DADA AUDIO ASSEMBLAGE ► March 2007

listen to "A Chocolate Feeling of Hair"
(do us both a favor--use headphones. ipodding--
engaging in the world--while listening highly recommended)

		As an experiment, I wanted to see what would come of it if I tried to create an audio piece using chance processes derived from Dada.   One Dada manifesto, 22 phrases, 11 audio producers, 34 sound clips, a homemade set of Runes, a deck of cards... .. . Read on, if you'd like to geek out on all the gory details of how the project worked, and some of my thoughts on it.
Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance, ca. 1916-17 Jean Arp (Hans Arp) (French, born Germany [Alsace], 1886-1966).

		The Experiment
		I contacted audio producers from around the country by email, requesting their participation.
		Ten producers sent me sound clips,
		following these instructions
		◄
		I did not listen to any of the clips until AFTER the order of assembly was chosen.
		Here's how that happened ---
		After much discussion and some trial and error, artist Sherri Wood and I came up with the following system, which we felt contained the essence of the source text, and held the balance of personal association, intuition, and chance that I was hoping to achieve.

	The Edit
Once we had chosen a clip to go with each item in the list, I then had the order in which the audio clips would follow each other. We had great fun listening to a few of the clips late that night. After the hours we had spent divining what order they should come in, it was like Christmas getting to finally hear them.	We were particularly relieved to hear clip #20, which by process of our random method had ended up appearing a total of five times. It turned out to be a clip from Tom Hausen and his son, Sampson. Sampson has appeared prominently in my audio work before (Sampson, 2003). Interesting that here he is again, and that he is the one who has given this dada audio assemblage its name, A Chocolate Feeling of Hair. (Dada Lesson #3: if you want dada, include a child.) This clip was short, fun and interesting, and I felt I could make it work as a motif used throughout the piece.
Only one other clip was selected to appear more than once.
It would have been interesting to have had a stats/numbers person work with me to devise a random method for selecting the clips, but as it turned out, the producer who submitted by the far the most clips, ended up being the producer with by far the most clips chosen, and the only producer who had none of their clips randomly selected, had only submitted one clip.
	It also interested me that only one (out of 11) producers got dropped by our random method -- the one who only submitted one clip. I put this producer's clip back into the piece, though. Collaboration trumps chance, I decided.

Dada Angst	The next day I sat down to create the piece.
	The chosen audio clips were all in their (randomly) chosen order in an Audition Editing Session.
		I devised a chance process using a deck of cards and a list of operations, such as
	"fade in,"		"add additional audio,"
"play simultaneously with preceding clip,"		"trim tail,"
		to guide me thru the transitions and to determine how many seconds certain transitions would be.
One day's work later, and I realized that while interesting for its own experimental sake, and quite delightful in some places, the experiment had not created a satisfying audio piece. Not satisfying to me, anyway. It had some rhythm--not much, little narrative sense (I use the term very loosely), and no cohesion. It also lacked an ending. (Dada Lesson #4: Dada does chance, Dada does surprise, Dada does not do conclusion-- I should have figured this one).
I set the work aside for a bit and pondered this. Should I let it be the simple Dada experiment it had started out as? Was I being uptight, that I did not like the piece as the cards had let it fall? Would it defeat the Dadaness of the experiment if I made additional changes, based on my volition only, to the piece?

I spoke with an audio buddy during this period, and was able to articulate some thoughts that helped me move to the next phase. Namely, unlike photo montage or collage, audio is a linear medium (unless you are more a sculpture of sound in spatial terms, as in a sound installation, which is not what this project was about).

The audience will always experience the work in a time-ordered fashion. They cannot experience it all at once, as a whole (except, as Dr. Jim Lee points out, for perhaps a few seconds at a time). Therefore, "cohesion" in audio applies not only to the overall effect of the work, but very significantly to each and every one of the transitions.

I decided that this was a collaboration with chance. I had come by some remarkable sound clips-- the raw material of the work came not directly from me. The order in which the clips appeared was the product of a chance process. In most cases, the choice to loop a particular clip had been made not by me, but by a chance process. Now it was my time to step in and make additional aesthetic choices to bring the piece to fullness.

I had also made the choice to record additional bits of the manifesto being read/performed, and I used these to create an audio prologue. Additionally, I used this audio throughout the piece to lend continuity. The two voices, male and female, serve as something like Dada narrators.

I noticed several things about how I worked on this piece that are the result of its Dada-nature. Once I got into the editing process, I was much more inclined than I would normally be to let a clip stay where it fell on the track.

For example, I frequently repeated clips, and instead of creating a loop, which would have created a uniform pattern to the repetition, I used the drag and release method to get these sound files into the session, and left the clips wherever they landed. This way, the amount of space (time) between each repeat varied randomly. This worked very well, and created some rhythyms I would not have come up otherwise. Sort of akin to flinging paint onto a canvas.

In several places, letting a clip play it's natural end or beginning, even if it was abrupt or sounded cut-off, seemed the right thing to do. As a radio/audio producer, I would normally always create some type of fade or other transition to make the raw beginnings and ends of clips as unnoticeable as possible.

Also, I got the idea that the piece should be exactly 10 minutes long, and I took that as a game I was challenged to play.

	This experiment in Dada Audio Assemblage has been big fun, tough work, a great challenge, a huge learning experience and a real turn-on! I am terribly indebted to all the collaborators.
Marcel Janco (Israeli, born Romania, 1895-1984). Untitled (Mask, Portrait of Tzara), 1919	THANKS TO:
	Audio Producers Nic Beery, Rebecca Sheir, Julie Shapiro, Matthew Sahr, Shea Shackelford, Tom Hausen, Jesse Dukes, Allyn Meredith, Ryan O'Connor,
	and to Sherri Wood, Ben Turney and Sampson Jemison		(Dada Lesson #5: Why do all the work yourself, when you can get somebody else to do half of it for you?)