Mechanization 1 & 2
Bertoia’s legendary barn coughs up its most explicit example of proto-industrial, factory-like soundings with a half hour of struck metal sculptures producing shivering, clangorous overtones that naturally split the difference between Indian classical drone, gamelan, and noise musics - RIYL NWW’s ‘Soliloquy for Lilith’, The Well Tuned Piano, Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica.
Maker of ergonomic sculptures that became modernist classics in the early ’50s, Harry Bertoia, between the late ‘50s and his passing, in 1978, forged one of c.20th experimental music’s most singular paths with his secretive body of sound works made with bunches of long metal poles. Stimulated and recorded to tape in a Pennsylvania Dutch barn in smalltown Bally, Penn State, the metal sculpture tape recordings were issued in short run private vinyl pressings on his Sonambient label and are now hailed as collector items and renowned as pioneering pieces of industrial sound art, beloved for the way they hover in shimmering overtones between atonal discord and fleeting moments of tongue tip, microtonal bliss.
Bertoia’s crafty DIY recording techniques and compositional discipline - 4 mics hung from barn rafters, often recording at night, sometimes involving tape playback and overdubbing - captured the experimental zeitgeist as much as an atavistic spirit, with judicious editing that parsed its most affective product for wider consumption, in proper barn/worksite fashion. Newly revealed nearly a half century hence his passing, ‘Mechanization 1 & 2’ stands among Bertoia’s most fascinating endeavours in the space between the physical and psychoacoustic.
The sonorous thrum of factory line repetition gives a steady velocity to its first part, interrupted by irregular jags of bladesaw grind and what we possibly hear as a playback of reversed tape loops, evoking the sound of a foundry or sawmill underwater. The 2nd part feels like documentation of a worker running machinery late at night, heavy machinery asynchronous in its diffused swarm that equally calls to mind hallucinations of slowed down gamelan or sepulchral workshop manned by monks on overtime, if you allow your mind to unbuckle in the atonal sound bath.
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Bertoia’s legendary barn coughs up its most explicit example of proto-industrial, factory-like soundings with a half hour of struck metal sculptures producing shivering, clangorous overtones that naturally split the difference between Indian classical drone, gamelan, and noise musics - RIYL NWW’s ‘Soliloquy for Lilith’, The Well Tuned Piano, Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica.
Maker of ergonomic sculptures that became modernist classics in the early ’50s, Harry Bertoia, between the late ‘50s and his passing, in 1978, forged one of c.20th experimental music’s most singular paths with his secretive body of sound works made with bunches of long metal poles. Stimulated and recorded to tape in a Pennsylvania Dutch barn in smalltown Bally, Penn State, the metal sculpture tape recordings were issued in short run private vinyl pressings on his Sonambient label and are now hailed as collector items and renowned as pioneering pieces of industrial sound art, beloved for the way they hover in shimmering overtones between atonal discord and fleeting moments of tongue tip, microtonal bliss.
Bertoia’s crafty DIY recording techniques and compositional discipline - 4 mics hung from barn rafters, often recording at night, sometimes involving tape playback and overdubbing - captured the experimental zeitgeist as much as an atavistic spirit, with judicious editing that parsed its most affective product for wider consumption, in proper barn/worksite fashion. Newly revealed nearly a half century hence his passing, ‘Mechanization 1 & 2’ stands among Bertoia’s most fascinating endeavours in the space between the physical and psychoacoustic.
The sonorous thrum of factory line repetition gives a steady velocity to its first part, interrupted by irregular jags of bladesaw grind and what we possibly hear as a playback of reversed tape loops, evoking the sound of a foundry or sawmill underwater. The 2nd part feels like documentation of a worker running machinery late at night, heavy machinery asynchronous in its diffused swarm that equally calls to mind hallucinations of slowed down gamelan or sepulchral workshop manned by monks on overtime, if you allow your mind to unbuckle in the atonal sound bath.
Bertoia’s legendary barn coughs up its most explicit example of proto-industrial, factory-like soundings with a half hour of struck metal sculptures producing shivering, clangorous overtones that naturally split the difference between Indian classical drone, gamelan, and noise musics - RIYL NWW’s ‘Soliloquy for Lilith’, The Well Tuned Piano, Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica.
Maker of ergonomic sculptures that became modernist classics in the early ’50s, Harry Bertoia, between the late ‘50s and his passing, in 1978, forged one of c.20th experimental music’s most singular paths with his secretive body of sound works made with bunches of long metal poles. Stimulated and recorded to tape in a Pennsylvania Dutch barn in smalltown Bally, Penn State, the metal sculpture tape recordings were issued in short run private vinyl pressings on his Sonambient label and are now hailed as collector items and renowned as pioneering pieces of industrial sound art, beloved for the way they hover in shimmering overtones between atonal discord and fleeting moments of tongue tip, microtonal bliss.
Bertoia’s crafty DIY recording techniques and compositional discipline - 4 mics hung from barn rafters, often recording at night, sometimes involving tape playback and overdubbing - captured the experimental zeitgeist as much as an atavistic spirit, with judicious editing that parsed its most affective product for wider consumption, in proper barn/worksite fashion. Newly revealed nearly a half century hence his passing, ‘Mechanization 1 & 2’ stands among Bertoia’s most fascinating endeavours in the space between the physical and psychoacoustic.
The sonorous thrum of factory line repetition gives a steady velocity to its first part, interrupted by irregular jags of bladesaw grind and what we possibly hear as a playback of reversed tape loops, evoking the sound of a foundry or sawmill underwater. The 2nd part feels like documentation of a worker running machinery late at night, heavy machinery asynchronous in its diffused swarm that equally calls to mind hallucinations of slowed down gamelan or sepulchral workshop manned by monks on overtime, if you allow your mind to unbuckle in the atonal sound bath.
Bertoia’s legendary barn coughs up its most explicit example of proto-industrial, factory-like soundings with a half hour of struck metal sculptures producing shivering, clangorous overtones that naturally split the difference between Indian classical drone, gamelan, and noise musics - RIYL NWW’s ‘Soliloquy for Lilith’, The Well Tuned Piano, Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica.
Maker of ergonomic sculptures that became modernist classics in the early ’50s, Harry Bertoia, between the late ‘50s and his passing, in 1978, forged one of c.20th experimental music’s most singular paths with his secretive body of sound works made with bunches of long metal poles. Stimulated and recorded to tape in a Pennsylvania Dutch barn in smalltown Bally, Penn State, the metal sculpture tape recordings were issued in short run private vinyl pressings on his Sonambient label and are now hailed as collector items and renowned as pioneering pieces of industrial sound art, beloved for the way they hover in shimmering overtones between atonal discord and fleeting moments of tongue tip, microtonal bliss.
Bertoia’s crafty DIY recording techniques and compositional discipline - 4 mics hung from barn rafters, often recording at night, sometimes involving tape playback and overdubbing - captured the experimental zeitgeist as much as an atavistic spirit, with judicious editing that parsed its most affective product for wider consumption, in proper barn/worksite fashion. Newly revealed nearly a half century hence his passing, ‘Mechanization 1 & 2’ stands among Bertoia’s most fascinating endeavours in the space between the physical and psychoacoustic.
The sonorous thrum of factory line repetition gives a steady velocity to its first part, interrupted by irregular jags of bladesaw grind and what we possibly hear as a playback of reversed tape loops, evoking the sound of a foundry or sawmill underwater. The 2nd part feels like documentation of a worker running machinery late at night, heavy machinery asynchronous in its diffused swarm that equally calls to mind hallucinations of slowed down gamelan or sepulchral workshop manned by monks on overtime, if you allow your mind to unbuckle in the atonal sound bath.
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Bertoia’s legendary barn coughs up its most explicit example of proto-industrial, factory-like soundings with a half hour of struck metal sculptures producing shivering, clangorous overtones that naturally split the difference between Indian classical drone, gamelan, and noise musics - RIYL NWW’s ‘Soliloquy for Lilith’, The Well Tuned Piano, Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica.
Maker of ergonomic sculptures that became modernist classics in the early ’50s, Harry Bertoia, between the late ‘50s and his passing, in 1978, forged one of c.20th experimental music’s most singular paths with his secretive body of sound works made with bunches of long metal poles. Stimulated and recorded to tape in a Pennsylvania Dutch barn in smalltown Bally, Penn State, the metal sculpture tape recordings were issued in short run private vinyl pressings on his Sonambient label and are now hailed as collector items and renowned as pioneering pieces of industrial sound art, beloved for the way they hover in shimmering overtones between atonal discord and fleeting moments of tongue tip, microtonal bliss.
Bertoia’s crafty DIY recording techniques and compositional discipline - 4 mics hung from barn rafters, often recording at night, sometimes involving tape playback and overdubbing - captured the experimental zeitgeist as much as an atavistic spirit, with judicious editing that parsed its most affective product for wider consumption, in proper barn/worksite fashion. Newly revealed nearly a half century hence his passing, ‘Mechanization 1 & 2’ stands among Bertoia’s most fascinating endeavours in the space between the physical and psychoacoustic.
The sonorous thrum of factory line repetition gives a steady velocity to its first part, interrupted by irregular jags of bladesaw grind and what we possibly hear as a playback of reversed tape loops, evoking the sound of a foundry or sawmill underwater. The 2nd part feels like documentation of a worker running machinery late at night, heavy machinery asynchronous in its diffused swarm that equally calls to mind hallucinations of slowed down gamelan or sepulchral workshop manned by monks on overtime, if you allow your mind to unbuckle in the atonal sound bath.