Electronic musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerising soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. He has composed music for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations, and collaborated with a host of artists: Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu and Dara Birnbaum. His SoundSurface (2004) commission with Scanner was Tate Modern's first audio art commission. In 1999 he was awarded a studio for six months on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center's Tower One, where he recorded the cracking noises of the building swaying under the stress of the winds following Hurricane Floyd. Night Chatter his first UK solo show is currently on view at Museum 52 (till 01/10).

Additional Info
Stephen Vitiello website
Saacthi Gallery interview (09/2006)
Time Out interview (08/2006)
Dia interview (2000)
KF#176: Night Chatter review

This interview was conducted via email in September of 2006.

Robin Rimbaud: It's great to be able to experience your work in London but I'm curious as to how the show came together. Do you think the gallery had any expectations or were the parameters left wide open for you?

Stephen Vitiello: The parameters were wide open. It was really just as direct as "Do you want to have a show here [at Museum 52]?" I did a bit of investigation, heard it was a good place and started proposing a few ideas. I've been working on a project called Dogs In The Yard, Birds Overhead. It's really a body of work based on field recordings from across the state of Virginia. I received a grant from Creative Capital Inc (a New York-based arts funder) to do this and it's allowed me to upgrade my recording equipment rig, hire a producer and spend time hanging out in forests, state parks, rollerderby rinks, and (officially for art purposes!) listening to to the howling dogs in my neighbourhood.

RR: Real playground of sound then!

SV: At first I really thought to make this show entirely aural (sound only works) but then found that the forest I've been working in, in particular, deserved visual representation. It's a newly discovered forest with some of the oldest and largest cypress and tupelo trees in the country, some dating over 1,000 years old. So, I made the sound work for the back room as the final product but lead you there with visual and sonic hints -- an enlarged Polaroid, a super 8 film that I made with a filmmaker friend, Matt Flowers. There's also the ivy with the small speakers and the processed voices of Tony Blair and George Bush. I had this overarching theme of nature but also of listening and surveillance, something you've most certainly explored in your own work!

RR: That brings me to a curious realisation -- I've often found that sound is clearly problematic in terms of visibility within the gallery space. You are almost obliged to consider the illustrative quality as magazines and catalogues will want to represent the work too, as they request photographs. Indeed, I like the fact that you offer this visibility to sound; you envelop it within a space that is both visual and aural.

SV: Thanks! I don't want to deny the senses for sure or the expectations of the Visual Art audience. On the other hand, I do look for places where sound alone can sneak through and stand on its own merits.

RR: I found this idea of "chatter" especially appealing in the show, voices abstracted into a new surface material, so initially you might think they were insect noises, natural sounds, as opposed to the great powers of Bush and Blair speaking to one another... it's interesting too that we're talking on the anniversary of 9/11, when the media again is filled with this chatter again, in re-examining the past.

SV: That's true. Well, with the visuals as well as the sounds, I tend (as many sound artists do) to gravitate towards smaller sounds or those that might otherwise be overlooked. I have been thinking a lot about chatter too. It's interesting to read that the chatter that was coming through regarding the destruction of the WTC was in a dialect that the listeners didn't even have a translator for. They got the translation from September 10, 2001 on September 12. It's also been interesting to read that several of the US government's most important monitoring stations are based in the UK too.

RR: Though I don't wish to dwell on dark matters, when you held that residency at the World Trade Center [In 1999, Vitiello was awarded a 6-month WorldViews residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center] I keep recalling the space, the shape of the interior floors, the banks of equipment you had set up, the artists studios all around.

SV: For sure. I really don't ever forget that. I try not to capitalise on it but I know it informs my work and personal memory as well.

RR: Today I've been watching the live streaming of events on CNN online, as they happened in real time five years ago. The sound strikes me as extraordinary, and in actual fact it's only when the amateur footage arrives that everything really starts to unsettle you, not the voice of authority of CNN but the individual.

SV: Wow. I remember watching and listening to it all live (on TV even though I lived a few blocks away) but I haven't found myself being able to go back to it. Last night, two of three networks had fictionalised broadcasts that make sense. Even with news, we try to keep it clean and visual, not always realising that the sound could be the emotional core to what we are seeing.

RR: We want to understand these images we see, we want to imagine the moments before, to remember inside that building, the rush of the air conditioning unit hum, fluorescent lights, and so on. It's the dirt, the glitch, the dust, the shaky hand held camera angles that affect you as the viewer.

SV: That's the most terrifying really, the mundane moment that was shattered so incredibly, the human content.

RR: Do you strive for an emotional resonance in your work? I mean that must be important, that these textures and environments move people? For me, ideas are invaluable, but I find I want people to have an emotive response to the works I produce, to engage on a level beyond a stoic intellectualism.

SV: I do. I really think that is one of the best reasons to work with sound. In the beginning, I would work with loud sounds and bass frequencies to really strike the listener. I've come to realise that you can be as much or more effective with quiet sounds that get into the listeners' conscience or sub conscience.

RR: And it's back to the mass, the chatter, trying to discern detail within the mountain to find meaning within the abstract. It's what I've recently been exploring with recordings of dead spaces, of haunted houses, etc (Esprits De Paris with Mike Kelley in Pompidou Centre, 2002, and Breakthrough In Riga, Latvia, 2006).

SV: I recognise this approach, especially since we are apt to say that insects and animals do not have a language but that's impossible to think when you're in a field of frogs listening to the call and response, rhythms, distant sounds that approach... Have you come to believe more in the haunted spaces through listening and amplification?

RR: No, you know I'm still not a believer in any force beyond us. It's like a retort to the idea of why do birds sing?

SV: Why do empty houses sing?! But it's true, buildings and spaces are seemingly able to voice themselves, to speak to us. I can understand that. In any case, conceptually and sonically, I understand the draw.

I just read that beautiful book by Daniel Tammet called Born On A Blue Day. The connection to synaesthesia is fascinating even if we do not have classic forms of it as he does.

RR: Yes, we tune in, we refine, we examine in detail that which might be forgotten or ignored or not even seem to be of significance.

SV: I think your description is key in any case. People often fear that the kind of work you and I do may be inaccessible but I think one just needs an easy (emotional) entry point -- which can be entirely one's own references, not ours.

RR: It's curious -- I was interviewed at the weekend in Holland and the interviewer was very enthusiastic afterwards but very troubled by my use of visual terminology to describe work largely focusing on sound. I find it amusing to conceive of language having such restrictions!

SV: I agree. I tend to get a physical response to sounds that work for me, a bit of tingling behind the neck. It's hard to explain to someone why that sound or that combination of tones works but it does happen. We also don't have a vocabulary for sound that comes close to the one we do for visuals.

RR: I've been listening to recordings of mountains outside of Guangzhou, China, this morning. Just simply portrait style recordings of this place but I can still sense so much detail within them. Funnily enough the CD must have stuck for about 30 minutes in the same place but I thought I was listening to an insect of some sorts until I looked at the LED read out and it was trapped at just 10 seconds!

SV: You need to record this! So many of my favourite artists have been ones who capitalise on accidents.

RR: Yes, I still like to listen to more traditional music, be it a rock or folk record, and to hear the presence of the person, to hear them put down the guitar at the end of the song like in Nick Drake's Pink Moon record, or to hear their keys jangling in their pockets as they dance around in the sound booth! It's this presence that is invaluable but something we forget about, indeed something that we continually try to erase, as CNN does as opposed to the amateur view.

SV: I understand this too -- I got really into Neil Young last summer. The recordings are sloppy if you listen closely (bumped microphones, missed cues) but that doesn't detract from the core feeling you get. Maybe it adds to it.

The amateur view is critical. Otherwise we'd believe it all to be fiction. I love Eder Santos' video in which he asks Brazilian people on the street if they believe the US moon landing was fabricated by Hollywood. They mostly say yes!

RR: Curiously when I record outdoors I always enjoy walking whilst recording, or those happy accidents where something might interrupt the recording with a dynamic force you can't predict. Again, like those amateur filmmakers out there on September 11, who happened to be filming a view of the city in the morning, who caught time changing in such a radical fashion. It's the moment when we stop looking, stop listening that often something happens!

Robin Rimbaud (aka Scanner) is an artist whose restless explorations of an experimental terrain have won him international admiration from, among others, Bjork and Stockhausen. As well as producing compositions and audio CDs, his diverse body of work includes soundtracks for films, performances, radio, and site-specific intermedia installations. He has performed and created works in many of the world's most prestigious spaces including SFMOMA (USA), Hayward Gallery (London), Pompidou Centre (Paris), Corcoran Gallery (DC, USA), Tate Modern (London) and the Modern Museum Stockholm (Sweden). He doesn't drink alcohol, tea, coffee, smoke or watch TV but he does have a modest addiction to white bread and milk.

Image © Stephen Vitiello
Courtesy Museum 52, London