Sonic Intention: An Interview with Metabolic Studio's Sonic Division

The Sonic Division’s David Baine, Lauren Bon, Aaron Ebensperger, Douglas Lee,and Dani Lunn discuss their sonic activation of the watershed of Los Angeles— a 240-mile stretch that is defined by the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Lauren Bon’sRequiem for Water is a sound score of this watershed with a glacial timesignature.

Lauren BonThe Sonic Division practice of weekly “jam sessions” is an intention-settingritual in which we connect ourselves at Metabolic Studio in downtown LosAngeles to the Owens Valley dry lakebed more than two hundred miles away. Wemake sound by the banks of the Los Angeles River that resonates in an eighty-foot-tall silo, “live,” via an internet radio connection between the LosAngeles River and the snowmelt of the Eastern Sierra. Through a tangibleoffering of sound, we link the journey of water to a sonic trace. We playvarious gamelan-esque instruments that are handmade or adapted — those soundsare feeding into the silo.

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On the Owens Valley lakebed, the array of silos and the attached ruin of aglass-factory warehouse is the concert hall into which our sounds are played.We receive sounds from the sculpturally adapted silos' interior and exterior.We then respond in LA to the silos’ sounds, and our sounds are livetransmitted into the interior of one silo. This back and forth — interior andexterior — creates a delay in the room: we're playing about thirty seconds toa minute later than the sonic broadcast from the Owens Valley silos. Dependingon the season and time of day, we are sonically fed different birds that areliving in the silo.

David Baine There is also the common ground of thinking about the sounds each individualin the Sonic Division makes relative to the whole. And, as far as makingsound, what we do is more free than conventional concepts of sound as music,or music as entertainment. Our shared practice removes us from that and allowsus to intentionally think about all the great reference points within thestudio’s actions — from the sonics of the desert to the sounds of waterrushing by. There are so many different valid sounds out there that contributeto the whole.

Aaron EbenspergerWhen we play together, I feel like all anxiety is removed. The goal is verydifferent from conventional musical entertainment. We have only one rule andthat's to listen to what everyone is doing.

DB I don't think we are ever dominating each other. We seem to treat it like youwould any conversation, and it becomes more about connecting without words. Soit's very much in the moment, which to me is an ideal musical expression. It'salso a conversation with myself because if I don't like what I'm doing, if I'mnot inspired, it's my own fault. I have to get deeper into shifting the flowwithin the sonic conversation. And then I can get that joy of finding theconnection out of nowhere, and everyone else is making it with you.

AEI never refer to what we are doing as “rehearsing.” We are just “in it.”You're not worried about what happened in the past or what's happening in thefuture. You're very present.

Charlotte CottonHow do you document your Thursday-evening jam sessions?

DBWe have a pretty decent setup — may of the instruments are mic’d and runninginto a recording studio out in the garage.

CCWhat do you do with the recordings?

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AEWe upload to Sonic Division’s SoundCloud account every Friday. We mix themdown just to set levels so nothing is really dominating, but we don’t cut ourThursday night jams down — they stay at about three hours in duration. Themost recent recordings play throughout the studio during the week on a loop.

LBThe desert has often been thought of as a place where there isn't much. Butsomehow amplifying that nothingness through the silo delivers to us anacoustic trace of the life there. The streaming of sound from the silos,including our weekly sound-making from LA, is all being recorded into aglacial time symphony, a Requiem for Water.

Doug has been working with me to turn the industrial ruin of PPG’s silos andwarehouses into a musical instrument that makes sound with wind, heating andcooling, and other environmental stimuli, whether natural or human-made. Thisincludes the sound of military jets flying over the lake, cows grazing on saltgrass, owls, birds, coyotes … all these sounds are part of the work.

Douglas LeeI started by setting up the silos to be a positive, vibrational force. Therewere many conversations about what this could be. The idea of the Aeolian harp— the first idea that took form — came together because Lauren was reallyfascinated with the idea of long strings being the vibrational method. Thestrong winds of the Owens Valley mean the silo could be the resonator for theharp. It took us very little time, and about $500 in hardware-store materials,to construct the first string. We ran the string along the eighty-footvertical exterior of the silo with a wooden bridge to set off the vibrations,like a guitar. When the string got into a wild enough flux, it created a tonethat then transmits through the silo — a cascading series of harmonics thatrise and fall.

LBIn a way, with that one string, the piece was really done. The rest is icingon the cake. If we had stopped right there, this would be still the mostcomplete artwork that I've done so far. But we didn’t want to stop there.

DLThe more strings you add, the more you hear the harp play. It doesn’tnecessarily get louder, it just creates more sonic opportunities as the windcurves around different parts of the silo and passes through the strings. Theother beauty is you have this 360-degree surface.

Once we had made the first version of the Aeolian harp, we put up a series offlutes that basically work off the same theory: making sounds with wind comingin all directions from wide-open spaces. I made about eighty flutes from PVCpipe. Each is eight feet tall, with a reed of a couple of inches carved intoit, and tuned to B Minor 9. They point in different directions along the

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outside of the silo. When you listen to the kppg.org stream, they sound like apan flute wailing in the background. When a storm comes through, everythinglights up on the outside of the silo, you can hear the storm coming in. It'spretty straightforward, actually. I mean, the silos are wonderful, resonantchambers. They don't need much. Just a microphone in the ceiling and you’redone. Two silos, two mics, and then there are two more microphones at eitherend of the catwalk, where the flutes are positioned. And then I have onemicrophone stuck inside a random small building just to capture someatmosphere.

CCYou mentioned two silos. Are they both set up the same way?

DLOne silo is set up as the Aeolian harp and the other silo is set up with thespeakers that basically broadcast what we play here at the Studio. There is apair of speakers inside that silo, and then a little microphone I tucked atthe top of the silo that picks up those sounds, plus the live sounds of cowswandering through, or birds, and broadcasts it on KPPG.org. The size of thesilo, even with its thick metal walls, makes a perfect diaphragm — the sidesof the silo become speakers themselves, vibrating in sympathy with what isbeing sonically brought into the interior and exterior spaces.

CCWhat other ways have you been sonically exploring the Owens Valley?

DL: We’ve done many different things over the years. At the beginning, we hada feed from the Owens Valley rivers and streams playing constantly here at thestudio. Or the field recordings of crickets or the trains. They connected thisplace with the Owens Valley — the sound was right on top of you. Or we wouldplay the sound of a Japanese water drum — the delicate movement of tiny waterdrops — to resonate loudly in the silo, filling its eighty-foot height, withthe silo itself adding its beautiful harmonics.

CCWhere do you record the water flows?

LBWe've recorded it in different places along the water’s journey: from the topof the glacial lakes of the Sierras to openings in the middle of the LosAngeles Aqueduct, where we dropped mics into the pipes as the water rushed by,to delicate little streams and rivers in the foothills. We have a sonictravelogue of the movement of water from one location to the other. This pastsummer, in 2016, we went up on mule-back to the very top of the high Sierraand made recordings of the glacial lakes. We used the best recording deviceswe could to record in the water and collect the material elements of thisglacial time symphony. For about a month, we played those sounds in the studioon the site where Bending the River Back Into the City will bring the Los

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Angeles River water out of its concrete straightjacket and into the buildingfor cleaning. We wanted to begin the process of bringing water from somewhereelse into the building. There is something interesting about realizing thatthe wastewater is the same water that we went to touch and feel on top of theHigh Sierra. We thought it would be interesting to take the raw industrialspace of Metabolic Studio and bring the intention for it to be the catch ofthe LA River through a sonic catch.

We started to think that the intention to bring wastewater back into the citywas to, at least in part, re-naturalize it — re-galvanize it with thequalities of nature. Beginning that process with sound stems from thismethodology. And, of course, positive vibration is something that works verywell with music because it's the nonverbal beginning of a remediation.

Extending from that, there is always the desire to prove that this remediationis happening. Similarly, we began to look at the cymatic imagery, or thepatterns of shadows and reflections as light moves through water when agitatedby sound. Aaron has taken a lead in creating our cymatic works — the kind ofenergy diagrams of our intention.

CCDo you consider all this as part of Requiem for Water?

LBYes, I do. “Requiem” is a word I’ve heard thousands of times but never reallyknew much about. One day I looked it up and realized that it's a song to bringrest to the spirits of the dead. It connected with an earlier experience ofmine, sitting on the rocks of the Owens Valley dry lakebed and feeling aweight on me. I realized that if the lake were still here — if the water hadnot been drained because of the unquenchable thirst of the metropolis — Iwould be with these rocks at the bottom of the lake. A ghost of that lake isstill there. And, in a sense, the idea of Requiem for Water is to bring restto the ghost of a lake that travels down the Los Angeles Aqueduct into the icein my glass. I guess there are other ghosts on this site, as well — the ghostsof the pre-colonial floodplain, both animal and mineral. And, for me, the siloin that hundred-mile basin is a resonant chamber that is twinned with thestudio right here in the historic core of the city. They are sonic nodesreflecting one another.

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