Che sistema!
photo by Ginger Fierstein
Walking in to the room was mildly psychedelic. Somewhere on a continuum with being in an anechoic chamber, but comfortable, enveloping.
SFMOMA wasn't recording the listening room sets (wild) but said I was free to use the RCA out, so I brought my Zoom along and recorded all day.
The engineering of the system felt luxury brutalist. No faders, only a binary switch from one turntable to the other. The tone arms were, it sounds funny to say, a total joy to lift and place. There was also a three-band EQ (which you could sort of hack into being a fader if you really wanted to) and a stepwise master volume control which boosted or attenuated ~2dB per click.
I opted to play mostly whole sides of records that I wanted to hear on the system. This was somewhat selfish - it allowed me to put on the record and then go listen to it in the audience.
Several minutes into the A side of Pavilion of Dreams, an elderly woman tapped me on the shoulder and asked what was playing. She took in the whole side holding hands with a young friend or family member. This was one favorite moment of the day.
My selections fell mostly in the ambient / dub / jazz / kosmische matrix, with Folie 2 stretching into more rocking territory. This one got a lot of ID requests, and exists only as a physical record and on the label's soundcloud page.
Not every record was 'hi-fi'; this K. Leimer comp was recorded in his home studio in the 70s and 80s. Ikumi was a highlight for the room.
The atmosphere of the listening room has a devotional quality. I always feel a welling up when I listen to World of Echo. Doing so with a few dozen people in silence only amplified that experience.
Makes you wonder what other secular spaces evoke this kind of collective surrender, and why we don't have more of them.
photo by Negash
Towards the end of my second set, I transitioned via Nachthorn into Quadrant Dub, which I had been looking forward to all day. Later someone told me the museum had recommended against playing club music. Ha!
The most memorable part of the day came around 8:15pm, when the lights in the entire museum shut off. Jamie and I were going b2b at this point and no one in the building could figure out how to turn the lights back on.
The curator came in and apologized for the darkness, but we were thrilled. The only source of light for about 30 minutes were the tubes and VU meters on the hardware.
When the lights did turn back on, everyone was dancing.
Set 1
Miles Davis - In A Silent Way (B) Harold Budd - Pavilion of Dreams (A) Pauline Anna Strom - Angel Tears in Sunlight (B2-4) Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia (A1-2) Folie 2 - Folie 2 (A) K. Leimer - A Period of Review (C1-6) Arthur Russell - World of Echo (B)
Set 2
Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison and John Also Bennett - Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison and John Also Bennett (C2-3) Les Filles de Illighadad - Les Filles de Illighadad (A) Romeo Poirier - Living Room (A) Sam Gendel - blueblue (B) Maxime Denuc - Nachthorn (A1-3) Basic Channel - Quadrant Dub (A) Pontiac Streator - Triz (B)
photo by Ginger Fierstein