An FTP site has been set up to include extra material for download regarding The Anta Project.
Available for download so far:
1. Full Signal to Noise Article (Fall 2006)
2. Anta Project Power Point (PDF version updated 04/08)
3. A video from Friday Morning Everywhere
"The Anta Project blurs the lines between sociopolitical art and experimental music. By reinventing the barrier fence into an electro-acoustic instrument, Weyant breaches on the controversial issue of US border control... A solid piece of work- thank you."
Glenn Weyant's presentation was fascinating and I think a lot of academics and non-academics alike would be interested in his project.
The Anta Project is a musical project wherein Glenn Weyant uses the wall along the US/Mexican border as an instrument. He plays it, with chop sticks and a cello bow, creating a "sonic sculpture" or sort of soundtrack of the wall as emitted by itself. It sounds intergalatic. Go forth and listen.
A nice synopsis of the Knoxville, TN installation.
Finally got a serious chunk of Glenn Weyant’s amazing “Anta Project” on the show. The Anta Project, which boils down masses of Weyant’s recording of his performances at (and ON) the US/Mexico border, will probably be the last straw for Homeland Security who are growing tired of ripping open all the weird packages you people send me. In my defense, please send more– it is my theory that if we keep them busy examining my mail, that they’ll leave Glenn alone to continue his incredible work. After you mail off your goodies, bop over to the SonicAnta site, and check out some of the recordings for yourself. Good stuff!
A video profile on The Kestrel 920 and assorted sonic doings broadcast on Tucson's public television news program: Arizona
Illustrated.
A fine Tucson radio interview about The Anta Project and assorted works.
A nice link to the Anta Project link on BOING-BOING (a fantastic site).
An hour of this stuff is hard to take in one sitting, but there’s something refreshing about this duo’s approach to the avant garde. In an age where it’s so easy to hit a button on a plug-in and spew out electronic noise to order, it’s great to hear something created the hard way, using imaginative playing techniques to extract new sounds from acoustic instruments. Phil and Glenn have found enough different flavours of cacophony to give each track its own distinct character, yet the album as a whole has a pleasing coherence.
A random discovery of Seven Transharmonic Explorations In Multitonal Omnivibrationalism: Volume Six in the "used bin" of a record shop leads to this wonderful review.
"Weyant's adeptness in layering different slices of musical textures creates coherent and strange wholes. I assume he is the only performer of the four to six instruments used on each track, from prepared piano and guitar, to clarinet and saxophones, to small percussion, to washing machines and sinks. The previously mentioned invented instrument whose description (“...a segment of found lumber that has been hollowed to create a resonation chamber for the placement of a contact microphone...”) brings to mind the work of Hal Rammel, whom I was lucky enough to witness before I left Chicago. The pieces, usually over ten minutes in length, cloud themselves in hypnotic soundscapes of drones, alienated melodies, tiny scraping noises and electronic processing. The various layers of noises fit together as if played by an ensemble and not one person, save for the saxophones on “Snug in Acid Washed Genes,” and “In the Sea of Key,” where they clash with the background noises as if randomly overdubbed.
Employing a combination of found sounds (the thump of helicopters flying above the border, for instance, or the amplified microtones of very small, guttural sounds within the wall) and experimental composition (perhaps most strikingly, the hum of Weyant stroking the barbed wire fence with his cello bow), the artist managed to compile a 57-minute soundtrack of carefully choreographed ambient sound. The Anta Project —“Anta” roughly translates to “border” or “end of territory” in Sanskrit—is also currently on exhibition at the Art Gallery of Knoxville, thanks to exhibition curator Crowe's interest in his work.
“When I heard you on the radio, I felt this excitement, this sense of relief,” Crowe tells Weyant. “It was just amazing to me that something so divisive could be softened, turned into an instrument, into something beautiful.”
Weyant humbly points out that he's not the first person to have “played a wall”; other politically charged borders, such as the barbed wire surrounding concentration camps, have also yielded music in the past. But he's the only artist thus far who has applied the idea to the wall between Mexico and the United States, challenging the disturbingly popular notion that a fence could stop the flow of undocumented immigrants into our country.
“It's an easy way of galvanizing the tension,” he explains. “We don't have solutions, but at least we can have a focal point for our fear: ‘We built a wall, we're safe.' But if the border has become a symbol of national insecurity, why can't we take the symbol and turn it on its head? Let's transform the wall, reconceptualize it as a bridge between two worlds.”
A thoughtful radio interview about The Art Gallery of Knoxville show.
In this music, haunting drones, shimmering and brittle, layer on top of each other, repeating and ebbing in an oddly calming fashion. Close your eyes, and the thick, humming electricity may evoke an alien landscape or a wayward beacon sent into space and lost. One of the last mental images these sounds are likely to summon is a man standing in the desert playing a metal fence with a cello bow and modified chopsticks, yet that’s exactly what you’re hearing in Glenn Weyant’s Anta Project recordings. At least, that’s the primary sound: Listen closely, and you might make out water jugs played with mesquite sticks, a barbed wire fence also given the bowed treatment, or the sound of helicopters circling in the sky.
VIDEO LINK FROM GALLERY INSTALLATION.
Supposing we relent for a moment and accept that border fences are destined to completely take over the world and will undoubtedly proliferate across the global landscape.
I wonder then how they might be used to, in a sense, bring themselves down?
How could we, as Weyant intends, transform them from “a symbol of fear and loathing into an instrument”?
Not only an instrument for making music but for devising some sort of architectural protest, perhaps; how could we use these structures to create a kind of auto-deconstructive Wall event where borders and barriers become a symbol of solidarity and resistance rather than an extended spatial dimension of military power and divisive nationalism?
What if playing them, as Weyant does, turned the fence along the U.S./Mexico border into something that came alive? What if all walls became, as a result of being made musical, to some degree, conscious of their own presence, their imposing nature – often times tragically out of context – erected for no other purpose then to serve some ideological trapping?
Weyant said he may also consider returing to Merced in order to "play" the city's water tower with the UC Merced logo, which is visible from Highway 99.
(Friday Morning Everywhere: Phil Hargreaves and Glenn Weyant) is music to contemplate to, to LISTEN to. Say goodbye to your other needs and shut the door as you would for an (arthouse) film. Indeed put it on first thing! It will disturb you and entrance you and create gigantic silences that were already there...
In the end, The Anta Project breaks down walls sonically and socially because the grumpy old three-mile fence is given a voice. Not only does the work blur the lines between creative music and sociopolitical art, but it also puts a new face on a contemporary issue that can't always be expressed with words. And like any imposed barrier, it's not always pretty.
In May Glenn Weyant went to the US/Mexico border to reinvent its barrier fence as an electro-acoustic instrument. This is his first-person account of the experience. Photos by Jenniffer Funk-Weyant
A nice effort by The Downtown Tucsonan to recognize local musicans.
A fun mention on the Tucson Underground Web site.
Peruse the entire site for some of the people, places and things who contribute to Tucson's unique frequency.
All things bowed. Worth a listen. Clear Light/SonicAnta is featured in Episode 13. Ahhh, lucky 13....
Listener Glenn Weyant lets us listen to his performance of music on the wall that divides Mexico from the United States. Weyant put contact microphones on a section of the wall near Nogales, Ariz., then uses a cello bow against metal on the wall.
"While it’s interesting, I have concerns about how this will play out as a text-based article. It’s always a tough thing to discuss music textually, and I really think that the music is going to be the most interesting thing here. Thus, I’ll pass. Best of luck pitching it!"
(Editor note: This comment is from the same guy who once asked me: "Who is John Cage?")
Seven Transharmonic Explorations In Multitonal Omnivibrationalism: Vol. 6 gets flayed.
High points for me:
"... a rather obvious vulgar gesture..."
"... a dearth of original thought... "
"... spectral, droning and every bit as overblown as the polysyllabic title, the project name and the title..."
"...80 minutes of ambient sound, the kind of background that maybe would serve well as the background of an art exhibit..."
Wait. A dearth of original thought yet suitable for an art exhibit?
Another one for the "I don't understand this" file...
Want to hear more? Click DISCS.
Tucson based sound sculptor Glenn Weyant performs live subharmonic omnivibrational microtonal sound sculpture coaxed, amplified and processed from steel, wood, iron and trans-oceanic radio signals on the Kestrel 920, a sound transmogrifer of his own design, calibrated to amplify and exploit the nano and overt vibrations created through percussive blows, bowing, electromagnetic fields and assorted manipulation.
Now, here's a press release that couldn't be more specific: "Tucson-based sound sculptor Glenn Weyant will perform an evening of live subharmonic omnivibrational microtonal sound sculpture coaxed, amplified and processed from steel, wood, iron and trans-oceanic radio signals on Saturday, February 12 from 8 to 11 p.m. at The Epic Café."
Really, what more needs to be said? Aside from an explanation of what the hell that means?
Actually, it's all right there, once you learn a few vocabulary words. Note that Weyant (an occasional Weekly contributor) calls himself a "sound sculptor." That's a clue that we're not dealing with traditional melodies and harmonies. "I'm trying to get people to question what is music, and what is noise," says the writer and free-jazz saxophonist. "I want people to listen deeply, and be more attuned to the sounds in the world around them."
I am driving toward Nogales through a freakish November fog in search of Charles Mingus.
On my dash, a dog-eared copy of his rambling autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, flips pages in the wind. I randomly read a line: "Charles, you're a dangerous man! You hit me." Moments later, a mangled javelina corpse flies past my window, clipped on the snout by a Mac truck bound for Mexico. As a writer, I appreciate the foreshadowing....