Ballardian

Interviewed at Mstation, here’s lo-fi acousmatic macrosonic electroacoustic turntablist, Janek Schaefer, on J.G. Ballard:

MR: Your Memory Museum was based around a similiar idea of taking sounds from elsewhere and putting them into a new space…

JS: In a way, yes, That was based on a book “Concrete Island” - you can tell I’m a fan of concrete!! I love it when in music its called “concréte” - thats kinda what I do. Whether it means concrete as well I don’t know, but it looks like it! So that was another site-specific project where I wanted to do a project on my favourite place in the world. I’d been asked at a dinner party where was my favourite place and I didn’t know - and then a few weeks later I stumbled across this incredible overlapping layers of motorways, roads and pedestrian underpasses, and this big circular drum you walk through, that when you looked up from the drum all you saw was the underside of the flyover motorways and all you could hear was the sound of cars but you couldnt see any of them, so this kind of became my favourite place. Its very hostile in a way, but magical to me.

MR: It has the very isolated feel of the story of Concrete Island as well [J.G. Ballard's story of a man, Maitland, who becomes marooned on a traffic island after a car accident].

JS: Exactly, and its under the Westway flyover - which I lived under, a bit further down, but it was more or less, pretty much where Maitland might have crashed his car, and it was a deserted island in a way, and it seemed to all fit in - so I named it “Maitland Island”. I wanted to do a real project rather than these conceptual ones that don’t get built, and I wanted to do a project where if you’re gonna use your favourite place in the world, you don’t really want to change it, so those presented a few problems, and it basically became a kind of installation, a demountable, mobile - its called Memory Museum, that deals with the intangibility of memory, and the way sound becomes intangible once its happened, it only happens at a single place at a single time, and its transient and ..temporal… so I invented this museum that was a piece of street verger that you could attach to the back of your bike, you drove up at the site, you erected the sign that said what this place was, so you’d sort of given it a presence to all the traffic, you dropped down these chevron mic and speaker system - it recorded the sounds in the space and played them baqck again 4 seconds later - so the museum was a kind of 4 second archive, and once the sound had disappeared it was left in the people’s minds who’d walked through the space - so the archive remained in people who walked through the space. So if you were trudging through and you hear kids screaming, and you go “What the hell’s that on there? I’m not looking at that cos its a bit scary in here!” and then your voice gets played back again on your exit - so its a bit spooky really!

MR: Again its the disorientation of expecting one natural sound and then hearing another…

JS: Yeah, which is the same but replayed. So you know extremely simple … But the beautiful thing about the piece was that I wanted to adress all the potential public that were passing around the sites, the people that couldnt see the site that were on the flyover, there were people driving past that could see it in cars, and there were people walking underneath. I needed to get hold of all those people so I put a transmitter on the mast [the sign saying "Memory Museum"] that transmitted on the Radio 1 frequency within about a 200 metre area or something, so every time you’re driving past on the flyover Chris Evans [a BBC Radio 1 DJ] would be interrupted by some abstract natural acoustic sound collages, people riding their bikes down below.

+ The rest of the interview here.