lowercase music: the genre featuring libraries, whales, and other…artists?
Take a moment to consider the noises around you. The silent hum of your computer. A faint swell of vehicles. Breathing. The faint ringing of tinnitus. Take it all in.
In public, noises are more subversive to the conscious. Music is often a ubiquitous background of public space. Cars roar. Phones buzz and beep. Advertisers panhandle their voices to anyone that will listen. These sounds aggressively scrounge for attention. Meek noises stand no chance against the cacophonous assault.
lowercase gives these forgotten noises a stage.
Some noises, even in silence, are not heard. They exist in infinitesimal pockets, undetectable to the human ear. They cannot even project above silence itself.
lowercase gives these forgotten noises a stage as well.
The lowercase movement began with Steve Roden’s forms of paper, an album that captured the noises of a public library. The first collaborator of the lowercase genre was an electric toy that made cricket sounds — it was put near Roden’s recording setup by an unknown individual. Roden has no ill feelings toward his unknown collaborator, as he felt the addition “sounded really wonderful.”
Roden feels lowercase is a step away from the bombardment of noise one often finds in public, stating:
I like a lot of popular music and I still listen to a lot of loud music. But the mid 1980’s — when I began my art career — it was a time of excess and money, everyone making big paintings, the bigger the canvas the more it can sell for (which is still true). I wanted to step away from things; like when you go to the hardware store and hear the music blasting out of forty speakers and there’s no quiet, anywhere. People tend to be uncomfortable with quiet in public spaces. Like when I go to the supermarket or the hardware store, I always talk to the cash register people and ask them if they like the music or if it drives them crazy.
The purists of the genre stick to raw recording. Albuquerque Hotel Room by Jeph Jerman appears to be a recording of an Albuquerque Hotel Room. The piece is ambient and tranquil, until the crescendo hits: a scraping noise that appears to signal the end of the Earth as we know it. Think it’s a hair drier. Strange sounds arise in the raw recordings: a middle-school flute solo, metals scraping together, or, in a particularly odd case, a near exact rendition of Accidental Racist by Brad Paisley and LL Cool J.
Others are more liberal with their recordings. These artists layer and distort their noises. One example is PodTune, a collaboration between Humpback Whales and Ambient composers.
The genre is not all ambient. Gert-jan Prins gifts his audience a migraine (HEADPHONE USER WARNING) in distorting radios, televisions, and retro technology into harsh white noise. The technology behind his improvisational setup deserves appreciation though.
Artists of lowercase, presumably being the quiet type, do not bicker over idiosyncrasies that define the genre. This makes sense, as a group of individuals who record home appliances do not have much ground for judgment. A lack of definition exemplifies the genre — anything that can make sound is welcome. Though I do question how the whales were adequately compensated for their performances.
