In Transit: Chinese New Year in Black History Month

by Norman Long

"Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat. Sometimes you're ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around."

—Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison 1952

"In Transit" is a sound piece, consisting of urban field recordings from cultural and liminal spaces mixed live with digitally processed sounds captured from field recordings. The recordings are from the Chinese New Year Festival in San Francisco's Chinatown and a mini Zen garden I recorded with a contact microphone in my apartment. In Chinatown I was attracted to the sounds of fake crickets, wind chimes, traditional Chinese and Chinese pop songs, DVD soundtracks from the video stores, street vendors, cable cars and street traffic. Usually all these things are going on simultaneously in Chinatown. On the other hand, Zen gardens are places designed for sitting and meditating, reflecting on your true nature and its connections to all that is around you. This is a key process of attaining "enlightenment" in the belief system of Buddhism. The recorded sounds of the miniature rake dragging through the matchbox-sized sand box of the miniature Zen garden contrast very well with the scale of Chinatown.

"In Transit" is an alternate mapping of the real and imaginary spaces—both personal and public—which have affected me within my own life. Recording and producing the content of the composition in Black History Month was important because this sound mix adds to the multi-cultural discourse in the area of new media. That is to say, by magnifying and deconstructing the "every day" or, re-ordering "space" and "place" through electroacoustic practice this project adds to the discourse of multi-culturalism. For example, in regards to representing African American culture in the field of new media, there is a tendency to mistake culture for demographics. Mass market culture has influenced our lives, telling us who we are and how we should live. This market mentality takes (for instance) African Americans, re-presents them as demographics (target audiences) which turns them into unchanging, stereotypical

commodities that are easily delivered to the mass market producers. This process of course is not limited to African Americans or people of color, it is a process and mentality that involves the commodification and reification of human beings who by nature are complex individuals.

I wanted to do a piece that was a bit more personal which spoke of things beyond simply tourism and capitalism. The title of this piece "In Transit" comes from my desire to expose part of the composition's architecture. Chinatown has been part of my life in the Bay Area. I walked through it many times to get to the San Francisco Art Institute when I was a student there. I enjoyed its sounds. The last recording I made from the sounds I sampled in Chinatown was in 2001.

Coincidentally, I was asked to create this piece a few days prior to Chinese New Year, which just so happens to be in Black History Month. So I began to think about the two. The Chinese once viewed time as a cyclical journey consisting of highs and lows that would eventually come full circle. This concept of time would become the basis for the Chinese Lunar Calendar—a 12-year calendar built around 60-year cycles that were delegated by the longitude of the sun and the phases of the moon. Black History Month is an important time for me as it gives me (and others) a chance to meditate on the accomplishments of people of African descent. This year it gave me an impetus to compose a new sound piece as a way to connect with my history and the environment that I interact with and sample.

While working on this composition I was able to "slip into the breaks and look around" ("Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison) with the help of digital sound processing, mixing and editing. The above quote along with the rest of Ellison's novel has been an inspiration to my practice of working with sound. The protagonist's experiences

with sound (mainly through jazz) parallel my interests in the relationship of sound to identity, or black subjectivity. Ellison's novel begins with the protagonist's depressing retreat to the underground —a basement in a whites-only building. The book's focus is on the character's ill-fated journey to college, his descent into a world fueled by ambition, betrayal, degradation, and self-hatred caused mostly by white supremacy and his eventual recovery. My main interest is his subterranean existence. Ever since reading "Invisible Man" I've been wanting to create a piece based on the main character's living quarters which are described in the prologue. He lives in a basement of a whites-only apartment building, surrounded by exactly 1,369 lightbulbs. "Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form" ("Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison). This description of the protagonist listening to the music of Armstrong on five turntables foreshadows by 50 years the multiple turntable work of Christian Marclay, Phillip Jeck and other sound artists who work with the physicality of sound. For Ellison, listening to Armstrong so loud magnifies the power within the music that comes from the creativity, volition and sheer humanity of African Americans that have been degraded through white supremacist hegemony. The book portrays the protagonist's retreat into himself as an acceptance of his defeat against racism, western dualistic logic and double-consciousness. I would maintain, based on my rudimentary understanding of the belief system of Zen Buddhism, that his retreat into himself and into an underground existence may have given him the potential for empowerment, volition, a keener knowledge of self and the space to form a criticism (if not downright rejection of) western dualistic logic (I'm pretty sure white-supremacy is

somewhere in there too). In Zen practice, when sitting in a state of meditation you are making sure you are focused on your consciousness, being one with your surroundings, knowing that there is nothing outside yourself. It is an act of transcending such binary oppositions as inside/outside, good/evil, us/them, victim/aggressor, etc.

So, I've been reflecting on this space that Ellison created over fifty years ago and have been inspired in many ways. This sound piece offers an alternate way of moving through private and personal space, through digital sound processing in the context of multiple cultural meanings. Hopefully, the soundscape that I created lets us all "slip into the breaks and look around", to think about who we are and our relationship to these sounds and to each other.