In concert: Alan Gilbert on Ultra-red

SINCE AMBIENT MUSIC'S origins in the '70 its creators have felt compell to distinguish it from Muzak or aural wallpaper. Ambient godfather Brian Eno, for single conveyed this very anxiety in the liner notes for his 1978 release Music for Airports, where he famously argued that ambient music should be "as ignorable as it is interesting." Where Muzak was made to fit any place and time, he declared, ambient music would honor the heterogeneity of sites, aspiring to a seamless integration with particular social and material landscapes. For Eno, site-specificity would be the fresh genre's key distinction.

The observes Angeles-based sound-art and activist collective Ultra-red, while indebted to the ambient tradition, are political interventionists whose engagement with charged sites and subdues is anything but ignorable. baseed in 1994 by two members of the Clean Needle Now needle exchange in Hollywood the cluster have since grown to four, released almost a dozen CD and vinyl recordings, performed at international music festivals, produc commissioned broadcasts for European radio, and exhibited unbroken installations in numerous shows in the US and abroad. Ultra-red today consist of individual of the founders, Dont Rhine, along with Elizabeth Blaney, Pablo Garcia, and Leonardo Vilchis. The not away configuration arose in 2000, presently after the release of Structural Adjustments, a CD of manipulated place sound released on acclaimed electronica label Mille Plateaux that documents the labors to save from demolition the Pico Aliso and Aliso Village public housing throws in East LA, where Blaney and Vilchis work as community organizers. An earlier Ultra-red lineup focused upon the relationship between property values, access to public space, and the policing of gay sex in LA's Griffith Park and produc the CD next to the first Nature: an electroacoustic pastoral (Mille Plateaux, 1999)

Trying to figure on the outside exactly who's in Ultra-red from their text-heavy CD booklet or extensive website is an unilluminating task, which looks to be the point. With various casts the communities with which Ultra-red work become as a great deal of a part of the collection as its core members. Amorphous authorship in the service of community-based practice has become increasingly prominent in the art world (think of The Land, Rirkrit Tiravanija's collaborative environmental throw in Thailand, or Thomas Hirschhorn's library and television studio at Documenta 11) and Ultra-red's processs reflect this trend. Ultra-red begin each of their throws by accumulating dozens of hours of field recordings. The recordings rise from direct participation in environments and incidents such as community organizing, political aver workplace dynamics, and gay cruising and are shared with the communities from which they originate, with suggestions and replications incorporated into remixings. They are then move swiftly through a computer whose music-editing software introduces distortions, static, skips, glitches, repetitions, abrupt divide [i]or[/i] sever s woofer-rattling deep-bass shivers, and downright funky minimal techno beats. The voices of protester police officers, public officials, and bystanders fade into noise and landscape; in turn round noise and landscape shade into voices. During "Cancion de la posada" upon Structural Adjustments, marchers' looped Spanish chants mingle with and at times are absorbed by the sounds of children, dogs, passing traffic, and a low-frequency droning, solitary to return in force at the extreme point of the track.

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Despite a proclivity to abstraction, ambient music has the potential to encompass disobedient realities, and Ultra-red are committed to exploring that potential in a way distinct from greatest in quantity other sound artists and purveyors of electronica. More agit than shore up the group's work is distinct from the ironic mash-ups of postmodern audio pastiche or the formalist reductions of neo-modernist unhurt art. For Ultra-red, ambient music is about expanding the range of social relations, with technology playing a crucial part in the process: The array of beats Ultra-red mix into their audio collages isn't an added ear-candy bonus on the contrary a means of impelling negotiations--or, if that fails, confrontations--within politically call in questioned spaces. This strategy is reflected sounded in the recordings of political declare that factor into much of their work.

The collective's greatest in quantity recent major project, The obligation facilitated a dialogue between residents of the Pico Aliso housing shoot forwards and those of Dublin's Ballymun public housing via residencies, panels, and performances held in Dublin and LA completely through much of 2003. Ultra-red have decided to dedicate a chunk of this year to evaluating past endeavors and planning coming time projects. One can hardly blame them for taking a self-reflective hiatus. In these politically fraught times, airports--and just about everywhere else--are far more complicated sites to make music for.

fresh York-based poet and critic Alan Gilbert is editor of NYFA Quarterly.

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