Cassette edition documenting Cook’s sound installation in the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis’ elevator for the Audible Interruptions sound art series in 2014.

Gallery Guide
Contemporary Art
Museum St. Louis

January 24 – April 13, 2014

Audible Interruptions is a series of site-specific sound installations that investigate the sonic identity of the museum’s architecture. First presented in fall 2013 and continuing through summer 2014, the three-part series features works that occupy museum areas— the restrooms, a hallway, and the elevator—that are not traditionally used for displaying art, removing distinctions between exhibition and common spaces. Such utilitarian environments, having a specific and limited purpose, typically do not promote thoughtful analysis and are used in mechanical and unconscious ways. By re-inventing the aural and conceptual landscapes of these areas, the works in Audible Interruptions offer a unique experience, helping us discover new and unexpected ways to interact with architecture and rethink familiar places.

Audible Interruptions is a yearlong exhibition series organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by guest curator Kevin Harris, a St. Louis-based artist, musician, and engineer.

Nathan Cook often presents live sound art performances that invite unique interactions with the audience and where patience, commitment, and engagement are rewarded with meditative and thought-provoking soundscapes. With Transmutation Passages, Cook uses the controlled environment of the elevator to explore the relationship between sound and space. Four separate pieces rotate over the course of the exhibition, each using sound to encourage a novel way of experiencing the movement of the elevator.

I. Driving: Spatial Displacement Digital stereophonic audio, 6:23 minutes Driving: Spatial Displacement uses cassette recordings Cook made while driving on highways. The raw field recordings from under the hood, outside the car window, and inside the vehicle were edited, layered, and arranged. The result provokes memories and induces the feeling of horizontal movement while the setting of the elevator provides a simultaneous, contrasting experience of vertical movement through space.

II. Network Overheat Digital stereophonic audio, 4:03 minutes The claustrophobic setting of the elevator is paired with an anxiety-inducing electronic score, encouraging passengers to question their level of trust and to what extent they are willing to surrender to technology.

III. Verticality: The Fountain of Bliss Digital stereophonic audio, 5:00 minutes Verticality: The Fountain of Bliss is a layered arrangement of digital field recordings of several local water fountains. The work playfully reinforces the vertical movement of the elevator while inviting poetic interpretations of the sound of falling water, re-contextualized in an unlikely interior.

IV. Enter as Flesh and Exit as Gold Digital stereophonic audio, 4:00 minutes Enter as Flesh and Exit as Gold was created by manipulating the pitch of several electronic oscillators in order to generate subtly shifting waves of harmonic overtones. At first listen, the work is awash in static. The chamber of the elevator facilitates focused attention however, revealing a myriad of pulses and beating patterns.

Professionally duplicated and printed. With color double-sided, 4-panel j-cards. Digital download link included
Mastered by Jonathan James

Edition of 100 on Chrome Tape.