Social documentarian Milton Rogovin photographed scenes of everyday work, domestic life, play, and community gatherings. In the 1960s, he captured intimate storefront church services around Buffalo’s poor and predominantly African American East Side.
Jazz musician Paul Cornish’s microcomposition starts off with a piano that transports us into the moment frozen in this photograph. Halfway through the track, his tune starts to break down and dissolve into abstracted sonic waves that lift us up from the piano’s keys into the psychological and physical experience of the piano player depicted in the image. His eyes are pressed shut, and sweat pours down his brow, as he soaks up the emotional and spiritual sensation of music flowing through him.
Paul Cornish is a Los Angeles–based composer and pianist.
Microcomposition by Maria Chavez
Experimental turntablist Maria Chavez creates compositions by manipulating vinyl records, often stacking multiple broken disks on top of each other to make sonic collages as the needle jumps between them.
The record was also fodder for experimentation for Swiss Surrealist photographer Florence Henri. Her playful use of mirrors creates reflections that isolate and double the records’ shapes amid geometric voids. The light shimmers across the grooved surfaces in different directions, adding a disorienting effect to the illusion.
For her microcomposition, Chavez wondered what music reflected in mirrors might sound like. She arranged a collection of disjointed melodies and layered echoing sounds that bounce around over the crackle of the needle, drawing us into a dreamlike space.
Maria Chavez is an improviser, curator, and sound artist from Lima, currently based in New York.
Microcomposition by C. Spencer Yeh
In preparation for his microcomposition, experimental noise musician C. Spencer Yeh took a deep dive into the work of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The enigmatic self-taught photographer often captured eerie scenes from the American South of children and townspeople wearing carnivalesque masks. He then enhanced his images with blurry multiple exposures and other forms of abstraction. This view doesn’t show people, but a blur of trees and dark shapes. Looking at the picture, Yeh imagined the cryptic natural scene to be perhaps what’s seen through the eyes of one of Meatyard’s masked figures.
Using only the human voice, Yeh echoed Meatyard’s vibrating visual effect in sound, layering repetitive tones that distort, expand, and contract forms of speech. Maybe this, Yeh wonders, is what the masked figure hears when someone tries to speak to them?
C. Spencer Yeh is an artist, musician, and composer based in Brooklyn.
Microcomposition by L’Rain
L’Rain is the musical moniker of Taja Cheek, a composer and multi-instrumentalist. She uses snippets of found sounds collaged in unpredictable song structures and other techniques of experimentation that push familiar styles of popular dance music into something avant-garde.
For her piece, L’Rain responded to Tap Dancer, a multiple exposure by Gjon Mili, an early pioneer of capturing movement through stop-action compositions. He often photographed artists, musicians, athletes, and dancers in motion.
L’Rain’s shimmering and cascading tones ebb and flow in atmospheric waves that evoke the crisscrossing diagonals and ghostly impressions of the dancer’s moving legs. The matrix of intersecting lines in the photograph is doubled by the dancer’s fishnet tights. Both Mili’s photograph and L’Rain’s sounds use the familiar textures of popular entertainment but push them beyond recognition, drawing out complex visual and aural sensations.
Taja Cheek, aka L’Rain, is a Brooklyn-born and -based musician and experimentalist.
Microcomposition by Mary Lattimore and Emile Mosseri
British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s simple but deeply evocative image shows a woman representing the mythic figure of Echo. She lays her hand near her throat to indicate her loss of speech, taken from her by the angry goddess Hera, who doomed Echo to only be able to repeat words spoken by others. The wistful emotion held in this single glance evokes a certain haunting beauty that harpist Mary Lattimore and film composer Emile Mosseri aimed to capture in their moody and diffuse microcomposition.
Lattimore, who often composes based on visual images or memories, modified the twinkling tones of the harp with electronic effects of loops and decay to conjure Echo’s presence. She sent her musings to Mosseri, who overlaid spooky, cinematic layers of sound on a synthesizer. The final track is the result of their wordless musical conversation.
Mary Lattimore is a harpist based in Los Angeles. Emile Mosseri is a songwriter, composer, and producer based in Los Angeles.
