Janek Schaefer: 'Lay-By Lullaby'

On previous occasions, I’ve mentioned my fascination with the acoustic environment of many of the locations I find myself lurking around with my cameras.  This has become obvious again in the last few weeks, as I’ve been getting out and about in search of subject matter and footage for my proposed video collaboration with Andrew Smith.  Given my penchant for hard urban surfaces, subterranean features, and those strange territories beneath elevated roadways, it’s no surprise that the resonating sound events of passing traffic, fragments of distant voices, and the ever-present background ambiences of the modern, industrial world, have all impinged on my consciousness of late.

Which caused me to reach for my copy of Janek Schaefer’s album, ‘Lay-By Lullaby’ [1.], on returning from another stint of filming, the other night.  It’s a recent acquisition that had become somewhat overlooked amidst a stack of other ‘must-hears’.  As often happens though, it was just a case of waiting until it became properly relevant to a current train of thought, and naturally rose to the top of the pile of its own accord.

Janek Schaefer,  Multi-Media Guy

Schaefer is a London-based Sound Designer, Composer and Multi-Media Artist of Polish/Canadian origin, with an international reputation.  His work is more often heard in gallery or installation settings than in concert venues, and is generally very site-specific in both origin and playback.  Occupying a similar musical territory to artists like Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz, so-called Isolationists like Biosphere or Scanner, and the wider ambient and electro-acoustic fields in general, he can be regarded as something of an established, Art Music star.  His chosen sound palette generally eschews beats, relying on atmospheres, evocative composed elements, electronic treatments, samples, field recordings, (and on occasion, an innovative, three-armed turntable), to achieve his sonic environments.

Janek Schaefer In Performance

As often occurs with this kind of stuff, one’s experience of the sound is greatly enhanced by an understanding of its context or conceptual framework.  I also find that Brian Eno’s [2.] original codification of Ambient Music as something integrated with an environment, that might be played quietly, or partially ignored as part of the furniture, doesn’t always work quite so well any more.  It’s not that it isn’t a perfectly valid idea, just that there’s so much of it now that any novelty has effectively left the form per se.  I listen to plenty of this sort of music, but do find that, once obvious structure, rhythm, lyrical content or melodic hooks are removed, a little more foregrounding or attention to detail are necessary if a piece is to avoid becoming just another pleasant, generic mulch of non-specific atmospherics [3.].  I have used ‘Lay-By Lullaby’ for the purpose its title suggests, falling asleep to it more than once, but actually find its nuances and distinguishing features are better appreciated once a little volume is applied.

Janek Schaefer, 'Lay-By Lullaby', Installation, 'Collecting Connections' Exhibition,
Agency Gallery, London, March 2013

In the event, ‘LL’ avoids this problem and has a pretty clear identity, derived primarily from Schaefer’s use of beautifully manipulated radio static and the sounds of passing vehicles as primary elements within his overall sound.  The road noises were apparently sourced late at night from a point, close to his own studio, where the M3 motorway passes the end of the road where author J G Ballard famously lived.  If this reference to Ballard seems like yet another case of ‘the usual suspects’, his ability to prefigure so much of the psychosis of modern life, (both good and bad), still feels pretty relevant even after we’ve learned to take so much of it for granted.  ‘Crash’ [4] and ‘Concrete Island’ [5.] both remain (in)famously arresting explorations of our psychic and existential relationship with cars and the infrastructure that supports them.  Seemingly, both were inspired, at least in part, by the construction of the motorway so close to his home.

J G Ballard, Outside His Shepperton Home (Photographer Unknown)

What Schaefer does, rather beautifully, is to evoke both the sense of passing traffic, witnessed in the depths of the night, from a stationary vehicle, and of a nocturnal car journey on sparsely populated roads.  The strange calm, hypnotic rhythms and insulated alienation of such situations are all things many of us will have experienced.  Indeed, for me, the disconnectedness of driving along such routes, alone in the still hours, has sometimes felt akin to being far out at sea.  The variety of Schaefer’s vehicle noises is complex and varied, (and something I’m becoming quite a connoisseur of, as already mentioned).  The sonic differences between a single idling engine, the distant, textural wash of traffic en masse, or the sudden explosion of a rapid vehicle passing a stationary point at close quarters, are marked and all evocatively employed here.

The Wonderful Footbridge Over The M3 Motorway, Close To J G Ballard's Home
(Photographer Unknown)

The use of static crackle is also really impressive.  It’s hardly a novel technique, (Burial being just one of numerous producers who have employed its emotional resonances and textural potential in recent years).  Schaefer is sophisticated in his manipulation of it, finding various sizes of audible ‘grain’ and employing it as veils of texture, multiple layers of environmental sound, and even as a variety of sonic substance which might be structured and sculpted, on occasions.  Most of the time, he avoids actual radio programme content, so that, when the occasional fragment of disconnected speech does intrude, it’s all the more effective, - implying that there is still a human world out there somewhere.  The occasional brief elements of implied melody that emerge might serve a similar purpose, but for me, they generally feel less like radio transmissions and more like part of Schaefer’s own mental soundtrack.

Again, this relationship between driving and radio is hardly a new idea, but it’s still a pretty resonant one.  Most drivers will know how much they come to rely on their car’s stereo to provide mental stimulation or as an aid in constructing some kind of soundtrack, particularly for a solitary journey.  I’m reminded again of Chris Petit’s wonderful and strange British road movie ‘Radio On’ [6.], - a film that explores similar ideas and is a masterpiece of road-bound alienation and evocation of the world as viewed through a windscreen.  I also recall a long journey, some years ago, when several work colleagues and I drove home from an exhibition installation job in London, in the early hours.  We were all physically and mentally shattered and it was my turn to drive.  One by one the car’s other occupants fell asleep and I was left alone with my thoughts, switching channels to stay awake as mile after mile of the unfamiliar and largely deserted M11 unfolded before me.  We made it home in one piece, but I’m still not quite sure how.

The individual sections of ‘LL’ flow together pretty smoothly, but they are numbered as a separate implied radio transmission, and careful listening reveals that each indeed has its own distinguishable identity.  ‘Radio 101 FM’ opens with some dramatic vehicle sounds before embarking on a sonorous passage of profoundly melancholy organ tones, which alternate with some distinctly disturbing, transmitted white noise.  ‘Radio 103 FM’ introduces what sounds like some distinctly Baroque chamber music, as traffic hisses gently in the background.  ‘In Radio 104 FM’, the passing vehicles once more burst into our world at close quarters whilst a repeatedly strummed arpeggio and gently brushed snare calls to mind a David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti movie soundtrack.  The foreboding melody that replaces it is even more emotively Lynchian but is itself replaced by a handful of plucked harp strings, a general wash of undulating road noise, and what may be rain on the windscreen.

And so, the album unfolds.  The guitar arpeggios return in ‘Radio 106 FM’, accompanied by the tinkling of crystalline chimes, whilst the fluctuating drones of ‘Radio 107 FM’ remind me of KLF’s wonderful, ambient ‘Chill Out’ album [7.].  A distant suggestion of jazz trumpet weaves its way though ‘Radio 109 FM’ and the snares and harp strings re-emerge to punctuate the following track.  If there is a noticeable quickening of the traffic noise towards the end of the album, during ‘Radio 112 FM’, it might suggest a world re-awakening around dawn, but there’s nothing as obvious as an implied through narrative in ‘Lay-by Lullaby’ overall.

Janek Schaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Multi-Media Installation, IF Milton Keynes International
Festival, 2010

Film Still From:  Janek Scaefer, 'Asleep At The Wheel', Multi-Media Installation,  IF
Milton Keynes International Festival, 2010

In conclusion, it’s worth noting that ‘Lay-By Lullaby’ appears to be something of a more reflective companion piece to the ambitious multi-media installation, ‘Asleep At The Wheel’ [8.], that Schaefer constructed for Milton Keynes International Festival, in 2010.  That project contained a more didactic, sociological and ecological agenda, and comprised sound, film, interractive elements, (in the form of cars), light, literary resources and a highly immersive, atmospheric staging.  It appears to have featured at least some of the same sounds that re-emerged on this later album.  It was also staged in a disused Sainsbury’s supermarket, something that echoes one of my own photographic stamping grounds.

Supermarket Car Park, Belgrave Road, Leicester, December 2012

The ‘Lullaby’ itself has also been presented via a small installation on more than one occasion [9.].  In these situations, it is played back, on a loop, through speakers embedded in a pair of recumbent traffic cones and connected to a car stereo in a small carrying case.

Janek Schaefer, 'Lay-By Lullaby',  Installation, Ace Hotel, London, 2014

[1.]:  Janek Schaefer, ‘Lay-By Lullaby’, 12K, 2014

[2.]:  Or, should that be Erik Satie’s?

[3.]:  In fairness, this may be as much to do with my own over-saturated perceptions as with the intrinsic qualities of any particular piece.

[4.]:  J.G. Ballard, ‘Crash’, London, Jonathan Cape, 1973

[5.]:  J.G. Ballard, ‘Concrete Island’, London, Jonathan Cape, 1974

[6.]:  Chris Petit (Dir.), ‘Radio On’, UK/West Germany, BFI/Road Movies Filmproduktion/NFFC, 1979

[7.]:  KLF, ‘Chill Out’ KLF Communications, 1990

[8.]:  Janek Schaefer, ‘Asleep At The Wheel’, Site-Specific, Multi Media Installation, IF Milton Keynes International Festival, 2010

[9.]:  Including:  Janek Schaefer, ‘Collecting Connections’, Exhibition, Agency Gallery, London, March 2013

…The Nut Behind The Wheel

After I wrote about the film making of Chris Petit, in connection with my own tentative experiments with shooting video from a moving car, I started to think a bit about how different means of transport affect our perceptions of the environments we traverse.

Burleys Flyover, Belgrave Gate, Leicester, December 2013

I’ve already discussed the advantages of cycling for those who wish to carry out urban observations, dérives, or just getting out there and collecting visual material, as an alternative to the psychogeographer’s traditional default of a good long walk.  It remains the nearest thing we have to the environmental immersion afforded by walking, (or running I guess, - but that seems to have a more directed agenda), and an obvious way of preserving the relationship between physical body and surroundings.  However, for now, I’m thinking about the far more mediated ways that car journeys affect our perceptions and, in particular, the relationship between them and film (or video), typically highlighted in Petit’s work.

Still From: 'Radio On', Chris Petit (Dir.), 1979

Most drivers, or indeed car passengers, take for granted the sense of being insulated from their surroundings in a protective capsule of metal, plastic, rubber and glass.  Indeed, car manufacturers and automotive proselytisers make a point of stressing the Clarksonian cliché of a car’s interior as ‘a nice place to be’ [1.].  To travel in a car is thus, inevitably, to experience a heavily mediated visual world.  It often seems that the ‘better’ the car, the more involving the interior becomes, (mood lighting, information screens, entertainment centres, massage seating, etc).  Often, in extreme high performance cars, the rear view is completely sacrificed and any side view severely compromised whilst vast expanses of windscreen emphasise the road ahead.  If only through the ludicrous velocities they can achieve, such vehicles seem to direct the occupants’ attention, (and particularly the driver’s, of course), to some point on the far horizon that might be reached with as little reference to the intervening terrain as possible.

Supermarket Car Park, Belgrave Road, Leicester, December 2013

In the majority of workaday vehicles however, there is a more interesting balance between the dual perceptions of interior and exterior space and the way the first edits the second.  The landscape becomes sectioned into the portions visible through the vehicle’s windows; framed by bodywork; filtered by tinted glass, condensation, raindrops, frost and grimy wipers traces.  In both ‘London Orbital’ [2.] and ‘Radio On’ [3.] Chris Petit allows these elements to intrude into his framed image.  In the latter, this not only draws our attention to the idea of any car but also to the cultural signifiers pertaining to a particular car.

Still From: 'Radio On', Chris Petit (Dir.), 1979

If the film could be seen as a poem to the stalled state of Post-War Britain just prior to the massive upheavals of Thatcherism and the dubious landscape we now inhabit, the choice of R’s old Rover seems masterful.  The wood, chrome, leather and iconic badging of that car’s interior speak volumes about an older, more comforting past and Petit allows his camera to linger on the huge steering wheel and the dash, from which R’s all important music and news bulletins emerge.  Thus, not only is his view of Britain around the A4 physically cropped, but contextually framed too, by the vehicle he occupies.  When the tired, heavy old car stalls and is abandoned on the quarry’s edge, with no way forward or back, at the end of the film, he is forced to seek a completely different means to exit, (on a soon to be privatised train).

Richard Smithson, 1969

Thinking about this reminded me of a piece by the American Conceptual Land Artist, Robert Smithson, that I referred to some time ago but which seems worth quoting again.  Although clearly separate from the Continental European and British traditions, Smithson’s documentations of early visits to New Jersey are clearly psychogeographic in intent.  ‘The Crystal Land’ [4.], whilst ostensibly an account of a geological field trip, captures Smithson’s subjective relationship to his surroundings through multiple gear-changes in viewpoint and literary style.  Particularly effective, is the passage in which he relates the macrocosmic environment of the great outdoors, the crystalline structures he seeks within it, and it’s formation through geological time, to the microcosmic environment of the vehicle occupied by his party.

"My eyes glanced over the dashboard, it became a complex of chrome fixed into an embankment of steel.  A glass disc covered the clock.  The speedometer was broken.  Cigarettes were packed into the ashtray.  Faint reflections slid over the windshield.  Out of sight in the glove compartment was a silver flashlight and an Esso map of Vermont.  Under the radio dial (55-7-9-11-14-16) was a row of five plastic buttons in the shape of cantilevered cubes.  The rearview mirror dislocated the road behind us.  While listening to the radio some of us read the Sunday newspapers.  The pages made slight noises as they turned; each sheet folded over their laps forming temporary geographies of paper.  A valley of print or a ridge of photographs might come and go in an instant." [5.]

'Yours' Supermarket, Belgrave Gate, Leicester, 2013

If one way in which the view from a car can be likened to film is through cropping and framing, the other is, of course, through the editing of an ongoing dynamic view.  This notion of an environment passed through and viewed in a constant state of flux is intrinsic to any form of vehicular travel.  However, some of the features specific to driving, (certainly in cities) are the multiple changes of pace, and of direction, the punctuations of junctions and traffic control measures and the rhythms of stop-start progress through heavily regulated systems.  My own domestic journeys, from which the 'Belgrave GateProject’ originate, could be said to break down, perceptually, into those views remembered as tracking, panning or zooming sequences and those static views apprehended repeatedly as I wait at the same stop lights each day.  Many of these are now indelibly burnt into my visual memory, just as a film editor can ensure certain images become memorialised as resonant landmarks within a film’s overall forward motion through time, space and narrative.

Supermarket Car Park, Belgrave Road, December 2013

Petit certainly captures plenty of this in his films, albeit in a rather hypnotic, Euopean Art-cinema manner.  Ironically, another memorable example comes from a dramatically different tradition.  The cop-thriller, ‘Bullitt’ [6.] is a clichéd favourite of most boy racers and usually scores highly in fatuous lists of ‘Top 10 Car Chases’ etc.  Whilst clearly a love song to the overpowered, under-steering, macho delights of the American muscle car, the film’s chase sequence interests me far more as an account of the specific, sunlit environment that is Urban San Francisco, when viewed from a moving vehicle.

Stills From: 'Bullitt', Peter Yates (Dir.), 1968

There can be few streets more distinctive in character, nor demanding to drive through, than those climbing and descending that city’s precipitous, terraced hillsides.  The sequence cuts in numerous views from within the two vehicles and is particularly effective at describing those numerous occasions when a San Franciscan driver must find their car’s radiator pointing at the sky or into a deep chasm with a severely compromised views.  For all the unbridled dynamism of the chase, it’s also notable, (and relatively realistic), just how often Steve McQueen and the baddies he pursues, are forced to slow for a junction or take account of oncoming traffic.  In terms of painted imagery, if ‘Radio On’ finds some kind of analogue in the work of Jock McFadyen, I can’t watch ‘Bullitt’ without thinking of Wayne Thiebaud’s and Richard Diebenkorn’s views of Californian streets.

Jock McFadyen, 'Looking West', Oil On Canvas, 2003

Jock McFadyen, 'Roman Road', Oil On Canvas, 2007

Wayne Thiebaud, '24th Street Intersection', Oil On Canvas, 1977

Wayne Thiebaud, 'Hill Street (Day City)', Oil On Canvas, 1981

With apologies for yet another mammoth post, there’s one other example I would cite of the relationship between car travel and the cinematic view.  It’s the old technique of projecting film of a passing scene beyond the windows of a static vehicle, (often being rocked by studio technicians).  Such a familiar and dated film technique has become both reassuringly quaint and, in these deconstructed times, an ironic reminder of the very artifice that is central to the medium.  It’s a wonderful instance of a version of the outside world being edited and mediated by the windows of a vehicle as part of a wider cinematic illusion.  Watch something like that at a drive-in (as many routinely once did), and you could easily get lost in all those contextual frames.

Still From: 'Detour',  Edgar G. Ulmer (Dir.), 1945

It occurs to me that many modern cars now feature built-in cameras to relay heavily mediated views to the driver from outside the vehicle.  I’m also struck by how often I read reports of the latest breakthrough in driverless car technology.  With no actual need to monitor the road ahead, how long, I wonder, before the windows of such a vehicle might be transformed into large video screens?  The passing view might actually be selected from anywhere in the world, I suppose, or the whole car just be transformed into a moving cinema or games station.  Would that break the relationship between a car’s occupants and the physical world outside for good?  What would be preferable, I wonder, – to ride from London to Bristol with ‘Radio On’ playing on the windscreen, or to study the actual view, put on some music, and create your own mental road movie, heading west on the old A4?


Postscript:

Although I have only a modest understanding of mathematics, I am slightly anal about finding order within numbers.  Therefore, as this is post No.100 in 2013, - I'll make it the last of the year.

See you in 2014.





[1.]:  Jeremy Clarkson, Numerous Episodes Of 'Top Gear', BBC 2.  Re-Running Ad-Nausiam On Various Channels Around The World, At Pretty Much Any Hour Of The Day.

[2.]:  Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair (Co-Dirs.), 'London Orbital', Illuminations, 2004

[3.]:  Chris Petit (Dir.), 'Radio On', BFI Production Board/Road Movies Filmproduktion GmbH, 1979

[4.] & [5.]:  Robert Smithson, 'The Crystal Land', Harpers Bazaar, May 1966.  In: Jack Flam (Ed.), 'Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings', Berkeley/L.A., University Of California Press Ltd, 1996

[6.]:  Peter Yates (Dir.), 'Bullitt', Solar Productions/Warner Bros. - Seven Arts, 1968