rectangular areas that transport sounds, not people. Sounds recorded around the city congregate in LaBelle’s sound stations, creating a rich tapestry of tinkling, cranking, whoosing noises, evoking movement and urban living. The Recycling half of the piece is a little less conceptually cogent—after all, in many senses most of the sound on this CD is recycled from somewhere—and the overlapping montage of voices is far less aurally impressive than the collage of abstract sounds on the Transportation half.
Event and Its Double is another multi-layered conceptual piece: the construction of the visual art echoes a 1952 John Cage "happening," while the audio (recordings of the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art under construction) echoes, literally, the museum where this installation was staged. Nevertheless, unlike the first two pieces, the sound in this case isn’t very compelling on its own merits, absent the intellectual acrobatics of LaBelle’s writing. The processed and tweaked hammer sounds have some minimal interest, often approaching an oddly compelling approximation of glitchy electronica, but they hardly add up to a realization of the piece’s considerable ambitions.
Lastly, Learning From Seedbed again attempts to comment on an art installation from the past—in this case, a 1972 masturbation-themed performance-art piece in which a ramp hides the self-loving artist from view. In LaBelle’s re-imagining, the ramp is inverted to open onto the room, and contact mics placed on it to record visitors’ movements, encouraging social interaction with the art. Nonetheless, the actual audio result fails to satisfy. Overall then, Concert is an intriguing album that demonstrates more than anything else the many pitfalls of conceptual art. LaBelle is successful about half the time here at translating his richly detailed and well-conceived ideas into compelling sound works. When he fails, the music is lacking, though the ideas remain interesting.
__Ed Howard, Grooves Magazine