This morning I found myself listening to various tracks downloaded from the website of Stephen Vitiello. I first became aware of Vitiello’s brand of abstract electronica from a piece of work that now seems exceptionally moving. For that particular piece Vitiello taped contact microphones to the windows of the 91st floor of the World Trade Center when the former punk guitarist was a resident artist there in 1999 for six months. ‘Sounds Building In The Fading Light’, a two-sided 10” single comprises a collection of Vitiello’s recordings from that experiment, and the sounds you can hear are variously of the street far off down below and the wind battering the glass. As with all location recordings, the results are completely unique to that point in time; the sounds recorded for ‘Sounds Building In The Fading Light’ – and other releases drawing on the same set of recordings – have an added poignancy post-9/11. Some free Vitiello recordings can be found here.
Architecture has been a theme for me this week. I attended the Le Corbusier exhibition at the Barbican ahead of it closing this weekend. In among the scale models of realised and unrealised buildings was a recreation of the Philips Pavilion Le Corbusier designed for the 1958 World Fair in Brussels, which featured a piece of musique concrète produced by Edgard Varèse. Hearing the blast of his Poème électronique whilst wandering round the brutalist edifice that is the Barbican complex was quite something, if a little claustrophobic.
Completing the theme, I am currently listening to the 1999 album Avant Hard by Add (N) To X which is an uncompromising journey into what you can do with fuzzy synths, drums and guitars. The album includes a track called ‘Buckminster Fuller’, named after the visionary architect.
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