Requiem for Fossil Fuels

A four-member choir, dressed in downtown black, sang ecclesiastic music in Latin while truck horns, the screech of brakes and other sounds emanated from elevated speakers encircling the main hall in Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.

The New York Times
October 28, 2007

The Music of the Gears
By J.R. BRANDSTRADER

FOR sanity’s sake, most New Yorkers try to keep the city’s cacophony at bay. But the composers Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, who go professionally by the name O+A, insist that the time to listen is now, before it is too late. In their opinion, the bell tolls for the sounds generated by oil-fueled transportation because fossil fuels are running out. Yet how do you say goodbye to fuel?

The composers offered an answer one recent Friday evening with a piece called “Requiem for Fossil Fuels.” A four-member choir, dressed in downtown black, sang ecclesiastic music in Latin while truck horns, the screech of brakes and other sounds emanated from elevated speakers encircling the main hall in Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.

It was as if the hundred members of the audience were at the bottom of a sonic bowl while the two composers, sitting at their laptops, channeled their digitized collection of discordant urban sounds from around the world. The clamorous results left some members of the audience staring at the air to see what might come next. Others kept their eyes squeezed shut, the better to absorb the unusual soundscape.

“The acoustic mayhem made me think of Dante’s ‘Inferno,’” said the actor Andre Gregory, who appeared in the film “My Dinner With Andre” and has worked with Mr. Odland in the theater. “It was terrifying.”

A highlight of the performance was a plaintive rendition of the Kyrie Eleison, the portion of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass that asks for mercy, in this case from the incessant petro-fueled din. And any commuter who regularly passes through Grand Central Terminal would sympathize with the composers’ efforts to make the Dies Irae audible above the failing brakes of an arriving train.

A visual artist named Marcy B. Freedman, who was in the audience, said she particularly admired the way the composers blended noise and classical voices. “It pulled my attention away from my usual visual perspective to a hearing perspective,” Ms. Freedman said after the concert as she headed into the raucous bustle of Washington Square South.

The composers regard their composition as both a warning and a salute to a dying way of life. One section of the requiem was sung over the sound of cars speeding along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; another made use of the roar of a helicopter taking off near Wall Street.

“Using all that oil to transport one or two people is a glorious display of power,” Mr. Odland said. Matter-of-factly, he predicted that in 20 years, all helicopters would be grounded for lack of fuel.

Come on feel the noise

On the heels of the excellent publicity that Jake Dunagan, Stuart Candy, and Shanah Trevenna have been receiving recently, a tip of the futures hat to Stephen Lohse who also received outstanding photo and text coverage about his views on Chinatown in the Honolulu Advertiser for Saturday, October 27.

Although I must chide Stephen for complaining about the noise in Chinatown, as least as reported in the article.

One reason I like living in the heart of Hawaii's heavy-industry district, Waikiki, is because of the constantly rising and falling wail of sirens; the pulsing, deep-seated throb of slowly-passing woofers; the fighting, cursing, vomiting, and blood-curdling screaming when the bars let out at 12, 2, and 4 AM; the screech of poorly-maintained street-sweeping trucks, and the roar and fumes of the first morning buses competing with the grinding rage of beeping garbage trucks racing down the street underneath my window at full speed--in reverse--with the attendants, leaning out, barely holding on, and shouting gleefully like harpies heralding doom.

Ah the sounds of life, of urban life.

Cherish it, Stephen, while the dwindling oil and money flows, and dread the coming silence.

Samsung Dream