Notes and Bolts Head Turns CTA Red Line Ride Into Music
By Jon Graef in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 28, 2013 9:30PM
The first train at the newly rehabbed Jarvis Red Line station, December 2012. (Photo credit: Brad Perkins)
There's busy, and then there's Kriss Stress busy. Stress, the head of Notes and Bolts, the Chicago microlabel that puts out cassettes, records, Lathe cut 7-inches, and podcasts, has started a new adventure: making musical compositions out of the sounds of CTA rides.
At least that's what comprised the first of a planned series of musique concrete and Dadaist-inspired pieces called "Reduction," under the moniker "Hannah Hoch," in homage to the German Dada artist of the same name. The second installment of Reduction comprises 24 hours of sound in one isolated spot distilled down to 15 minutes.
The first piece, however, drew considerably less time from its source material.
"It's a three-hour long CTA Red Line trip distilled into a 15-minute movement," Stress told Chicagoist. "I recorded it round trip, but cut [the piece] in a linear fashion as to where the sounds started at the north end and completed at the south.
"It's definitely not melodic in the traditional sense, but it's definitely got a hypnotic quality once you lock into it. Listening to it on a train makes it super surreal, as well," Stress said. "The project is definitely more sound art than it is 'music' you know?".
Latch on here:
Stress wrote on the Hannah Hoch Bandcamp page that editing the piece "required over 300 separate cuts and edits and over twelve hours of piecing and pasting to form the stemmed collage of the track...".
A natural kind of music then emerged.
"I began to hear rhythms, patterns and sounds that would sustain like drones as they moved from one passage to another," Stress wrote
Stress added and layered effects like echo and reverb in to truly complete it. Stress cited French composer Pierre Schaeffer of the techniques used to create the "Reductions #1" piece, as well as a famous counterculture author, for inspiration.
"The goal was to re-call a lot of the stuff that William S. Burroughs did with sound collage and cut up techniques," Stress said to Chicagoist.
Stress said a purpose of "Reductions" was to find art in the everyday.
"I think that even if the end result is mundane, the power of it comes from the sustained carrying of sound," Stress said. "Trains, nature, cars passing, things of that sort - my pieces are meant to amplify those sounds and distill them onto themselves so that you can find some kind of melody out of them.
"The melody isn't top 40 by a stretch, but everything has a rhythm and a structure, you know?," Stress said.
A full-length, 35-minute album mastered by drone artist Cinchel is forthcoming. Listen to "Reductions #1" above.