The Palace at 4 A.M.
Leo Daedalus, 1996, 23 minutes
listen to 2-minute sample:
Soundtrack commissioned by Edie Carlson, Ingrid Lahti, Harriet Sanderson and Ruth Tomlinson for their installation Footprints in the Vacuum, exhibited at Hoffman Gallery, OSAC (Portland, Oregon) and FUEL Gallery (Seattle, Washington). The piece was produced by Leo Daedalus and Rodney T. Hearne at Capitalist PigDog Recording Company.
Original notes on the soundtrack:
When I was approached by the artists to create a sound accompaniment to their installation, Footprints in the Vacuum, my first inclination was to produce a very spare recording of house and environmental sounds characteristic of night. The artists (Edith Carlson, Ingrid Lahti, Harriet Sanderson and Ruth Tomlinson) had gathered a list of such night sounds, as heard in their respective homes. I planned to record and assemble these sounds very sparsely over one hour of tape, and to organize them according to chance operations, in the naturalistic, hands-off approach of John Cage. In this way, I expected to arrive at a “true” interpretation of a night soundscape, complete (probably) with long silences between events.
But the Surrealists in general, and the Giacometti piece inspiring this installation (and lending its title to the soundtrack), were, needless to say, not intent upon a distanced realism. To serve the Surrealistic preoccupation with the subconscious, the soundtrack demanded an automatic deliberateness in its composition, in contrast to the Cagean ideal of the transparency of the composer. Furthermore, Giacometti’s original, besides being a sudden and crystalline realization of subconscious processes, is also (as with other Surrealist work) a dense condensation thereof. The soundtrack would need to reflect this.
Somewhat preceding the Surrealists, the Futurists were idealizing and utilizing the artifacts of the mechanical environment. Early on, Luigi Russolo had constructed noise machines which reproduced or simulated a variety of “anti-musical” (the term is obsolete) sounds of that environment. I imagined that a house at night is a kind of museum of quieter such noise machines (toilets, refrigerators, heaters, etc. as listed already by the artists), and that so quiet a museum also allows the intrusion of the various independent noise machines outside: the trains, sirens, the ubiquitous windchimes. All these sounds were waiting to be collected and composed. But the Futurists were not, structurally speaking, revolutionary.
In the soundtrack, Giacometti’s denseness is approached by condensing the hour centered on 4 A.M. into twenty-three minutes—two half-hours each lasting eleven and one half minutes. Into this compressed hour I assembled the night-sound machines according to a score written deliberately but automatically (in the Surrealist sense). The result, to my pleasant surprise, is a very symmetrical structure, with each “half hour” reflecting the other. Each begins, for example, with the ticking of a clock, and the chiming of either four o’clock or the half-hour, and ends with the dripping faucet.
The soundtrack is also particularly dense for a house at night (assuming life away from a highway, train station, or home appliance testing facility). There is very little silence per se, although the piece, when heard at the appropriate very quiet volume, should support the sense of silence, hopefully even moreso for the empty nocturnal familiarity of its elements.
The result owes much in some ways to the French musique concrète movement (begun with the advent of tape recorders in the late forties—and thriving still under the name “electroacoustic”) in that it is a fixed assemblage of natural or found sounds. The idea persists to create something nearly classical but with the sonorities of creaking floors and ticking clocks instead of traditional instruments. However, musique concrète is notable for the extensive manipulation of its source material, to the extent that the original sounds are often indecipherable in their end configurations. For this soundtrack we have recorded sounds directly and subjected them only to basic equalization (and of course the important transformation inherent in the plucking of any sound to tape). In this sense, there remains a Cagean pull to encourage our attention toward the unadorned environment of sound continually at play around us. I hope the soundtrack will facilitate the experience of Footprints in the Vacuum, by conspicuously disappearing.
— Leo Daedalus, February, 1996