Tower of Winds: Taylor Deupree and Savvas Ysatis

From the Volume 1 press release: "During the day, Toyo Ito's Tower of Winds rises as an oval, aluminum cylinder out of the center of a roundabout in Yokohama, Japan. At night, it transforms into a kaleidoscope of lights triggered by wind, temperature and the ambient noises of the city." Deupree and Ysatis input digits from the Tower’s computer (which "acts as a natural sequencer in the same way that a musician deals with the controls on a synthesizer") and rework the results into repeated fragments and distortions. The detailed liner notes describe the duo’s creation as a soundtrack to Ito’s environmental architecture where they answer the question "What would the environmental algorithms that Toyo Ito created within this tower do when attached to a synthesizer? If we added in other environmental inputs, what music would this create?"

To this listener, what emerges from these ear-tickling experiments seems to go from relaxing, pretty loops, to tiny machine staccato, to drips and clangs and chirping bell-tones. The unique aspect of this CD outlines an artist’s imagination of what it would be like to hear audio accompaniment to a towering light show. The pulsating neons project towards their surroundings as reflections from internal mirrors; mirrors that can symbolize the colors in them as well as embodying their luminescence. Similarly, synesthesia of sound and form comes about in Dupree’s and Ysatis’ original process with a production technique that composes music "by manipulating sound without the use of keyboards or other traditional input devices," just like the tower interpreting its environment.

Waterloo Terminal: Tetsu Inoue

On the other hand "Tetsu Inoue's aural interpretation of Nicholas Grimshaw's Waterloo Terminal is a sonic diagram of the station's arches and surfaces, echoing the structure's asymmetry, while exploring the terminal as a self-contained environment where world citizens re-evaluate concepts of time, space and place in this age of globalization." In fact, Inoue’s exploration does, literally, form a sonic diagram because he produces the sounds by feeding Grimshaw’s blueprints through his computer software. Couple the effect of marrying those two worlds with the reality of Waterloo Terminal posed on the edge of an undersea tunnel that connects the British Isles to continental Europe and you’ve got a source of fascination and perplexion. Strange that it can be a world of its own yet be filled with the confluences of many worlds traveling through it.

Museum of Fruit: David Toop

As for the third interaction, "Itsuko Hasegawa's Museum of Fruit, comprised of three domes stemming out of the earth, is a natural form on a gentle slope by Mount Fuji, Japan, acting as a metallic home to the vegetation within." In David Toop’s compositions he attempts to dissect the enclosure of nature and the control exerted by technology. Indeed, he uses Michael Prime's recordings of electrical impulses given off by fruit and imparts a twittering, shaky feeling. Picture yourself with an ear pressed to the door of a sound laboratory, listening to periodic rustlings and thoughtful strumming. Then you might know what it is like within Toop’s home studio where most of the recording was done.

One of the Museum’s aspects, which Toop calls its "balance of simple means suggesting a microworld of complexity" comes through in his compositions. In the recordings, he plays traditional instruments such as flutes, steel guitar and bass guitar. Toop also diversifies those sounds with electronic keyboards and acoustic percussion (stones, Japanese paper balloons on a frame drum, Chinese wooden cowbell, etc.) lending an organic quality to the spare atmosphere of his tracks. The music conveys the relationship between his own musical realizations and Itsuko Hasegawa's theories of architecture and to (in his own words) "also convey a sense of vastness and transparency (the sky, the glass) that seethes with movement, small events and transient detail." In expressing this concept he says, "I want the music to sound as if it is growing as the listener hears it."

The Architettura CDs share a collective theme of depicting relationships between simplicity and complexity--how things turn around on themselves and come back. In this way Architettura plays on the same idea around all the Caipirinha projects, namely Technology and how it affects all these different art forms. In our first issue, Beam 1.1, Robert Phoenix met with Iara Lee to discuss Modulations. This time we got her on the phone to ask about Caipirinha’s further visions for the series plus the ongoing live Architettura Events associated with it. Check out our Events Circuit reflections for details of the first Architettura event that was held at the Brooklyn Anchorage under the Brooklyn Bridge, New York (in conjunction with Creative Time’s "Music in the Anchorage 1999"/"Exposing Meaning in Fashion Through Presentation").

Interview with Iara Lee
Director of Caipirinha & Producer of the Architettura Series

RV: So I heard that your Architettura event under the bridge went off really well.

IL: Yes. Gosh, it was wonderful. We had over a thousand people.

IL: I think what attracts the audience is the synergy of different art forms. Because instead of just the music event, it brought together video, film and slides and music, fashion. It was like Oooo, your senses . . ..

IL: Yeah, actually we are doing one at the Museum of Modern Art next week. But this time around it’s to celebrate the opening of the Architettura exhibition there. Our Caipirinha musicians will be doing the live soundscapes in the garden.

IL: So it’s going to be really nice. It’s continuing with this idea of mixing things together.

IL: Right. And obviously, since we’ve prepared this whole event at the Anchorage we are now considering going to some of the major cities little by little like San Francisco, Chicago, L.A. Just today we were trying to think, you know. Obviously it’s in the preliminary stages but the San Francisco MOMA is a very nice place and I hear they are very cutting-edge about having events like that.

IL: Really . . .. It’s nice to see Museums that scale being more open-minded about youth culture and pop culture.

RV: Pulling in the wider audience.

IL: It shouldn’t be just for older people, it should be for young and it shouldn’t be just about Picasso exhibitions. . .. What about something different and unusual?

IL: Right. That is awesome . . . and I’m actually a big Bill Viola fan. He had an exhibition here at the Guggenheim. It was big; and the water and fire, the natural elements and the way he plays with video is really cool. And the way he plays with sound is really amazing.

IL: Yeah, absolutely. I actually saw the Tower of Winds when I was in Japan. It was so bizarre, because during the day it’s just a cylinder in the middle of the street but then the weather and the wind triggers the computer which triggers all these lights and it looks so different. It’s a conceptually very interesting architectural project and Toyo Ito is always very forward-thinking, so it’s really cool.

IL: Right. He was really receptive . . .. He was into the CD and he gave us his blessing, saying that it was exactly how he would portray it, if you had to think about music for [his] building. And now we’ve been engaging in a lot of positive feedback from other architects. It seems that this is going to be an ongoing series, in the sense that we are already thinking about Volume 4.

IL: I’d like to use Oscar Niemeyer’s building because I’m from Brazil and he designed the whole city of Brasilia but just recently he designed the Museum of Modern Art in Niterói in Rio de Janeiro. It’s a circular building; it looks like a spaceship right in the hills and it’s really incredible. I saw a big slide in the Royal Academy of Architecture in London and thought, "Wow this would be great CD cover." Also connecting the idea of being Brazilian and always trying to be connected to my country and my culture, I think would make sense.

IL: I collaborate a lot with Taylor Dupree–he’s our musician and also our director. One day we were talking abut this idea. He was like, "I’m down for it. I’ll do the Volume One, Iara." When he said he would make this idea come into fruition, then I said "All right. So let’s do it." We contacted the architect, got permission from the photographers, etc. Taylor collaborates a lot with Savvas from Greece and they decided to do Volume One. Meanwhile, I was already exploring all the architects, and I thought Nicholas Grimshaw’s Waterloo Terminal was also very interesting and I was trying to do a project with Tetsu Inoue, so I asked him to do Volume Two. He was totally interested and he scanned all the architectural drawings and the photos. It’s like making music with Photoshop, you know, he used software which creates sound inspired by pictures and he just does the editing and the conceptual work. Not only the concept is interesting but the process–in how each one has a different process to accomplish this.

Volume Three was actually not me bringing the architect and the musician but David Toop, after hearing about Volume One and Two said, "Hey Iara, I’m fascinated with the Museum of Fruit in Japan. Can I do one for that?" So it just naturally evolves. Sometimes I come with the architect and musicians come later, or sometimes the musician comes with the architect. I think we will do Vol. 4 at the beginning of next year. I haven’t decided who will do the music but probably someone very unusual like Panacea, who does noise and hardcore music. He was in New York doing some live gigs and he was very interested in doing soundtrack for my next film. And I said, "Well, if you want to do the soundtrack for my next film, maybe you should get started by doing a CD on Brasilia." I’ll be shooting it in Brazil next year, so it would be a way for him to get acquainted with Brazilian architecture.

IL: You should definitely talk to Taylor a little bit. He’s very minimalist and his theory is microscopic sound. It’s kind of funny because we’re doing this book and he almost coined this term that I think is a very good term because nowadays these musicians they play with microscopic sounds–they take tiny bits of sounds and they stretch it and then multiply it.

It’s not about big chunks of sound but you take one nanosecond of sound and make a full album out of that nanosecond of sound. And he’s been experimenting with different styles, and I was very intrigued when he was telling me about this but I was like, "Can you explain it?" He said, "No, that’s it. That’s all I can tell you."

IL: Lately he’s been super inspired by minimalists and this whole set that he did at The Anchorage it was based on reducing things to essentials. A lot of times people think simplicity is something more simple but it’s actually the opposite. Simplicity is a very complex thing. So he likes to play with this concept. Going beyond, we even did a CD called Microscopic Sound where he gathered all the tracks from all the musicians who are also playing with this idea of tiny, tiny sounds.

IL: He is really into repetition and circular movement, so he takes sound fragments and draws it out, and sometimes people don’t get it but that’s exactly what his concept is--textures inspired by repetition and sound fragments.

IL: Right. His whole thing is rhythm and frequency.

IL: When I listen to David Toop’s CD, I always feel it brings in a very subtle way, a lot of the Japanese reference of Noh Theater–very languid, stretched sounds. He was perplexed with the surreal idea of enclosed nature, which is a big topic for Synthetic Pleasures–the whole idea Japanese people have of wanting to bring nature indoors and control it.

IL: It’s kind of funny if you think about it. None of our projects have a beginning and end, but they all just start and evolve and keep on evolving. Sometimes they come back with a different mutation.

IL: Yeah. It’s nice–you do a film 5 years ago and then you do a CD that refers back to that first concept of studying Japanese culture and the idea of controlling nature. Because the Museum of Fruit is futuristic-looking and it’s right by Mount Fuji, an amazing natural place and you have the snowcaps, Mount Fuji and then the Museum of Fruit–all metallic and glass and domed.

I don’t know if they mentioned to you, I cut three films for this installation we did at The Anchorage. We’ve been shooting on 16 mm and every time I got invited to go show Modulations, I’ll take my cameraman with me and we would do the Modulations presentation but then shoot architectural forms in those different cities. [Laughs].

I always like the idea of getting two things done at the same time, maximizing your user time. So when we were presenting the film in Sonar in Barcelona we ended up shooting a lot of the architectural forms in Barcelona and then we shot in Copenhagen, we shot in Tokyo, we shot in Brazil, when we were doing the location scouting for the next film.

And I had all this footage and I knew at some point I was going to be forced to go and edit, and when the Creative Time people invited us to be part of this music series at the Brooklyn Bridge in Anchorage I was like, "Okay, now I gotta just edit all the material and do it," so it was a very interesting process.

It was a work in progress, just [continually] getting the footage . . . without even knowing what specifically I would be doing it for. And it just fell into place and I cranked. It was no sleep, just editing, editing, editing and just got it ready a couple of days before the event. It was the premier. Now it’s ready and more people are interested in taking it as a travelling installation.

IL: We’ve got the material but we don’t know yet. There’s legal issues and all the parties involved and permissions. But a lot of things in our lives, they happen that way where they sit there for a little while until all of a sudden we do it. I’m sure we’ll do something because the idea is to have my sound editor, the one who edited the sound and music for Synthetic Pleasures and Modulations, to gather all these different channels and actually recontextualize all the sounds created by these different musicians.

Totally new music will come out of that. It’s just bizarre and I think it’s very much a product of our culture where you have elements from the past but then you mix them together and you come up with something totally new. And the whole idea of sampling and mixing, that’s the culture of the hybrid that we start to celebrate now.

RV: Do you think you’ll have your installation be virtual at any time?

IL: Oh, right, that is funny. It could be possible but the fact that so many things happened parallel to each other, like we have the film loops happening simultaneously with the music and the slide show above on a 15x20 screen, the film we cut on architecture around the world and then the fashion at the same time, it’s kind of difficult to reproduce that virtually. And I think maybe that was the beauty; the fact that it was so physical.

IL: Yeah. And as much as we deal with technology, it seems to me that the best is when it’s very visceral and physical. It’s kind of a nice contradiction.

IL: Right.

RV: So then if anybody wants to go and see what you guys have done, they have to actually go out to it. They have to leave their house.

IL: They’ve got to leave the computer. We all have to leave the computer. [Laughs]. Yeah, even ourselves, to just prepare, we have to do so much background work. And all of a sudden it was so cool. We had all the interns, and the collaborators and the musicians, and everybody had to in one physical space.

IL: I know, it was so cool because the guy who did the color correction and the film lab people and the vendors, all those behind the scenes. And they said, "We really like Caipirinha because, not only they come to work with us but they always keep us posted on all the events. It’s the industry, you know, and a lot of times people produce all these things but they don’t really participate. It was cool to see the guy who did the online editing and the post-production... a big reunion.

When you’re doing little by little, you don’t realize the complexity. When you see them all together, you look at how many people it took just to get these simple things done. Again it comes back to the idea of simplicity.

There’s this Japanese photographer, Sugimoto and he goes all over the world just to take these very simple frames, which is like seascapes, the ocean and the sky. So you flip through the book and it’s always the same framing and there is something so beautiful about it because a lot of times, people think, if you’re going to go around the world, you should choose and work with the things that are very obviously complex. But to find the complexity inside the simplicity is so whimsical.

IL: . . . The whole thing about Zen philosophy and Buddhists, right?

IL: Absolutely. There is something very profound about this very complex simplicity.

IL: Right, right.

IL: My pleasure. Talk to you soon.