FAULT LINES is a compilation LP, book and digital download
Project includes: Morgan Gerstmar, Molly Allis, Jenica Anderson, David Paha, Jules Gimbrone, Aidan Reynolds, Max Wanderman, Odeya Nini, Marcus Rubio, Todd Lerew, Alex Black, Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, Oscar Santo, Bridget Batch, Barnett Cohen, Jen Hutton
This project started as a desire to cultivate a space where sound becomes a physical presence. By locating artists inside a geological feature of the earth, FAULT LINES encouraged composers to create time-based work that resembles the extreme temporal scales of tectonic plates. Whether these plates appear deeply still or silent, at any moment they can send waves of massive movement and disruption. This buildup of potential energy or stress within a fault line is stored until the strain is released, causing rupture. This latent energy is analogous to the medium of recorded sound, specifically the vinyl LP that holds kinetic energy in its rotation. Although each composer worked independently from Jen Hutton’s text, the pieces are connected by their experimentation in timbre, a textural feature that helps to objectify sounds, and gives differentiation regardless of pitch or loudness. A focus on the physicality of sound textures, and the spaces that these sounds inhabit, appear to dictate the artists’ compositional choices. Often sound is considered an abstract, liminal, and/or transitory medium given meaning through its narrative thrust -- where it takes the listener through a linear, time-based journey. FAULT LINES, however, is an attempt to give sound a physical body, a body where time bends, is held, expands, and is again made solid.
– Jules Gimbrone, Curator
Rock is a timepiece of the extrapresent, the long now. Its tick is fixed. A piezoelectric pulse ripples along its internal lattices. Time is compressed in rock’s strata of accrued sediment, in its record of heave and push, in the gravity of its dead weight. Its temporality is outside of “this room” and “this five minutes.” It is a reliable mnemonic of all tenses. As a cool dark thing in your hand, a rock gives time a texture.
- Jen Hutton
