#michael pisaro

Pisaro first came with the intention to participate in a two-year project during which people would congregate for soundwalks up and downstream from The Station. In addition to taking in the sounds of the river and surrounding forest, participants would stop at shelters and listen to musicians perform 12-minute concerts, some of which featured music that had been composed at The Station. Afterwards the participants would listen to field recordings made during the soundwalks, and then return for another day of walks and sounds, including new ones generated by Pisaro, with these memories in mind. Talk about your antidotes to the hectic pace and distraction of post-internet and cell phone life!  

Initially things went well, but then they got complicated. The first two years yielded such profound experiences that Eckl invited Pisaro and others to continue the project, but this was easier said than done. In 2013, a scaled-down version involving walks and field recordings, but no performers or listening shelters, took place. There was no gathering in 2014, and the following year Pisaro, Eckl and a few others did the final walk in a single day. Another year passed before Pisaro finally sat down to deal with the collected material. Art is shaped by the events around it, and Pisaro set to work on Nature Denatured and Found Again on the cusp of Donald Trump’s ascension. Imagine immersing yourself in the work of people bent upon bolstering humanity’s respect for nature when your own president seeks to empower the obtuse but well-financed forces of climate change denial. Since Pisaro lives in California, the time that he worked on this project coincided with the scourge of wildfires raging unchecked in neighborhoods near his own. When an artist’s extraordinary personal experience occurs amidst growing ghastliness, they can either ignore the world around them or deal with it in some way. Pisaro doesn’t deliver a screed against natural destruction, but the respectful way he treats natural sounds in his work and presents them as creative material on a par with man-made sound lets you know what side he’s on.  

Nature Denatured and Found Again comprises five CDs, one for every year from 2011-2015. They are broken down into four 12 minute-long tracks. If you have five playback systems on hand, you could play the discs together for a concentrated Nature Denatured experience; here’s hoping that someone somewhere puts together an installation that runs all five discs on shuffle play until all the possible combinations have run out. Pisaro assembled each disc from material relevant to a particular year, but no disc is a straightforward document of its time. Fissures in Green (2011) includes recordings of the musicians and the environment arranged so that they invite a listener to steep in the beauty of woodwinds and water and to consider the similarity between electronically filtered noise and natural sounds, but also periodically jolts you out of reverie and into the moment by intentionally fragmenting said material. Pathsplitter (Yellow Red) (2012) takes inspiration from the experience of hearing and seeing things over and over by processing them with a readymade musical form. A canon is a composition in which a complex musical piece is created by layering different instruments or singers performing the same part at different pitches. For this disc, Pisaro has fashioned one from Jürg Frey’s clarinet, his own white noise and sine tones, and collected environmental sounds.  

On Landscape in Black and Grey (2013), Pisaro works exclusively with the sounds he recorded along the Grosse Mühl. Sometimes straight, sometimes edited, sometimes electronically filtered and reassembled, the environment is everything. But for White Light Under the Door (2014), the year that Pisaro didn’t make it to Austria, he works with remembered sound in a room. Specifically he uses electronic tones inspired by the 50-hertz hum of the European electrical grid, layered into sine-tone structures. Since such tones change depending on the shape of the room and the way you orient your ears to them, this is the album’s most personal communication of the box; it’s Pisaro signaling you, from his room to yours.  

Hellgrün (Small New World) (2015) confronts the fact of change, and the fact that nature does not remain static while we regard it. The piece’s raw material includes recordings from the project’s earlier years played aloud in The Station’s performance space in 2015, bursts of birdsong, and the sounds of the river recorded at different times. Pisaro shapes, isolates, and recombines these sounds, and honors nature by giving the album’s last word to cicadas, birds and flowing water. This natural music invites us to consider the possibility of its absence. What if all this is gone, and people can’t hear it anymore? Or if mankind figures out too late that its demise is a likely consequence of waging war on nature, will people no longer be around to hear what the world sounds like?  

But where The Earth And Sky used post-production to make adjustments to performances of pre-existing compositions, methodologically Shades of Eternal Night is closer to Pisaro’s other 2018 release, Étant Donnés. On that CD, Pisaro used other people’s recordings as malleable raw material. Likewise, the piano is raw material for acousmatic compositions on Shades. The term acousmatic refers to the experience of hearing a sound without seeing what caused it. In the mid-20th century, when musique concrete was a new and radical thing and nearly all recorded music still derived from playing instruments more or less at the same time, that experience was a paradigm shift. Now it’s how things are done, which makes it ripe for re-visitation by someone who well knows how radical the sundering of sound from source once was.  

Van Houdt’s playing is just one component of this construction. Pisaro also recorded environmental sounds in Greece and California and subjected all of the ingredients to plenty of filtering, culling, refraction and extraction. These processes hollow out the piano’s voice and plant incongruous, sometimes hard to tame sounds into its midst. In particular, wind is usually a field recorder’s bane, but Pisaro uses it like an auditory stand-in for the unseen but equally withering actions he has visited upon the keyboard’s output. The piano proposes drama and emotional intensity; surf accepts the challenge and throws it back at that puny box of strings. The title Shades of Eternal Night implies the presence of death, but the music’s inhuman elements suggest that natural actions will survive humans without even noticing that they’re gone. While Pisaro uses highly evolved technology to handle this material, he’s more like a magician, applying the painfully limited knowledge of man to secure an audience with powers far more powerful and enduring.