For me, music and sound last week was all about train stations. I saw two performances in two very different contexts that dealt with very different ideas, but both of them rooted in the energy and dynamism of train stations. Malang Jobarteh’s soulful singing and strumming snaked its way through the columns and bustle of the Columbus Circle uptown 1 train platform while Sound Shuttle by Max Hirsh and Michael Schiefel took recorded snippets from train stations around the world and pieced them together into a site-specific installation. Seeing these performances within a couple days of each other made me think about how many different ways there are to engage with these spaces of connection and vibrancy.
Malang Jobarteh’s playing is a part of a long tradition of train stations serving as natural busker locations (George had a lot of interesting things to say about the nature of busking a couple of weeks ago). In New York, buskers are a fixture, sometimes making them easy to ignore. But every once in a while a busker gives you no choice but to stop and listen. I could hear Jobarteh’s playing echoing through the halls as I walked up the stairs from the D train on my way out of the station and had to seek out the source. He sat against a wall playing Kora music, which I had heard a few times on recordings but never in person. The music itself was arresting but what really struck me was how he rose to the challenge of the space. His playing very naturally interacted with the pacing of the station: passengers exiting the local trains, express trains barreling down the tracks. You can hear him holding back and stepping out as the space presents him with obstacles and opportunities. By placing himself in the middle of the functioning of this kinetic hub, his playing ascends to awesome heights. Ultimately, Jobarteh’s music acted as a focal point connecting the swirling mass of activity.
In the face of Jobarteh’s tactile, immediate interaction with the trains, people, and spaces of the station, Sound Shuttle, at Metropolitan Exchange, reconstituted the sounds of similar spaces around the world to create a far different result. Max Hirsh and Michael Schiefel traveled around the world recording the sonic environments of various transit spaces including Penn Station and the MTR in Hong Kong. They have now brought these field recordings together as a series of site-specific installations where a number of media players and speaker systems are arranged within a given exhibition space. The installation offers brief glimpses into local culture through these spaces of transition, sometimes creating vertiginous juxtapositions. Blaring techno bashes up against screeching brakes, which slowly transitions into a voice over a loudspeaker in Mandarin. These details, removed from their original context, still summon their places of origin while generating an abstract, meta landscape of connection and transition. I sat in the darkened room quietly taking in the installation, aware that I was in a position of removal, in a context that encouraged contemplation of the sounds around me. Sound Shuttle took the swirling mass that Jombarteh had fit into and contextualized the din as the focal point of the audience’s attention.
Taken together, these two experiences show the contrast between intentional and unintentional sound. Jobarteh sits in the station and takes calculated action. He integrates into the surrounding soundscape and shifts what he is doing based on the input that he gets from the space. The wheels and brakes of trains, announcements blaring from loudspeakers, passengers carrying on loud conversations (the raw materials of Sound Shuttle) are all events within the space that happen with no regard for their aural impact. They are byproducts of the functioning of the space. But in a wonderful twist on this relationship, Sound Shuttle takes these unintentional sounds and intentionally harnesses them to create something new. And both approaches say something important about train stations, which cover the experiential distance from the personal, human interactions of hellos and goodbyes that fill their walls, to the monumental, forward motion of large-scale infrastructure spanning vast distances through technology.
