The Museum At Tomorrow - Jeffrey Nils Gardner - Five Twenty-Three AM

How I Make Music

Join accomplished sound artist and ‘Unwell’ audio drama creator Jeffrey Nils Gardner to explore a disorienting ambisonic violin recording sound installation which toured both Burning Man and the streets of Chicago. 'Five Twenty-Three AM' was adopted as an unsettling and arty exploration of sound and used as the soundtrack for fiction podcast 'The Museum at Tomorrow.’ In writing the piece, Gardner’s influences ranged from Pauline Oliveiros to John Cage. Immersive listening. Headphones required. TRANSCRIPT00:00 Intro The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called Five Twenty-Three AM. It's an instrumental track used in The Museum At Tomorrow, an abstract audio fiction collage miniseries. Today we'll break it down and experience why and how it was made. If you're listening to How I Make Music, where behind the scenes, musicians get to tell their own stories. My name is Jeffrey Nils Gardner. I'm a sound artist, director and designer from Chicago, Illinois. And this is How I Make Music.01:50 Beat scriptFor each episode, I write out what I call a beat script laying out each moment of the show. And then I conduct interviews with friends or colleagues or interesting people I run into, along with music and other audio elements to fill in that beat script. We create this collage that tells the story in a very different way.02:45 Great grandmother's violin I've been playing violin since I was six years old. This instrument was actually my great grandmother's. I have a very sharp memory of as a very small child, finding this instrument in my grandparents' attic. And that was how I went down the path of becoming a violin player.03:31 DisorientationDisorientation is what I would say one of the main goals of the piece. Kind of like with a magic eye puzzle. If you unfocus your ears and kind of let them follow where they want to go in the overlapping sounds, I find that the listener often creates a fascinating story alongside the narrative that I'm telling. Adds a certain element of chaos. So Five Twenty-Three AM was originally a part of an eight channel sound installation. This installation toured both to Burning Man and also around Chicago. So the experience is you walk into this octagon and close it behind you and lay in the space and are surrounded by this huge number of speakers and the walls block out the city around you. And so you're hearing this fascinating array of experimental music in multi channel sound. And you just see the sky airplanes crossing your sphere of vision. Laying in the octagon it really effectively blocks out the city, which is not something that we get to do very often. Here in Chicago. It's a cool installation.05:35 InfluencesPauline Oliveros is is a big influence for me, and you can hear some of her work with the Deep Listening Band. One of the other really interesting things that Oliveros has done is create these text scores that are that would stand in for a musically notated score. A text score is a set of instructions for creating a piece of music, something like find an object in the room. Begin manipulating it to find a sound that interests you. Make that noise for five minutes. The piece ends. John cage also works extensively in text scores. Pretty fascinating. He calls them (without prevarication) music. I think he would be deeply offended to hear them not described as music. So I will try not to what you're hearing now is one interpretation of John Cage's a dip in the lake. And I want to be really explicit, this is challenging, strange art. And that is totally okay. It doesn't have to be for everyone.07:37 Recording processI recorded the material for Five Twenty-Three AM while I was in grad school at Northwestern University. I woke up very early in the morning, went down to the studio. I set up an array of these eight mics scattered throughout this large open studio facing different ways. I began to improv

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