Deep Listening to Gravel with Concrete Husband
Electronic musician, flutist and composer Carlos Aguilar AKA Concrete Husband comes from the lineage of the avant-garde experimental electronic artist Pauline Oliveros, and her seminal work on “deep listening.”. Oliveros was a classically-trained musician-turned-sound-artist, greatly influential in the 1960s for her work involving improvisation, meditation, electronics, myth and ritual. In poetic and esoteric sonic “text scores,” she encouraged people to engage in intense, full-body listening, making the distinction between listening (which is selective, voluntary, and intentional) and simply hearing, which is passive. Her work centered on a deep, conscious listening to the world, which included both human-made sounds and natural sounds; the sounds of the blood in our veins and the sound of a traffic overpass; the sound of silences, lapses, and the in-between.
Aguilar talks about his engagement with Oliveros’ work, and how he combines his training in classical music with experimental flute improvisation, as well as within his more recent work as an electronic music producer and industrial house and techno DJ. We listen to and discuss excerpts from his upcoming album, as well as a new work composed exclusively for Mutamur, Harmony Dissolves, based on a sound exchange with Mutamur host Allie Wist. Wist’s recent sculptural work in concrete prompted the idea of a concrete-husband-and-wife collaboration that would aggregate their interests in industrial experimentation. Wist recorded the sounds of herself walking on gravel and waste concrete rocks in an empty lot in Troy, NY, engaging in a deep listening practice in the spirit of Oliveros. Wist imagines that feral and abandoned urban sites would be embraced by Oliveros, who saw the sounds of human landscapes as having just as much validity as traditional nature soundscapes. And in fact, these urban spaces are a kind of neo-nautre, filled with their own ecologies and material evolutions. What might "deep listening to gravel" mean? And what worlds can we imagine when we stop falsely separating the “natural” from the human?
Wist collected gravel from the site and also recorded sounds of the rocks being used with crystal and brass singing bowls. These and the field recordings were sent to Aguilar, who composed a 15 minute piece for Montez, which is aired in full in the episode.
Aguilar was the featured flutist on A24’s new film Beau is Afraid and has performed at The Kitchen NYC, Basement NYC, Bossa Nova Civic Club, The Lot Radio, Newtown Radio, Trans Pecos, and Nowadays, among others. He is currently a Density 2036 Fellow with MacArthur Genius/Harvard Professor Claire Chase.
Aguliar’s composition for Mutamur was also the soundtrack for a film which debuted at The Experimental Center for Performing Arts in July of 2023.
