Wall Music by Gabriel Birnbaum
Hi everyone - you may remember that I shared a record of 4-track instrumentals with you in early April, something I'd been working on to soothe myself and keep offline during the beginning of the pandemic. That record, Nightwater, resonated with a lot of you.T he amount of people that record resonated with and the sincerity of the responses really moved me. It made me feel a new optimism about sharing music with people who love it, all thoughts of career and strategy aside.
I have continued, since then, my practice of 4-track recording. In May, I released a covers record of some beloved songs, vaguely in the same style (smeared, dreamy sounds), called Ambien Jukebox.
Since then, I've been working on a long term passion project. After visiting the Sol Lewitt retrospective at MASS MoCA a few years ago, I completely fell in love with Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawings. The scale and simplicity of them was wonderful to me, and, for a project that was often so structured, they were totally joyous and playful. I loved how you could glance at them quickly and be thrilled by the bold shapes and huge washes of color, and then also sit and stare into them for long stretches and find other depths. It set me off thinking about how that kind of feeling could be reproduced in music...which lead to this project, in which I take the directions for and images of the wall drawings and try to use them as scores.
I created an 8-note scale to correlate to the 8 points on a square (each corner, midpoint of each side) and then used various objective and subjective readings of the artwork to create compositions. Different colors were adjacent keys in the circle of 5ths. Sometimes I altered the pieces based on concepts like the position of the viewer relative to the piece in the room. Lewitt's drawings involve a lot of repetition and I tried to lean into that at times, and at other times indulge my desire to wander, reading a visual chart in a spiral from the center to the outer edge for example, rather than from top left to bottom right in rows like sheet music.
Most of the pieces here are for four electric guitars. At first I wanted to try and replicate the clean lines and precision that I found so pleasing in Lewitt's work. Then, as things changed and I found myself outside protesting an overwhelming number of obvious injustices, faced with violence I'd never directly been threatened with before, my interest in a clean, removed sound changed, and I switched to saxophone and greatly extended the duration of the last two pieces. During this time I thought a lot about breath and spit and the body, which are the reasons perfection and precision are so hard to attain on the saxophone, but also what gives the instrument it's expressive power, and I decided to let Lewitt's orderly structures co-exist with the natural unevenness of extremely long tones on the saxophone, of intonation wobbling, of spit adding texture to the sound, of breath running out.
All three records are currently available as a pay-what-you-can downloads. I'm going to donate 50% of digital sales in July and August to Equality For Flatbush.
My linocut printmaking practice, which I first mentioned when I shared Nightwater, continues apace, and I have made prints for these two albums as well, in the same way. Hand-printed in dark blue ink on cream colored Rives paper, sold only via bandcamp. 12" x 12".
