The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) presents:
"LINES OF SIGHT 5" (AN ORCHID IN THE LAND OF TECHNOLOGY), a sound program curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirá at Radio Web MACBA
NOTE: You can listen and download the podcast and information about the sound pieces in PDF format.

"The recording can be a reflection of the thoughts and emotions of a human being (Arthur Russell), memory (see Brandon LaBelle's project, Phantom Music – Radio, Memory, and Narratives from Auditory Life), or museum (Edgard Varèse used recordings of the Holy Week procession of the Catalan village of Verges, presented every year since the middle ages, in his soundtrack for a film on Miró). A studio production records one perfect performance, its presence in time and space similar to that of a film. Destructive noise can be transposed into delicate vibrations of a transparent membrane (Juan Matos Capote)."
(Excerpt from "Lines of Sight 5 - An Orchid in the Land of Technology -" by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirá)

PROGRAM:
01 Edgar Varèse "La procesión de Verges", 1955 2'54''
02 Anne Wellmer, "needle", 2003 3'
03 Brandon LaBelle, "Dirty Ear" 2007 8'42''
04 Richard Garet, "Précis", 2007 6'
05 Octante, "Untitled" 2008 8'15''
06 Arthur Russell, "Home Away from Home", 1986 5'12''
07 Juan Matos Capote, "The trembling of my Williamsburg art studio while they were constructing outside", 2008 6'55'' (Note: Please cover your speakers with a thin sheet of paper or acetate film to better appreciate the vibrations)
08 Roscoe Mitchell, "Parched Plain", 2006 13'06''
09 John Bischoff, "Override", 2002 3'51''
10 Andres Lewin-Richter, "Study 1", 1964. 3'35''
11 Matt Davis "Rain", 2007. 8'55''



The Trembling of my Williamsburg Art Studio While They Were Constructing Outside, 2008, 6'55"
by Juan Matos Capote.

NOTE: While listening to the piece, please place small pieces of paper with different geometrical forms inside of the cone of the speaker (placing the speaker horizontally on a table). The papers will move and vibrate inside the speaker due to the low frequency vibrations.

"The trembling of my Williamsburg art studio while they were constructing outside is a piece with one part that is visual (see image above) and the other sound. The sound is an edited recording of the sounds produced by construction on various buildings near the studio where I lived and worked in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during my last year in New York. It is a manifestation of the huge and rapid growth of real estate development in that part of the city. The recording consists of the noise of construction machinery, trucks, cement trucks, drills, etc.

These daily sounds, constant and irritating, kept me from being able to work properly in my studio, and woke me up in the early morning. During this period I was working on some paintings with geometric shapes, for which I needed precision and a steady hand. The construction machinery produced, in addition to the noise that invaded silence, vibrations in the building where I was working that made my hand tremble.

In order to take advantage of the adverse circumstances, I decided to record the surroundings in which I was destined to work, and to take advantage of it. My latest works (visual and/or sound) have to do with a reformulating of the experience of place or personal space. This is how the idea of this piece came about.

The visual part happens in the home or in the place where the listener is located. The listener can place a piece of thin acetate or some other similar material (sheet of thin plastic or paper), over the cones of the speakers without their protective covering, so that the low frequency sounds makes the acetate, or other similar material, vibrates. The more powerful the speakers, the more the effect of vibration is perceived, and a subwoofer works even better. In this way, the vibrations that attacked my building in Williamsburg, where I was trying to paint in silence and with a steady hand, are reflected. A variation of the visual element of this piece is to place small pieces of paper with different geometrical forms inside of the cone of the speaker (placing the speaker horizontally on a table). The papers move and vibrate inside the speaker due to the low frequency
vibrations." (by the artist)

7 designs (in different colors) of table placements in New York City's restaurants (in some of which the artist, as well as other immigrant fellows, worked).




Juan Matos Capote
GOLD & NOISE
2008
"Rich Gold" oil paint on used cardboard box, cardboard boxes, scavenged speakers, cables, 2 audio channel CD, CD player.
32 x 140 x 115 cm approximately.

Scavenged speakers implanted into two cardboard boxes used by the artist in his move from New York City to Barcelona (Spain).
A two-channel Audio CD played through a Discman CD player and connected to the two speaker cardboard boxes.
- Right channel: Fellow immigrant voices that work in New York City restaurants are heard, telling their own experiences of crossing the US-Mexico border. This right-channel cardboard box is painted in "Rich Gold" color. Through this channel immigrants' point of view is heard, who think of the new country as an opportunity to enrich their lives.
- Left channel: The same told experiences from the right channel, but processed and transformed into noise, are heard. This left-channel cardboard box has been left in its natural state, without paint (showing its worn state by its shipping from New York to Barcelona). Through this channel the society's point of view is heard, which thinks of immigrants as noise that must be silenced (by deporting or naturalizing).

"The comparison to painting is very compelling: These recordings have many hearts.

New York City has many hearts. They are called Union Square, Times Square and 5th Avenue, among others, and these hearts pump people through the veins of the Big Apple: People, who ride the famous New York Subway. The tubes the subway trains travel through when below the ground, are sometimes continued high above, and the whole circulation is being fed by these hearts, moving passengers from one chamber to another, thus guaranteeing the city's enormous productivity and flow of life, in short: life's movement itself.

Juan Matos Capote is one of millions of people, who use this 'life system'. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. This man with Spanish roots and an accomplished career as a painter, with numerous exhibitions of his works, has now turned his attention on experimental music. No, this CD release is not his first one, if one discounts his work with his duo Thick Wisps. But it is one which is surely very important in the string of his artistic achievements.

The Subway Aural Recordings keep just what they promise: A ride through the 'tubes'. We hear announcements at the stations, we here the sounds of opening and closing doors, the rails getting pounded by the ever so fast turning wheels. Pieces on this CD are called 'Train's Entrance', 'Beat & Breath', 'Union Square', and 'The 6 Train', among others. And while there are some field recordings, there is also an extraordinary scale of electronic music perfectly embedded in them. The whole impression these sounds create is a realistic one, but also slowly flows into an ocean that leaves everything open to the imagination of the listener.

Yes, there is a recurrent theme. And it is organized in such a way, that just when you think you drift away into these endless waters of your imagination, the artists grabs you by your life vest and drags you back to the main subject. It surely is no coincidence that the comparison to painting is very compelling. And yet, while a painting is in some way very stationary, the sounds of this CD seem to withdraw from such a statement. Although one could argue, that they are not a subject to any change, just as a painting is, they spread an enormous potential of possibilities, depending on the mood of the listener, the listeners own experiences, his education and so on. You name it, there are more influences than stones on a mountain.

But Juan Matos Capote succeeded here in strictly limiting these excursions into the unknown - although the temptation is always around the next corner; just like he does in his paintings, the listener is kept to the very intentions of this music, and I greatly applaud this fact. It focuses the attention on what needs and is intended to be said.

I greatly admire this disc. It has the taste of a fast moving world, of a merry-go-round of human life and it's exposures and affiliations with an unforgiving technical environment. But there is no denial of the very situation we are living in. And how could this be better stated than in the title of the last track on this CD, which illustrates the somehow ironical view of the artist: 'At last the poet says: Again there is no L-train'. A great work and well worth listening to. A piece of art in it's own right."

One of the great developments related to modern technology is that more and more visual artists are starting to work in the field of music, presenting fresh visions of sound. One of them is Juan Matos Capote. In his case, the relationship between eye and ear has always been a symbiotic one. In fact, his paintings and sculptures already dealt with written sounds, silence and synaesthesia. It should only be consistent, then, that his fledgling career as a musician should be occupied with optical phenomena, threedimensional compositions and with methods of reflecting and representing the world which surrounds us in music: His debut as a solo artist, "The Subway Aural Recordings" was scored over the course of years and documents his travels with the New York City tube system. The entire process of its creation marks him as an artist who cares next to nothing for the traditional terminologies of the music business or for separating writing from recording and purpose from spontaneity. While scoring "The Subway Aural Recordings", he hid recording devices in his clothes all the time, keeping them switched on incessantly to capture every nuance of his environment and to include chance as a vital element. Consequently, the album sounds anything but a regular field recording and offers much more than just a couple of soundscapes built from the same source material. Instead, it offers living testimony of his idea of treating sounds as aural spaces through which the composition flows.


Hi! How are you? Where are you?
Hi, I am very good. Thanks. I am at this moment in Brooklyn, New York, at my apartment.



What's on your schedule right now?
Right now I am looking forward to the imminent release of my first solo album, "The Subway Aural Recordings," at Einzeleinheit. This album is comprised of several aural compositions based on field recordings of the New York City subway system that I recorded over several months during my rides in the subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I am also working in new material and collaborating with other artists. Also, I am preparing for my moving to Spain at the end of the year.



What or who was your biggest influence as an artist? Do you see yourself as part of a certain tradition or as part of a movement?
I came into sound through the visual arts. I was trained academically as a visual artist and not as a musician. The paintings and sculptures I have been making are dealing, among other things, with the aural. I was working with onomatopoeias, or written sounds, and silence. Some of my interests have been on the monochromatic visual tradition, on concrete poetry, Cage, Arte Povera, phenomenological sense perception, synaesthesia, etc. Lately, I have been interested on Pauline Oliveros's teachings on listening, and after I began to study "circuit bending" with Reed Ghazala, I started to play with electronic modified toys and instruments I built. Among other things, I learn from them improvisation and chance as a way of combating extreme rigidity. I like an experimental approach to sound making, and see myself as part of a group of sound artists that use sound as art, as an element, the same way I can use colour in my paintings.



What's your view on the music scene at present? Is there a crisis?
No, I don't think about the actual music scene as being in crisis. On the contrary, I think about it as an effervescent creative scene, where the concept of Music has been already expanded and identified as Sound. And this fact brings renovating energies not only at the level of the music scene but also at a societal level; music has being democratized. The discriminating particular has returned to the involving whole. I see much hope here.



What does the term "new" mean to you in connection with music?
"New" for me is that which cannot be categorized on first listening. Eventually, it will loose that "newness" once it is categorized. But "new" is also for me that which always affects me in a novel way, even if the piece is old.



How do you see the relationship between sound and composition?
I think about sound as aural space, and composition as the guided or improvised movement through those aural spaces.



How strictly do you separate improvising and composing?
Lately I am giving a lot of importance to the live performance, to the act of performing in a present moment, and when I play I improvise but I also compose within the flow of the performance. In this case, their separation tends to kind of blur. On the other hand, when I sit in front of my laptop at my studio, I can be inclined to compose in a more strict way.



What constitutes a good live performance in your opinion? What's your approach to performing on stage?
A good performance for me is that in which you get engaged so much in all the aural that you forget about what happened and what will happen, and it kind of affects you in some way. My approach to perform in stage is to try to play in a way that engages me, involves me, and surprises me as the piece evolves.



A lot of people feel that some of the radical experiments of modern compositions can no longer be qualified as "music". Would you draw a border – and if so, where?
We would have to discuss first what we are referring to when we say "music." Which kind of practice? With which characteristics? For my actual understanding of music (and for my hope on it) music embraces a broad range of practices, so I have to say, no, I don't have the necessity of drawing a border. I see a whole.



Are "serious" and "popular" really two different types of music or just empty words without a meaning?
I suppose it has to do with what you do with the so-called "serious" and "popular music."



Do you feel an artist has a certain duty towards anyone but himself? Or to put it differently: Should art have a political/social or any other aspect apart from a personal sensation?
Some art may be explicitly more political or social than other that may look like very personal, but I think that in art, individual aspects can always be transposed into societal aspects. It is inevitable.



True or false: People need to be educated about music, before they can really appreciate it.
That is true. We would have to argue then which kind of education it would be necessary depending on which type of music. One needs to be educated to be able to appreciate classical music as well as any type of music, and also to be able to appreciate more contemporary experimental sound practices.



Imagine a situation in which there'd be no such thing as copyright and everybody were free to use musical material as a basis for their own compositions – would that be an improvement to the current situation?
Not necessarily. Why would that be an improvement?



You are given the position of artistic director of a festival. What would be on your program?
I would include performances by sound artists and audiovisual performances, with some emphasis in the craftiness of sound and visual source devices or instruments. I also would like to include performances of extremely altered pieces by contemporary artists of more "popular," traditional or classical music compositions, pieces that use elements of them, and that as a result, they create something entirely different and new. I would try a program that would create a place of improvisation, chance and play.



Many artists dream of a "magnum opus". Do you have a vision of what yours would sound like?
No. I tend to think in terms of the whole in my practice rather than in a specific masterpiece.


Discography:
The Subway Aural Recordings (einzeleinheit) 2007

REVIEWS:

"No mean achievement for a noise-album: This halucinogenic lava stream is strangely unclassifiable.

Many people assume there is nothing easier to comprehend than a noise-album. Where sound takes over from melody and harmonies, the argument goes, the reaction should be immediate and without external filters – you either like it or you don't. And yet, "Thick Wisps," while clearly associated with the noise-cosmos, openly defies and contradicts this line of reasoning.

Of course, the aforementioned premise often seems stem from the belief that "noise" and "industrial" are mutually interchangeable terms. As this album once again proves, this is a fatal fallacy. While the two musicians behind the project obviously enjoy twiddling their knobs and controllers to the point of earbleed and are, one may at least suppose, resistent to a great deal of racket, their music is neither directly nor ideologically influenced by a past in the barren outskirts of coalmines, exploitative factories or relentless assembly lines. "Thick Wisps" is not a political album, nor is it a work penetrated by the often formulaic slogans of defetism and revolution used and abused by some of their colleagues. Instead, it is a statement of complete openness and a veritable effort of leaving typical genre-associations behind.

Giancarlo Bracchi, for one, still uses "conventional" instruments such as the guitar, but he looks at them with different eyes, just like he considers the human voice a further tool for sound generation, rather than a cheap emotional element. Juan Matos Capote, meanwhile, is more of a split personality. The sustained chords and plinkety piano notes of his 5$ baby-keyboard are obvious "musical" references, while the rest of his gear is clearly that of a new generation, characterized by effect pedals, stomp boxes and mixing boards. There is a playful mood running through their interaction, just like Capote's hero, circuit bending-maestro Reed Ghazala never considered chance an enemy but an ally.

A naive drone opens the ninetineen minute "Organ Accumulator," one of two grand-scale meditations framing the album's body of mostly concise tracks and leads into a game of associations, of bouncing thoughts hence and forth and of allowing the music to evolve almost in dreamtime. Rhythm can be the trigger, but so, too, can be a two-tone bass motive or a group of reoccuring sounds. While the methods are recognisable and anything but "new" in a classical sense, the thick and intense halucinogenic lava stream flowing forth from the bipolar encounter is strangely unclassifiable. Especially the epic coda "Deluvio" holds an uneasy equilibrium between terrifying ambiances and utterly zen-like calmness.

On a first listen, I enjoyed myself without further consequences, but on a second one I was intrigued. With each listen, "Thick Wisps" opens up new perspectives, new angles of incidence and alternative interpretations. It's still not Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, but easy to understand it ain't exactly either. No mean achievement for a noise-album."

The Subway Aural Recordings are a set of 11 aural compositions based on field recordings I made of the New York City Subway System. Einzeleinheit (Munster, Germany) has released the album CD in October 2007.

"The Subway Aural Recordings" are both an album of experimental electronics and a personal diary. For years, Juan Matos Capote secretly hid recording devices in his clothes, taping the sounds of the New York subway. He didn't go there explicitly to record. Every day, when taking a ride to work or returning to his home, he would just leave his MiniDisc and Edirol R-09 running, collecting all the noises that surrounded him.

On one level, these recordings represent a musical mirror image of the New York Subway. On the other, they document Capote's search for the structures underneath the surface: "It was a discovery of hidden sounds that at the moment I could hear because I knew I was recording and I was putting more attention to anything that was sounding around me."

Accordingly, "The Subway Aural Recordings" are not just a couple of field recordings which make for nice source material. They constitute a private, often rhythmic, musical vision and a small and diverse world in their own right. (www.einzeleinheit.com)


Juan Matos Capote: MiniDisc, Edirol R-09, Electronics.

TRACKS:
1. Money Intro
2. G's Prana
3. Train's Entrance
4. Beat & Breath
5. Please, Swip Again
6. Union Square
7. The 6 Train
8. The Musician
9. Go
10. From Metropolitan to Astor
11. At Last the Poet Says: Again There Is No L Train

TOTAL TIME: 44 minutes.

PRICE: 8 euros (+2 euros S&H). For those interested in buying the album CD, click on Einzeleinheit.