ETOKIKU by Amnon Wolman

Amnon Wolman: ETOKIKU
notes by Jennie Gottschalk

Whether you're hearing a work of Amnon Wolman's live, opening up a book or a mixed media boxed release, it is always an open question how the sound will reach you. He is constantly playing with formats, materials, and pathways to the aural imagination. It is what I like to call music in the second person, which is why the liner notes begin in a similar manner. You are the subject of the work—your perceptions and allusions—as much as the content is.

Wolman has said that he doesn't like writing about his own music, but the music itself is quite communicative. Taken in the context of his long term projects there is quite a lot to say about each of the tracks on this release, even with a limited technical understanding of how they were made.

One of his long term interests is in activating the aural imagination. He often does so through the use of text, imagery, or video, and even creates counterpoints of emitted or vibrational sound with suggested internalized sound. What you have in front of you now (a pill box containing a thumb drive containing only sound files) appears to be a exception to this interest, but it is not. He has used sound alone to set up the conditions for an active and memorable series of imaginative experiences that are not only aural, but also visual and spatial.

How should these pieces best be heard? All of the pieces on this release are in stereo, though Two Excerpts and Rinachichi also exist in quadraphonic versions. Wolman writes:
As for the preferred way of listening, this is a complex issue. In a sense choosing between two categories of sound producers (earphones vs loudspeakers) brings to focus the extent that the listener has over the music, specifically the sound of the piece, by choosing not only if she will listen via earphones but specifically which type of earphones. In my mind this is part of what is called in music “interpretation.” The performer chooses the mean through which she will listen to the piece and what type of piece it will be. I feel comfortable leaving all of these pieces available for the widest interpretation.
The notes that follow are based on my own interpretation, listening primarily on loudspeakers. You are invited to interpret the works for yourself, either independently of these notes or through a process of comparison with them.

1. DoSi (2010)
There is a busy floor of sound with a constantly flickering presence. What are the sources of the sounds? I don’t know. They seem to move in curves and in lines, with occasional juttings out of that surface. It feels like a place that I have never visited before, and can only visit through this sonic projection of Wolman’s imagination.
These thoughts have just enough time to register before the entrance of a tone whose origin is immediately identifiable: a clear note, the C above middle C, played on a piano. There is some reverb, but there is no doubt of what it is. Both sound sources continue, apparently independently of each other. The piano is measured and careful, as if exploring the action and the tuning of the instrument on two pitches (B and C/Si and Do), mostly in two adjacent octaves. This voice reappears after a pause in what sounds like a recording of itself. Despite being more processed, it gradually takes on more presence.
The third type of sound is evidently and immediately biological: a human voice in some excess of pain or emotion. It is neither measured nor careful, but an involuntary sound, sometimes more like a retching sound, at other times more like a hoarse scream.
No one can replicate such a sound of the human larynx and organism through a verbal description alone. Nor could such a sound be imitated, even by accomplished actors. It depends on the unique organism of the individual. The piano sounds could be most easily described, and could be notated simply as pitches and rhythms and articulations.
These three types of sound—electronic, mechanical, and biological—are concurrent in time; but the imagination has a big task to discover or construct connections between them. As a listener, you are given a continual choice to inhabit three different spaces or to construct continuities. But perhaps the suggested continuity is only one of proximity. Wolman writes that the name, DoSi, results from a “stream of consciousness kind of situation where I was typing while thinking about two things at once...what am I doing now and what do I want/need to do next.” The confusion of that coexistence was materialized by the appearance of “DoSi” on his computer screen.

2. Ramp Ahead (2014)
In Ramp Ahead, the sounds are synthetic throughout, but are in continual states of advancing and receding. Strata of sound overlap with each other, some getting louder while others fade. Some sounds gradually begin to resemble human voices. Later in the track, the layers become more sustained. It is hard to tell if the slow-motion quality of their sound is the result of comparison to what has come before, or because of some in-built quality of the trajectory of sound. Change is occurring at a great rate, and yet there is a sense of being caught in a loop, or inhabiting a space where statements loop back on themselves. Both amplitude and frequency are in perpetual motion. There is a space acting upon the sounds, an active acoustic seemingly with agency of its own. But the influence works in two directions, as the walls seem not only to resonate, but also to expand and contract: The space is being transformed by the sounds that act upon it. It becomes less oppressive, less confining, yet still affects the reverberation.

The sounds fade away, and we are left to imagine the shape, qualities, and continued existence of the space.

3. Two Excerpts (2015)
This track is a remix of two excerpts of Dust Control Area (2014). In addition to the stereo version of this release, there is also a quadraphonic version.
Percussive sounds are set against sustained sounds. A female voice speaks careful French, as if for the radio. The second and third entrances of spoken voice are increasingly high in register and increasingly obscured. The sustained sounds transform so that they seem to be male voices, perhaps drastically slowed down and made lower. More and more voices crowd the scene, taking over the texture. The sustained tones return, dominating and inviting speculation about the original sounds that generated them. The track is shaped by degrees of clarity of appearance. We spend the last several minutes in material that is unclear, unknown, and obscure.

4. Rinachichi (2015)
Like Two Excerpts, Rinachichi also exists a quadraphonic version. The title has no meaning, but was generated through a computer program.
Rhythms and textures hover at the brink of regularity, never settling into a pulse but glimmering in amplitude, speed of articulation, and the audible components of sound. Some waves of sound are more sustained, also with a similar glimmering, unstable quality. Individual components of the sounds seem to be identifiable (wind, trains, tides, drums), but their accumulations are improbable and abstract, defying all efforts to reconcile them with visual imagery.

5. Share the Road (2001)
Share the Road is dedicated to Evan and Tara Marcus, and is derived from a home recording of Wolman’s partner Eyal Levinson singing a traditional Shabbat Blessing..
A sustained tone. No, there are three tones, each with its own rhythm and appearance. Male voices, concentration, a sense of stillness, expanding counterpoint.

In another wave of activity, voices appear in a female register. The counterpoint has changed and each voice has its own distinct rhythm.
Each wave of activity is something to grow into, live within and develop.
The singing just before the 12-minute mark is clearly liturgical. This source material has been present in some form throughout the track, but now it is less processed and more apparent for what it is. The particular attributes of Eyal’s singing voice and articulation carry a sense of closeness and clarity, especially as compared with the earlier distancing of the voice through processing.

If these five pieces had been released on a CD, I probably would have listened to them all in a row. Because they were on a thumb drive, I listened through my computer to each one separately, often at separate times of the day. It’s impossible to know what other listeners will do, but in my experience, the format of the release negated the adjacency of the works.

Despite that choice of discontinuity in listening, there was a progression in my listening experience through the five tracks of ETOKIKU. Certain themes are introduced, reinforced, and varied—modes of sound generation, a sense of place and acoustics, and manipulation. In my experience of the release, the first two tracks introduce those behaviors, and subsequent tracks develop the possibilities of their interactions.

Each track is, in my mind’s ear and eye, a separate space with its own acoustic properties. Just as these tracks are each distinctive in their properties and interactions, the entire sound world of the release sounds like something other, as if unfamiliar forces are at work. It is up to you to decide whether these events occurs in the distant past, the distant future, some other world, or in your own or my own or Wolman’s imagination.

Amnon Wolman is a sound artist and composer. His music works employ acoustic instruments, electronics, images and texts in pursuit of a sound world in which social interactions are part of the musical information provided to the listeners, and part of the composition process. He is interested in the peculiar and subjective listening of an individual.