This piece is a collaborative essay constructed by students in the “Age of Listening” writing seminar at NYU Gallatin, Spring 2023, taught by Ben Ratliff. The following reactions and reflections are from a class discussion of our April 6th performance with claire rousay and Fuji|||||||||||ta. Thank you to Ben Ratliff and his students–daniel chronopolous (dc), Grace Daniels (gd), Zoey Kapinos (zk), Isabella Karpuzyan (ik), Spencer Knobloch (sk), Margot Krauss (mk), Lauren Lakra (ll), Sofia Musselman (sm), Eliel Peterson (ep), Mariel Picknelly (mp), Victoria Princi (vp), Ivy Prost (ip), Reid Schaffer (rs), Jason Wallach (jw)—for this study on the practice of listening.

As claire rousay approached the stage and sat down, she seemed uncertain about what she was about to do and who she was about to do it in front of. I noticed this by the way rousay sat down at an angle, facing away from the audience instead of facing the crowd head-on. At first, she refused to use a microphone because she said it felt “strange,” but after realizing the audience was having trouble hearing her, she decided to use the microphone. After using the microphone, the change in her voice was apparent; knowing she had control of the room, she became less insecure and delivered a strong voice. She was confident about what she was saying, but each sentence seemed to end with a question mark. Maybe the purpose of this was to evoke a relaxed setting for the audience. (rs)

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I’ve never thought about noise as music before rousay’s performance. A collection of literal noise, weaved together through a smoked-out graininess and a distorted monotone voice. Out of chaos, Claire pushed out melodies. (ep)

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At one point during rousay’s set, the distortion created by the synth or guitar had become palpable. I put my hand on the cushion of the empty seat in front of me and could physically feel the vibrations reverberating from the stage. (rs)

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Her silences are poignant and purposeful in equal measure?; it isn’t until the other sounds die down that I realize my shoulders are tense and that I’m holding my breath. It’s such a profound silence that I can hear the person next to me swallow—I can hear how thick their saliva is in their throat. (sm)

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rousay mixes musical sound with voice recordings. At first, I was trying hard to make out what was said in the recordings, rather than listening to it with the other sounds. In the first part, it was a dialogue between an interviewer and an interviewee. In the second, however, the voices took a backseat: It was difficult—no, nearly impossible—to make out what the voices were saying. There was a fragment of a cuss here, laughter there, but…I realized I was focused so hard on listening to one part that I neglected the other. And that just didn’t feel right, so I stopped trying to listen for something, and just listened. I uncrossed my legs and planted my feet on the floor, letting the sound course its way into me, not only through my ears, but through the rest of my body, too. (sm)

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Finally she sings, her voice obscured by Autotune, shattering and coming back together in some robotized hushed melody. The guitar strumming the same few notes on repeat, we hearkened to her words, and though they were more or less indistinguishable, the emotion seeps through the mumbles. It is not so much a song as a story. (ll)

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There was something distinctive about the background noise in rousay’s set. In brief moments, I shifted my focus on this noise: what was it? Why was it persistently infiltrating my brain? Why did rousay choose to use this crumbling paper noise on repeat? As I sat with a puzzled look on my face, Eliel took my notebook and wrote: that’s someone doing drugs. I appreciated the artistry behind it, and how this exact sound stayed on a loop throughout the majority of rousay’s performance. I truly appreciated rousay’s dedication to using sound to portray physical emotions that are sometimes hard to describe with words. (ik)

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i can’t understand the words she’s singing, but every line feels like being lovingly kicked in the ribs. lately, i’ve been avoiding songs in minor keys or mixolydian mode, but i’m not interested in remembering why. i’m just glad to be here right now; i might even be falling back in love with the bittersweet.  (dc)

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Maybe it is not a song, but a poem that leaps. Leaping poems are best defined by Robert Bly: a long floating leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known. (ip)

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Or just a normal poem? Robert Frost said, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” That’s what’s happening here—a melting. Some of the noises sound frozen or at a standstill, then all of a sudden, they expand and flow. (ip)

An earlier recorded piece by rousay, “it was always worth it,” had made me feel like I was being read aloud someone’s journal, but it was not mine to hear. Around the six-minute mark, an airplane propeller-sounding-synthesizer comes to an end. Either the plane or relationship has taken off, or the fight has just begun. You get comfortable with the consistent sound until it no longer exists and the discomfort of the unknown begins. The realization that this relationship is not working kicks in. It’s just like a real-life breakup—the ending of sounds ends an era of life. (mp)

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In that same earlier piece, tones clash with your ear, creating the instinct within yourself to pull away. But by rejecting this reaction and instead staying close to the noise past these initial moments of shock, you open yourself up to the full experience of the sound. By giving yourself over to this discomfort, the inevitable fade and resolution of these sounds feels cathartic and earned. The release is your reward for sticking with the sounds that didn’t sit right in your ear during the opening moments. (mk)

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During the set, Claire crafted a call-and-response between her guitar and laptop. The two machines bounced back off one another, like a list of pros and cons of how analog and technical advancement interact. There was just as much competition between the two components as there was unity, especially when rousay brought both forces together with her own vocals. The combination formed a mechanical angel, which haunted us both with their reverberated voice and the external sounds of the world we often ignore. (zk)

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Music is an incredibly particular art form that begs for vulnerability, ushering its performers to bear their hearts and souls out on records. Yet rousay rejects this in a daring way. Obscured through unintelligible sounds and lyrics, her work can be first heard as almost “anti-vulnerable.” Yet, it is through this obscurity that a particular kind of vulnerability comes through—one that allows audiences to sit with themselves, still, replacing the “gibberish” and applying their own feelings and attitudes on to it.  (ep)

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I found myself revisiting thoughts of rousay’s music and “liminal identity” more throughout the week. Charming, warm, and comforting, she connected with the audience, recounting unsolicited anecdotes at length and giving shout-outs to her supportive friends. She also poked fun at the formality of the venue, playfully undermining the event organizers’ highbrow ethos and showing that she was not beholden to it. Indeed, folding chairs discouraged more active bodily participation.  (jw)

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In Fuji|||||||||||ta’s amplified, electro-acoustic piece, man and machine were united: he cranked the piston of a wooden box, covered in stones (reminiscent of a Japanese rock-garden), and a pipe-organ wheezed to life, wavering in pitch with each stroke as the beating dissonances intermingled. He cranked a Moog ring-modulator pedal, inducing a wavering tremolo that gradually built up speed until the organ was screaming with metallic sidebands. At various points, he pulled the pipes out of their wooden housing and blew into them like flutes. (I am very curious what led Fuji|||||||||||ta to decide on using these specific effects, and what significance the physicality of the pipe organ holds to him. Does he have a background in wind instruments?) As he breathed in and out while singing guttural chants, it became apparent that he was implying a continuity between the organic and inorganic machines—both the pipes and his vocal cords were “oscillators” doing very much the same thing. Is this an oblique nod to Pauline Oliveros’ “Bye Bye Butterfly?”  (jw)

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He then begins layering on a clean slate with creations of his own voice. Though we see that the sounds are coming from him, they once again feel other than human—raw, feral, wild. I hear frogs and birds and the echoes of vastness—hidden in the guise of awed, unrecognizable vocal inflections all being produced by just one man and a computer. It all happened right before us, yet it felt so distant. (ll)

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‍Thump thwamp, thump thwamp. Fuji|||||||||||ta mocks the roaring, distorted organ sounds. He hums, he yells, he growls. He fluently communicates with the otherworldly sounds of the organ using a method so essential to our own being: the human voice. Together, they tell a story that we can’t quite audibly understand, but we can feel. I find it deep in my soul: It resonates with me, it haunts me. How can the human voice feel so strange yet familiar?  (vp)

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Stalked his Instagram and came across an excerpt I found wonderful.

“On the way to Omaha, Nebraska, the driver parked car beside the freeway. It was midnight already. The driver wanted to see the stars a little, so I got out of the car. The pitch-black and flat land as far as the eye can see. There are no streetlights. The sound of a truck running on a highway echoes in the vast land, and the sound can be heard with a faint flanger. Maybe it was made by vast and flat land, I could hear the sound of cars far away. And I could see a number of stars in the sky that I’ve never seen. I took the recorder out of the bag and recorded for five minutes. I will never forget the stars and the sound of the car that I saw in the pitch-black earth of the middle of US.” 

I think he would make a wonderful lyricist if he wanted to. (gd)

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The power from the organ and his vocals invade my space. I can’t ignore them even if I tried. The sound is now so rich and dense that my chest vibrates. The dissonance that once disagreed with my ear now transforms into resonance as I continue to listen. It is beautiful. It is haunting. It is simple. It is complicated. It is pure. It is distorted. (vp)

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It was a reminder that there is nothing wrong with not understanding the flow of a performance, but letting it pull you along like waves against the shoreline. (ik)

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I still can’t quite make sense of Fuji|||||||||||ta’s performance. However, I believe that is why it changed me. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it before. Fuji|||||||||||ta’s art is revolutionizing the current world of sound, and I still have much to learn from it. (vp)

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As the listener, part of me expects the performer to know something I don’t. To be more proficient and technically skilled than me. “Performer” is a title earned and maintained through practice, while carrying an air adjacent to professionalism. I listen to the performer prove something to me, and they are in on something I’m not. Thus, with my understood position in the backseat, I am simply along for the ride. (sk)