A New York Minute

I was simply delighted when Phill Niblock asked me to make a double CD for his XI label. In March 2000 I had played a concert in his bi-annual series at his loft, Experimental Intermedia, which became the second CD's two tracks ("14, Second, Fifth" and "Remington Khan"). "14, Second, Fifth" was composed specifically for the concert and remains the only time I ever performed it. I didn't like the first twelve minutes of "Remington Khan" so I thought to do a twelve minute fade-in from silence, hence the "Hearing Test Mix" appellation. We did it at the mastering session, and Allan Tucker, the mastering engineer, thought I was out of my mind, but he got it done and it worked out to my satisfaction. I got the idea from Maryanne Amacher, who told me that she had done one piece which had a 40 minute fade-out! Coincidentally, a friend of Maryanne's was at the concert, called her on his cell phone, and let her listen to the entire show over the phone. The first CD was done at Echo Canyon and Quakebasket studios. "A New York Minute" was the result of my taping the weather off WINS news radio every morning for the month of January 2001, and editing it so that the forecast for the following day bumped up against the next day's actual weather report, and so on. The conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith loved this piece and did a series of transcriptions of radio traffic and weather reports in tribute, which he published as books (and even read from at the White House!) The high-pitched sounds at the end are from a very busy subway station in Chinatown where people are continually going through the turnstiles, so that the beeping of their fare cards becomes a sustained sound (a kind of nod to Phill's drone music, and Chinatown is the neighborhood he lives in too). "Freaky Friday" was composed specifically for this CD, and subsequently became a piece I would play in solo concerts for the next few years; my album YMCA (also on bandcamp) is a recording of it taken from two live versions. "Muhammed Ali and the Crickets" takes samples of recordings of crickets (taken from an album in Irv Treibel's Environments series) and the boxer in action (from William Klein's documentary about Ali), and "Another Sky," a home recording, is an outtake from my album "Rabbi Sky." Kenny Goldsmith had suggested using Felix Gonzalez-Torres' classic photo of two clocks set to an identical time, "Untitled (Perfect Lovers)" for the cover, and I loved the idea, but the Gonzalez-Torres estate denied permission. So I had Aki Onda take two photos of the clock on the wall at the music venue Tonic and collage them together (set to a different time than the Gonzalez-Torres picture, and a minute apart rather than the same time). The weather reports on WINS always lasted exactly a minute; I felt using the expression "a New York minute" and an image of time would be appropriate. Also a lot of the pieces have a long, durational aspect to them and the phrase "a New York minute" sort of implies the opposite, i.e. a New York minute is only a few seconds because the city is so fast-paced, so the title is ironic too, in a sense. Two outtakes from the album can be heard at www.ubu.com/sound/licht.html