Interpol guitarist Daniel Kessler (above) has been a divil for the side-projects this year; his new band Big Noble launched the video to their first single this week, with an album due early in 2015. He's also been busy making his Sounds of NYC installation, an "interactive conceptual map" of New York, which launched in a city gallery last month.
The rising popularity of audio projects that capture street-level sounds as an art form has been especially partial to NYC. Somehow the world’s crassest, busiest, angriest city has allowed musicians to repeatedly wrangle creativity out of the place.
Website soundcityproject.com offers a selection of sound bites from locations around Manhattan; so you can listen to car horns and verbally aggressive strangers from the comfort of your own home.
Meanwhile, back at the urban ranch, James Murphy (the LCD Soundsystem frontman responsible for penning New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down) has been pitching his idea for a subway symphony all year. He hopes to transpose harmonious chimes over the monotonous drawl of the subway turnstiles, to create a cacophony of aesthetic sounds. Unfortunately, an official spokesperson for the NY subway said it won't happen because they "don't really care". Which was to be expected, really.
Irish-based project Heterodyne has done something similar, commissioning musicians to create site-specific soundscapes for landmarks around the country. Their five-track score for Military Road in Dublin (available on Bandcamp) offers an idyllic audio pathway of undulating soundwaves. You wouldn’t find that in New York City.
