My playlist:

• Harrow/Dormant (Cuéllar) – performed by Jeff Gburek (Radius broadcast field recording, summer solstice 2011)
• Revision 9 – Jeff Gburek
• future blips – Saiko
• Kimpusenji Temple? Yoshino (near Nara) – Unknown Artist
• Pastoral Pause – John Levack Drever
• Other Double Music – Baudouin Oosterlynck
• LDM III – Werner Dafeldecker
• Voix Et Jeu De Flute – Laos (K’mu)
• Conversation – Meredith Monk
• Only – Joseph Clayton Mills
• Revision 2 – Jeff Gburek
• Harrow/Dormant (Cuéllar) – performed by Julia Miller (WNUR Airplay, 2011)

The programming is organized for the radio show Transmission Arts. The show features “artists at the forefront of the radio and sound art genres” (WGXC). The show includes an international and local roster of Distract & Disable, framework, Giant Ear))), Pirates Week, Radia, Radio Wonderland, The Shortwave Report, and Radius.

Sketchpad broadcasts on 90.7 fm every fourth Saturday of the month at 2pm EST in Greene and Columbia counties, New York on WGXC: Hands On Radio.

WGXC is a program of free103point9, a nonprofit arts organization that focus on defining and cultivating the genre of Transmission Arts since 1997.

The following are three instances of Julia’s interpretation of the score, which she presented as part of Articular Facet , a fragment of her larger project Dissecting Adam.

The Chicago Reader’s 100 Minutes of Silence article emphasized the silent aspect of these recordings, which set up an expectation of an experimental installation.  Rather more, it struck me as a display of personal interrogation. The cacophony of sound played back from the speakers was heard from the first floor of the building (made me think I was at the wrong address for a moment) – not necessarily silent (or quiet), but reflective of Morris’ absence.

“Silence is not always what we think it is. Silence can be the absence of sound; an accustomed sound gone or the loss of a voice. Absolute silence is hard to come by. These sounds are what are left.”
–Nathan Keay

The hundred speakers were distributed throughout the apartment in pairs, stacked on window sills, the floor, by an undone bed, bathroom racks, night stands, kitchen counter, and office space. Neither peaceful not chaotic, the continuous minutes of absence collided with Morris’ presence in photographs, stirring contemplation and anxiety, as the apartment at times seemed to rumble. The installation as a memorial agitated the significances of presence and absence, silence, and private space.

I am very excited about this particular presentation of sound work, in which the recorded and looped bespeaks its essence-ephemerality.  For me, the content of the recordings became shadows of much larger evocative moments we ponder and try to root down.  That transitory feeling was held there.  The silence was inside the visitors of the exhibition.

Being aware of the tricky and confusing legal issues of apartment galleries in Chicago, I am affirmed that an exhibition like this communicates something that a designed environment conveys differently.  I hope that work like this inspires others to create it and support it – to underline and transform existing spaces, and to transmit the personal into a shared experience.

Editor’s Note

Three years ago, I lived and studied in Pittsburgh, PA, where I worked alongside TNY Managing Editor Kristofer Collins at Caliban Used & Rare Bookshop slash Desolation Row Records. Summer 2006 marked a period of creative revival for TNY. At the time, Kris, Scott Silsbe, and Ellie Gumlock were busy reinventing the then-defunct Pittsburgh literary organization, taking do-it-yourself cues along the way from revered indie publications and non-profits such as Kitchen Sink, Punk Planet, and The Believer.  By uploading TNY to the web, re-staffing the editorial board with stir-crazy University of Pittsburgh undergrads eager to find loopholes in their school’s experiential learning program—three credits for free beer, books, and indie rock? Yes, please!—and planning multidisciplinary events such as September 2006’s The Return of The New Yinzer, Kris, Scott, and Ellie planned to leave a footprint for Pittsburgh’s younger community of artists to step along, against, across, between, beyond, and—perhaps most importantly—into.

My favorite kind of artist is a catalyst: a collaborator, strong in his or her own creative convictions, whose work, presence, and enthusiasm forms a chemical reaction, precipitates change. Artwork that moves me the most does so because it bangs and rattles around on the page, refusing stasis.

This issue of The New Yinzer compiles a diverse, international selection of work from younger artists whose work is alive and kicking in a lattice of interconnectivity. These artists find the delicate balance in their subject matter’s expansion and contraction. Their fine distinctions and sudden webbing inspired me to theme the summer 2009 TNY the “small” issue.   I hope you discover transformative rearrangement in the wee things found here, things that pay attention to, directly address, or represent the not fully formed, the seemingly insignificant or unimportant, the little, compact, short, bijou, tiny, miniature, microscopic, cramped, elfin, etc.  Artwork that zooms in and out, looks up at tall buildings, addresses issues of agency: writing that expands in its own thinginess.

The New Yinzer played an integral role in shaping my experience as a young writer creating art in Pittsburgh.  It is an honor to return this way to Pittsburgh, to take a walk around in Kris’s editorial shoes, and to so closely focus on this particular assortment of work, now fully formed.

—Claire Donato
Brooklyn, NY & Providence, RI