Reconnecting
Words and art by Eli Andersen
Genetics are hard to escape. It’s impossible to deny the impact they have on one’s thoughts.
Recently I’ve been living in my widowed grandmothers basement. Observing someone in their twilight years is a very moving thing. You watch them start to forget their lived experience and revert to being a child, frustrated at their inabilities. It’s very bittersweet. I’ve been obsessed, for a long time, with the idea of stripping things down to their core elements. The same way a person with dementia reverts to being a baby.
Ive always hated when musicians (or any artist) talk about the meaning of something they made. Every form of art is basically meaningless much like most of the shit someone with dementia says. The real meaning is only understood while you are creating something. And then it goes away. If it sounds good it’s good. if it looks good it’s good. If it doesn’t. It’s bad. Your brain decides if something is beautiful or not. It’s definitely cultural. But if you reconnect, it’s hard to believe it’s not genetic.
Q: Can you tell everyone a bit about your history as a horse girl? Maybe mention any funny stories you have pertaining to horses.
A: I used to go to horse camp over the summer as a kid. I had one other friend who was into horses as much as I was named Clarissa. We went to elvenstar where we each took care of a horse over the summer and by the end we’d perform in a competition. We rode western so it wasn’t like dressage or even jumping or anything like that, just trotting and tiny jumps but it was literally my life’s passion. I still have all my elvenstar ribbons and everything. I need to mention that I don’t think that a horse girl needs to be an equestrian or vice Versa, I was lucky enough that my parents indulged me. But I think a horse girl is anyone who is obsessed with horses. They can vary in levels of knowledge but the obsession is there. Also the memorabilia is DEFINITELY there. Horse plushies, horse video games, horse clothing, horse figurines, horse books. You name it and a horse girl will have had many of the above at one time or another. horse girls make it very easy on extended family to know what they wanted for Christmas and birthdays. They wear their obsession on their sleeve. I wore my favorite horse shirt until I didn’t fit into it anymore and then I got the same one in a bigger size. I watched spirit: stallion of the cimarron weekly. The only DS games i played were pony friends 2, ener-g horse riders, and yoshi's island 2 (yes I consider yoshi a horse)
Q: Describe horse girls in 3 words
A: enthusiastic, knowledgeable, unapologetic
Q: What characteristics do you have that you think come from being a horse girl
A: passionate, driven, competitive, and some know-it-all tendencies
Q: name 3 celebrities, pop culture moments, or tv shows/ movies that have horse girl energy
A: Timothee chalamet, Kristen Stewart, glee has MAJOR horse girl energy, taylor swift
Q: Do you have a holy grail horse breed?
A: appaloosas and fresians
Childhood Remembrances on the Power of Acoustics and the Aesthetics of LDS General Conference
by Aidan Bay
Like many Mormon households, twice a year my family woke up early, baked cinnamon rolls, and sat wrapped in blankets around the TV to watch a church broadcast called General Conference. For the unacquainted, this is a large televised meeting that the LDS church holds with its highest leaders giving a variety of sermons and announcements. These gatherings are filmed in the Conference Center in Salt Lake City, a massive 1.4 million square foot building, where for several hours the words of a rotating cast of speakers fill the cavernous room. Even when their voices are frail from old age, or cracking due to emotion, every wet mouth noise, monotonous phrase, booming admonition, and fierce condemnation is amplified, echoing out for several seconds and making it all somehow sound both weighty and weightless.
Conceptually I’m reminded of the effect of Alvin Lucier’s piece “I Am Sitting in a Room,” in which the artist’s voice is recorded, then played through speakers in a room and re-recorded, then continuously played and re-recorded again until his voice becomes unintelligible and all that can be heard is the ghostly sounds of the room. Consequently, the irregularities of his voice are “smoothed out,” as he informs us in his original text. Likewise, with so much of the reverberation and even the scattered noise from the room picked up in the microphones in the Conference Center, the speakers’ voices often sounded distant, blurring into an ethereal blend of resonances. The sound from our TV would hypnotize me, especially when the talks were painfully boring. The character of that room is so distinctive I could immediately recognize when, on occasional Sunday afternoons, my parents would listen back to snippets.
In middle school, I remember an unsettling day in History class learning about the rise of the Third Reich and their use of propaganda. We watched an early recording of an up-and-coming Adolf Hitler passionately addressing a massive crowd. It was bizarre hearing his actual voice, giving a body to a previously abstract symbol. In the recording, his voice sounded so reverberant and powerful. The language was completely foreign but the feeling that the sound evoked was so familiar, a disturbingly religious feeling of awe, the humbling feeling of listening to a passionate person speak. I’ve tried to find this specific video many times but have been unable. Out of all the reverberant spaces I had heard by that age, something about that recording connected so strongly in my 12 year old brain with the sound properties of the Conference Center, and I was disturbed and confused. I had never considered that there might be aesthetic techniques in play when Conference talks would evoke emotions in me, and I felt deceived.
In this musique concrète sound piece, I explore the reverberation of the Conference Center using only recordings from General Conference sessions of my childhood. By utilizing pointillist technique, and sampling only the reverberant tails that occur in between the spoken words, the intent of the speakers is obscured, and only the acoustic properties of the room is amplified.