Recently, a friend was discussing the psychogeographical changes
that cellphones were having on the streets of New York. She posited that
everyone now was a walking GPS (global positioning system) and observed
that the first thing most people do when talking on the cellphone in New
York is to disclose their geographical position to whomever they are speaking:
"I'm walking down 6th Ave. approaching 23rd St."
This acute
awareness of place is accompanied by a whole new realm of soundtracks:
the ringtones. The streets of New York are now filled with a new sort
of music: I've heard everything from Beethoven's 9th to "Pump Up the Jam"
chirped out on microchips. On WFMU, we've actually gone on the Web and
collected as many of these as we can and play them as interstitials between
segues. They've become a new sort of audio cliche, making their way into
pop songs in the same way the vinyl scratch or the digital glitch has.
So I figured
that it wouldn't be long until someone decided to take these phenomena
and make a symphony out of them. Golan Levin, a conceptual digital artist,
has done just that. The result is Dialtones: a Telesymphony, a
26-minute piece composed and performed on 200 cellphones. The CD is from
a live recording made at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz. The premise
is great: the first 200 people coming into the auditorium who were carrying
cellphones registered at a computer kiosk in the lobby, whereupon new
ringtones --specially composed for the event --were downloaded to their
phones. They were then assigned seats in the front center part of the
concert hall in a 20-by-10 arrangement, hence becoming the cellphone "orchestra."
Onstage,
Levin and his cohorts were working banks of computers as they frantically
started calling each cellphone in the "orchestra." Since they knew exactly
where each participant was sitting and what their ringtones would be,
they began weaving lines of sound through this forest of phones. The piece,
scored beforehand, was simply a matter of coordinating hundreds of machines
to work together to produce a symphony.
The result
is a fairly abstract piece of electronic music. By contrast, Levin could
have done, say, massive cellphone versions of Metallica tunes, but instead
chose a more ambient route, taking cues from Ligeti's "Atmospheres," Mike
Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" and Terry Riley's "A Rainbow in Curved Air."
The phones' incessant chattering is also oddly reminiscent of Olivier
Messiaen's transcriptions of birdsongs in his "Catalogue d'oiseaux." The
glitches and small technical flaws bring to mind much of the digital electronica
that we've been hearing over the past few years.
Dialtones is a symphony in three movements. The first part
begins with the quiet chirping of conventional ringtones and slowly builds
in complexity, culminating in Bach-like harpsichord fugues. After a few
minutes, you forget that the instruments are cellphones; instead, they
start to remind you of electronic organs or synthesizers. The second movement
features a solo on 6 mobile phones by Scott Gibbons, a composer who fronts
the experimental group Lilith. Gibbons taps out complex rhythms against
the random blips and bleeps of the orchestra. In the last movement Gibbons
throws a phone on vibrate mode onto a pad, giving occasional disruptive
blasts of noise to the whole affair. The piece ends with a crescendo of
200 chaotic ring tones all going off at once and fades out with one or
two conventional rings into silence.
You can
file this one alongside Wendy Mae Chambers' car horn rendition of "New
York, New York," Donald Knaack's performances on oil cans and phone books,
John Cage's compositions of amplified cacti, Lauren Lesko's contact-miked
sounds of her vagina, Matmos' dance music made from the sounds of plastic
surgery and Jaap Blonk's new techno music all made with samples of his
mouth sounds. Dialtones raises the bar on these examples by coordinating
elaborate technical and telephonic pyrotechnics; it's a small miracle
that Levin was able to pull this off. And far from stopping at the wonders
of sheer geekdom, it also sounds great, making this one of those rare
instances of computer-based music where the music is actually more interesting
than the machines that made it.