“Artworks are devices for engineering attention.” – Susan Tallman
Insofar as I take inspiration from artists who don’t work with sound, in 2019 I took a lot of inspiration from Vija Celmins, who I first heard about via a (yet another excellent) Calvin Tomkins New Yorker profile. Celmins is celebrated for her meticulous paintings and drawings of night skies and oceans. What struck me was her process: how she takes photos of the ocean, then meticulously draws or paints a facsimile of it. Crucial to her workflow is that she draws the photo not all at once, but in many, many layers. Each “pass” involves a different pencil or a different technique (smudging yesterday’s lines, for example), and she repeats this working in passes process many times until the work radiates its own energy and looks halfway between a photo and a drawing.
Tomkins suggests that what makes Celmins’ “images so alive is the consummate craftsmanship that goes into them—the hand, which knows things that the mind does not…If you spend enough time on a work, something else might come into play.” Similarly, critic Susan Tallman explains the basis of this craftsmanship: “Up close, you see that every swell, curl, and cranny has been given its individual due. There are no schematic waves, nothing is generalized, and no part is prioritized over any other…These drawings are astonishing feats of attentiveness.”
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What I learned from Celmins’ work was the idea of working on music production in layers. I suppose I had been doing this anyway, but thinking about her pencil drawings helped me reframe how I was using effects in my own work. I found myself shaping a sound using one effect (e.g. a reverb), and then returning to the sound the next day to re-shape it using another effect (e.g. a different reverb). For some sounds, such as drum and percussion sounds I did this for weeks and sometimes months at a time. It began because I didn’t know what I was looking for, knowing only that what I was hearing was not it, so I tinkered with the sound. A drum sound would get a big compression or EQ sheen and for the moment it was improved from what it was. But then I would repeat the process later in the week, fiddling with what I thought I was “done” with. For a long time, nothing I did sounded good for me and so the only way forward was to keep altering the sounds. After a while I noticed I was doing this to almost every sound I was working with.
It wasn’t until I read the article on Celmins that it occurred to me that working in layers makes sense for many reasons. First, it’s a way to try out one thing at a time without going too astray if it doesn’t work out. Trying say, one process per day is a do-able thing that keeps me focused. Second, it’s a way to pace yourself, knowing that there’s no way a piece could be finished in a day or a week anyway, so why not space out your tinkering? Third, it’s a way to let a process carry you through to a resultant sound. For example, as I applied a reverb to a drum sound, it might only sound good on a few hits here and there, so I would leave it at that. During the next pass the next day I might apply something else to the sound. Fourth, working in layers to some degree takes the notion of talent out of the equation and replaces it with the discipline of holding one’s attention over time. Instead of thinking about production skills, I now think about productive attention. Finally, working in layers gradually transformed my sounds in ways I could never have predicted had I not worked in this slow and additive way. After ten or twenty layers of processing, a sound can morph into something altogether new.
Perhaps the most important aspect of working in layers though, is that it reminds you that making things takes a lot of time. When you give yourself time, you have space to attend to details within details—as or Tallman says, giving each element of the work “its individual due.” Based on my own experience, the energy of your work is directly proportional to the energy you put into it over time, compressing and distilling all the adding and subtracting in layers that went into its making. My favorite musics are not off the cuff improvisations, but records of a level of detail that I’m now convinced took the producer many, many long hours of attentive attending to incorporate into their being.
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