thunderstruck (insert wicked guitar solo here)

I felt a little bit lost jumping into this project to be perfectly honest. The actual creative element I’ve been exploring enthusiastically; I found myself even with a surplus of ideas because of the delicious openness of the project itself. What I found daunting was locating a particular piece of sound art that could be said to inform my own approach to the topic, probably because my understanding of how one piece of art informs another is obviously more deeply engrained in fiction writing; digging through various sound art across the spectrum, I found myself asking: “How can any of these be directly related to my own understanding of the work, which derives from a place totally independent of any digital background or even audio/musical background?”

Charles Bernstein’s piece, “Piffle (Breathing),” felt like it opens from a very similar place to where I intend to go with mine, simply by virtue of its use of basic body sounds to set a particular mood. My own piece is still developing in its conception, simply because my instinct is the same with fiction, furniture and anything really: clutter the hell out of things until I feel like I need to dig my way out. Where it begins, though, is with a very simple concept. When I was a child, my family was not religious; I went to church approximately 4 times, and only so my parents could dump my brother and I off while they went golfing with my grandfather. Beyond that, my only religious experience was in something called vacation bible school, which was basically us being shunted off to a local church for a week to sing songs and reenact Bible stories with sock puppets. While we were there, a group of about 200 children would sit in this huge chapel and play “thunderstorm,” a game in which everyone would rub their palms together, then start snapping, then stomp their feet on the floor to simulate the sound of a rainstorm. This only worked with a bunch of people participating, and for me it began to embody everything I understood about organized religion: you cannot find God without lots of people, and sometimes we as individuals are forced to find him, even if we don’t want to.

My sound piece begins from the attempt to reenact that thunderstorm sound with the sound effects from a single person, namely, myself. I am going to do as much as I can through manipulating it, but I ultimately expect to fail, which is part of the point. On top of this, I intend to layer a narrative which I am currently writing, which begins with the sentence, “She found Jesus in a rainstorm, even though she was not looking for him.” Beyond that, I’m still deciding on any additional layers.

Back to Bernstein. What immediately struck me about this piece when I began listening to it was the very basic and yet disturbing place it opens. For a good moment, we get only the artist breathing. I was so uncomfortable about this after the first few seconds that I found myself actually skipping ahead to find what else the piece consisted of on the first listening. What it develops into is three layered pieces: the first, the breathing; the second, a conversation that begins after this; and the third, a conversation between the artist and someone else regarding the logistics of the actual piece. What drew me to this was two things. I was interested in the use of breathing in the piece for numerous reasons: the discomfort it causes, the background rhythm it creates, and the fact that it’s so simple and yet shapes the piece so definitively. Also, the meta-art tactic it uses with the one conversation makes us that much more aware of the piece’s art-ness, and this artistic self-awareness is always something I’m interested in.

I’ll talk about this more in class. But to round this piece out, I’ll leave you with a little AC/DC and admit that on some level I’m sure this informs my piece as well (forgive the video; it's a poor substitute for the original music video, which was difficult to find an accessible copy of):