Techno-Babbling Brook
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“People that go into that place don’t want to hear electronic music,” says Block. “So I wanted to do something that might sound pleasant too.” She constructed Transgenesis from a single feedback tone: she slowed it down into a pulse, which she then ran through a series of electronic filters, recombining and tweaking the processed sounds. Block sees the result, similar to the sound of rushing water, as analogous to the conservatory’s idealized simulation of nature. “The idea was to create this sound that augments the fantasy of the space. But if you sit and listen to it for a while you realize that it’s kind of skewed and that it’s not a natural sound at all. It’s completely artificial. You can choose to stay in that fantasy, or you notice the architecture that contains the plant life itself and think about what made the sounds.”
It wasn’t until moving here–with her boyfriend, writer Alex Shakar, who was getting his PhD at UIC–that Block found other musicians to help her put that emotional element back into her work. Jim O’Rourke answered an ad she placed in the Reader, and through him she hooked up with players like Jeb Bishop, Kyle Bruckmann, and Ernst Karel. Her two solo releases, Pure Gaze (1999) and Mobius Fuse (2001, both on Sedimental), are deeply intuitive works that mix environmental and abstract sounds with evocative passages scored for brass and strings.
On Saturday night Seam will play its first show in three years, headlining a benefit performance at the Abbey Pub for the Steven K. Pak Memorial Fund. (Pak was a supporter of the Asian-American arts community who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in April at the age of 30.) Guitarist Soo-young Park started the noisy minimalist pop band in the early 90s in Chapel Hill. By ’93 Seam had relocated to Chicago, where it went through a number of personnel changes; drummers John McEntire and Bob Rising and guitarists Bundy K. Brown, Craig White, and Reg Shrader all served time in the band. The lineup that opened for Wire at the first Noise Pop Chicago festival in May 2000 featured Park, guitarist John Lee (who’d formerly led San Diego indie rockers aMiniature), and bassist William Shin–all Korean-Americans–with drummer Chris Manfrin. But the day after that gig Park moved to San Francisco with his fiancee, Fiona Cho, who was beginning grad school at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall.
