Triple Canopy

On January 19, at McNally Jackson Books in New York, Triple Canopy’s Alexander Provan and Peter J. Russo read selections from Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy and discussed its genesis and form with the book’s designer, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Adam Michaels, both of the firm Project Projects. (They were joined by other, interjecting editors in the audience.) Krishnamurthy and Michaels talked about how Project Projects makes productive use of the tension between new and old print technologies and design conventions in its work, which ranges from exhibitions to pamphlets, websites to catalogues. Michaels spoke of historical precedents for Invalid Format and his recent volume, The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback, a collaboration with Harvard cultural historian Jeffrey Schnapp.

For Triple Canopy's thirteenth issue, Bad Actors, artist David Levine wrote “Matter of Rothko,” an essay about coming to terms, later in life, with his father’s role in the scandal over Mark Rothko's estate—and with his failings as a father. Levine tells Triple Canopy's Anna Altman what he found out about Rothko, his dad, and himself while writing the essay, and what happened after publication: the discovery of new evidence, a brush with the law, the ghosts looking over his shoulder.

The conclusion of a series exploring the politics of urban sound in Bangkok and beyond, through first-person reporting, field recordings, and analysis. In 2010 and 2011, protest was something of a way of life in Bangkok, with a culture developing around the constant demonstrations and occupations. In this episode, Tausig explores the audio spaces of the protests, recording the music, political oratory, and improvised broadcast systems that flourished among the opposition encampments.

A live set by Heatsick, the solo moniker of Berlin-based musician Steven Warwick, recorded on August 6 at 6 a.m. at CockTail d'Amore c/o Chez Jacki. The performance marked the release of Heatsick's debut 12" single, Dream Tennis (CockTail d'Amore), and features a version of the title track as well as "Tertiary." Using a Casio keyboard, processed vocals, drum machines, and real-time loops, Heatsick creates saturated washes of tones and entropic loops, focusing on the movement from repetition to abstraction. Heatsick employs a rich palette, with references spanning musique concrete, psychedelia, and early Chicago house mixtapes, all with a minimal analogue setup. The LP Intersex is forthcoming from Pan.

"Love Bombing" is a noncomprehensive mix of religious, cult, and armed-revolutionary songs that artist James Hoff first began compiling in 2006. This collection includes recordings by David Koresh, L. Ron Hubbard, the Trees Community, Children of God, and Jim Jones's Peoples Temple Choir, among others, sourced by Hoff through trading communities, record fairs, and file-sharing networks. Hoff's inquiry stems from research he conducted while developing a 2009 sound installation on the convergence of modern genre music and political action. In particular, "Love Bombing" was sparked by an interview with a surviving member of the Friedrichshof Commune, founded in 1972 by Viennese Actionist Otto Meuhl, who sought to create a new form of jazz music, which he piped throughout the Austrian compound during daily radio addresses; and by a young Japanese artist who described for Hoff the sound of Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, whose pop music was played on television news just following the group's Sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway in 1995 (children reportedly sang Aum Shinrikyo's songs in school the next day, prompting a ban on their recordings). James Hoff is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He is also a founder and editor (along with Miriam Katzeff) of Primary Information, a nonprofit arts organization devoted to publishing artists' books and publications by artists.Track Listing: The Up, "Free John Now" (Mix 1) The Trees Community, "Kohoutek" (Bonus) Lumpen, "Free Bobby Now" Children of God, "Revolutionary COG" Sheep, "Let All the Redeemed of the Lord Say So" Bobby Beausoleil, "The Orkustra - Flash Gordon" Exuma, "The Vision" Church Universal & Triumphant, Inc., "Preamble - Great Divine Rector's Call" Apollo All-Stars, "The Power of Source" Peoples Temple Choir, "Will You" Shoko Asahara, "Lord Death's Counting Song" David Koresh, "Book Of Daniel" Father Yod and the Spirit of '76, "Side B" G.I. Gurdjieff, "Harmonium and Accordion Improvisation" Elaine Brown, "Seize The Time" Anton LaVey, "Satan Takes a Holiday" (instrumental) L. Ron Hubbard, "Song"

On June 11, 2011, Triple Canopy and Printed Matter, Inc. presented Volume Number, a discussion of the past, present, and future of artists' publications. The conversation, recorded live at Dia:Chelsea, took as its starting point Gwen Allen's recent book Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press), which surveys American and European artists' publications from the 1960s to the 1980s. In this recording, Allen gives a brief presentation of this history, followed by a discussion of its relationship with a variety of contemporary publishing projects, from multimedia journals to generative archives to e-books. Participants include Paul Chan, Angie Keefer, Matt Keegan, and David Platzker, with Triple Canopy's Colby Chamberlain moderating.

On April 2, 2011, Triple Canopy and Dalkey Archive Press presented an afternoon of failure at MoMA PS1 to celebrate the release of The Review of Contemporary Fiction's "Failure" issue, guest-edited by Joshua Cohen and available for purchase here. In this recording, US Girls plays a set of refracted, mangled pop songs. The melodies are (mostly) intact, but they're down in the substratum and cranked through a pile of junk.

A series exploring the politics of urban sound in Bangkok and beyond, through first-person reporting, field recordings, and analysis. This episode describes twelve hours in the auditory lives of a unique class of laborers, Bangkok's motosai, the motorcycle taxi drivers known as the ears of the street. They absorb the city's noise and rumor, from the roar of traffic to the gossip of street vendors, long workday after long workday.

On April 2, 2011, Triple Canopy and Dalkey Archive Press presented an afternoon of failure at MoMA PS1 to celebrate the release of The Review of Contemporary Fiction's "Failure" issue, guest-edited by Joshua Cohen and available for purchase here. In this first of two installments of recordings from the event, poet Eileen Myles reads "Solo Performance" from her new book Inferno (a poet's novel), published last year by OR Books; novelist, poet, and critic Travis Jeppesen delivers his essay "Itchy Homo, or Why I Am So Terrible"; and author Helen Dewitt Skypes in (via faulty wireless connection) from Berlin to read "Re: Awesomeness, or The Internet as Consolation."

A mix of post-war exotica. Shiman is the archivist and programmer at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and proprietor of Office Naps and The Exotica Project, both stellar repositories of arcane sounds. These records summon desert oases and tiki-laden paradises, but move beyond the genre's popular touchstones: the lush, sylvan orchestrations of Les Baxter, the cool Polynesian jazz of Martin Denny, and the ululating Andean wail of Yma Sumac. Shiman's selection unearths 45s and LPs produced by obscure exotica labels in the 1950s and 60s, whose output ranged from instrumental rock bands covering Arthur Lyman's faux-Polynesian "Taboo" to careening mambos played by Latin American orchestras. These fantasias juxtapose thrush songs and cruise-ship combos, teenage-girl groups and African percussionists, R&B professionals and forgotten lounge singers. Track listing: Tommy Burchard and his Cordovox, "Romero Sunset" (7" 45) Buddy Collette Septet, "Tennin (Polynesian Suite)," Polynesia LP Big Black, "The Snakecharmer" (7" 45) Noro Morales and his Quintet, "Saona," No Blues Noro LP Gene Sikora & the Irrationals, "Tanganyika" (7" 45) The Galens, "Chinese Lanterns" (7" 45) Bill Osborn, "Bamboo and Rice" (7" 45) Patti Kim, "Johnny Guitar," Famous Theme Songs LP The Wailers, "Driftwood" (7" 45) The Charades, "Flamingo" (7" 45) The Caribs, "Miserlou," Caribbean Capers LP Larry O'Keefe, "Love's Dream" (7" 45) The Vaqueros, "Desert Wind" (7" 45) Orpheus Four, "Caverns" (7" 45) Saori Yuki, "Whispering Rose" (7" 45) Lalo Schifrin, "The Snake's Dance," Lalo = Brilliance: The Piano of Lalo Schifrin LP The Madmen of Note, "Peppermint Fink" (7" 45) The Fabulous Pearls, "Jungle Bunny" (7" 45) Roscoe Weathers, "Penny Whistle Montuna" (7" 45) Lee Golden and Trio Tres Bien, "Fire In My Heart" (7" 45) The Blue Jeans, "Moon Mist" (7" 45) Marshall and Wess, "Time (Is Endless)" (7" 45) The Shelltones, "Blue Castaway" (7" 45) Carmen Lesay, "Sunset Mood" (7" 45) The Sound Breakers, "Marooned" (7" 45) Jeri Simpson, "In My Black Lace" (7" 45) Jerry Sun, "Taboo," Personally Yours: The Exotic Jazz of Jerry Sun LP

Matt Mullican, whose navigable scale model of the solar system, "Planetarium," appeared in Triple Canopy's tenth issue, discusses his work with digital and interactive media over the past twenty years. Mullican first experimented with digital environments in 1991, when he made Five into One, a virtual city constructed in accordance with his personal visual vocabulary and cosmological order. Exploring that city, Mullican was transfixed by his ability to leave the earth's surface and travel into nothingness. "I would fly upward," he says, "farther and farther into the sky, beyond the stratosphere, into pure, white, infinite space. I would go on forever, so far away from this city I had created that I couldn't find my way back. I became curious about where, exactly, I was when I was out there, in the middle of nowhere." Recorded live at Artists Space on January 25, 2011.

A series exploring the politics of urban sound in Bangkok and beyond, through first-person reporting, field recordings, and analysis. In this episode, we hit the streets to find out what people in Bangkok are listening to and why. As migration from the countryside has enlarged the capital and changed its population, so has the radio been transformed. Today, radio is at the core of how Bangkok residents define themselves; you can tune into the explosion of identities simply by spending a few hours scanning stations, dialing through global teen pop, rural ballads, and Thai country music.

A wintry mix. Seasonally appropriate: deep freeze, the coming insurrection, failing lights, crude blues, Selbstportrait, and other droning figures.

The obstruction, for Mathews and McElroy, being their microphones; now, for the listener, the degraded quality of this audio file, a recording of the two great American writers in conversation on October 21 at 177 Livingston, hosted by Triple Canopy. When Harry Mathews published his first poems in 1956, he was associated with the so-called New York School of poets, with three of whom (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler) he founded the review Locus Solus in 1961. Through his friendship with Georges Perec, he became a member of the Oulipo in 1972. Mathews is the author of six novels and several collections of poetry. Joseph McElroy, born in Brooklyn in 1930, is the author of nine novels, including A Smuggler's Bible, Hind's Kidnap, Ancient History: A Paraphase, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, Actress in the House, and Cannonball (forthcoming).

On November 7, Triple Canopy presented Print & Demand #2, the second in an ongoing series of conversations exploring how print culture is being changed by the manifold forms of online publication and how public spaces are being constituted around those forms. The discussion, which took place at The NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, included James Goggin, Jiminie Ha, and Rob Giampietro, and was moderated by Triple Canopy creative director Caleb Waldorf. It focused on the role played by design in shaping digital forms of publication: How are certain tropes of print publication—and the reading and viewing experiences they have engendered—being translated for new media (while others are being jettisoned entirely)? How has the shift from graphic design to user design, with its focus on interaction and interface, changed the way publications function?