A survey of the usual audio ecology of Long Beach’s East Village Arts District: traffic growls, bus hydraulics puff every 20 minutes, skateboards clatter over loose sidewalk grates, bike bells twinkle—police, fire and ambulance sirens chop through everything—somebody shuffles around on a drum set—helicopters thump toward the harbor—the old prop-driven Catalina DC-3 mail plane moans over—soggy digital honks from the Blue Line train as it scrapes into First Street Station—another band practicing high-up in one of the old office towers, tube-tone guitar curling down around the street lights, keys jingling, cell-phones yipping, cheap TV chatter splattering through Venetian blinds, a hammer barking against concrete, tires squirting and biting at asphalt when someone reconsiders a yellow light, and bored cops pointing their PA at tourists about to turn backward on one-way Broadway: “You’re going the wrong way!”

This is SoundWalk’s native environment—processed and disrupted one night a year by dozens of sound art installations (most sanctioned, a few guerrilla) curated by Long Beach art organization FLOOD, which, says member Marco Schindelmann, arranges its artists with zookeeper zeal to make an already lively sonic landscape wild again. For that one night: trees whisper, speakers call out from the alleys, bicycle bells align into loose symphony, galleries hum with deep digital tone, improv taxis play Antonin Artaud, a hot phone line connects direct to a South Korean street at international mid-morning, and once an artist shoved a jingling antique piano up and down the sidewalks. FLOOD member Dr. Frauke von der Horst once said what SoundWalk does is bring surprise back to the environment—true and maybe even modest because SoundWalk also erases and replaces the East Village’s normal sounds, commandeering an entire neighborhood with the kind of agility and conviction that usually remains limited to the theoretical. It’s the world—extending as far as you’d care to comfortably walk, anyway—reset as art.

This year’s SoundWalk will be the fourth in an annual series—the most robust and ambitious yet, towing an international profile (one Italian artist who had to ship his piece to Long Beach told FLOOD he wished he had something like SoundWalk locally) that might (in the future) position it as one of the city’s signature events. Chicago artist John Kannenberg, who has participated in every SoundWalk so far, says he finds himself scanning the SoundWalk roster to see who’s doing what—that’s the kind of state-of-the-artform reaction that signals an event is about to become indispensable. But it wasn’t until he made the plane trip himself that he learned exactly what he’d become part of: “Compared to just about anything else,” he says now, “it’s probably the most exciting sound exhibition I’ve ever been involved in.”

* * *

Somewhere in Long Beach, on a quiet street where a toy gun floats in a puddled gutter, the current members of FLOOD—Kamran Assadi, Shea M Gauer, von der Horst, Shelley RuggThorp and Schindelmann—are meeting in a dark and boxy little patio next to a swimming pool that saps the summer heat. Where the inaugural 2004 SoundWalk found artists picking out acoustically promising locations around the alley dumpsters of the East Village Arts District, the FLOOD event up for discussion now involves an installation piece on the front steps of the Carpenter Center—the diligent recreation of Kamran’s living room, where many FLOOD meetings mapped out SoundWalk (except for tonight, which is particularly stifling). Should they bring the living room stereo? FLOOD is wondering. What should they play?

“KJAZZ,” says Frauke.

And the coffeemaker?

“Like ideas percolating,” says Marco, smiling. “Espresso… expression.”

“We are trying,” says Kamran mock-seriously, “to make the process of creating art as boring as possible.”

FLOOD has a sharp sense of humor; the organization’s very first action put a faked-up art exhibit in the then-denuded East Village Arts District. “The way I saw it, we were in an arts district with very little art,” says Kamran, remembering 2002, so FLOOD installed “Reception-Perception-Deception” in the first floor of the Lafayette apartments, where Gauer’s store {open} would later move in. That project announced a certain aspect of the FLOOD personality—a satirical show that was all hype but no actual art. Gauer connected with the group as a partner with Kamran in 2003’s “Cartet,” which parked four identical rental cars with doors thrown open and stereos synched to a preset piece at the corner of First and Elm—daring, original, and a little loud, which are arguable other aspects of FLOOD. Between personality and technical set-up was something of the genesis of the SoundWalk idea. At first, it was just a play on words—the East Village then and now known for its ArtWalks—but the idea moved with only a little push.

Sound was a versatile medium, says Kamran. “If you put on a painting show, you have to rent a gallery. To find space for sound, you can use alleys or trashcans—the medium offers a lot of flexibility. And it’s really cheap to produce it.” And sound was an under-used medium, says Shea, with exhibit opportunities for artists uneasily separated into infrequent gallery shows or sometimes-esoteric live performances: “It’s still kind of a fresh thing,” he says. And sound was a wild medium, says Marco: “Even though sound art was birthed at the same time as abstract art, society as a whole hasn’t really adapted to that aesthetic. You can walk into any home design place and see kitschy abstract art, but they don’t have sound art—even though the first sound piece was by Duchamp at approximately the same time. Marinetti said that sound art really comes from the idea of noise—that music is the art of sound, and sound art comes from the idea of noise, and noise came from technology. And up until that point, there was only silence.”

And when they brought SoundWalk to the city in early 2004, there was at first a little confusion—Kamran remembers being asked what sort of music they would be playing? But then SoundWalk trampled all attendance expectations, sending visitors both deliberate and accidental (Frauke remembers one barber shop patron stumbling into SoundWalk and rushing happily off to get a map of the event) on a Village-wide prowl after dozens of installations—some (like a giant industrial spring prickling with contact mics) obvious and some hidden (like the speaker birds in the trees) and some too hidden (like the installation in the community garden that had curious SoundWalkers somewhat indelicately pushing through the plants).

The kind of thing the Situationists had talked about, Shea said—an audio derive ‘Magical’ is too cheap a word but the SoundWalk was certainly unusual—unlike the ArtWalks, which just sort of attach themselves to the environment, the SoundWalk became the new environment, and an aimless walk through the East Village’s streets and alleys became suddenly (if temporarily) unfamiliar. SoundWalk had the excitement of performance, the ambition of a worthy gallery show, and the sheer ridiculous fun of visiting a place for the first time. Even the city responded, formalizing grants to make sure SoundWalk could come back each year: “When we first supported the event,” says Downtown Long Beach Associates President and CEO Kraig Kojian, “we didn’t really know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised.”

* * *

The first night of the SoundWalk pre-performances, and inside the Broadlind Café, Los Angeles’ Alan Lechusza (performing tonight as Arcanum) is playing a straight soprano sax into a bank of delay and loop effects, gently aligning long slow melodies over and over into zoned-out abstractions like Terry Riley. Before him came laptop artist Phil Curtis, conducting his MacBook with a handheld remote, and before him came the edgy phogmasheen, who contact-miced a greening old ’30s trumpet to nightmarish—his term—effect. Besides almost 70 artists booked for SoundWalk Saturday proper, the weeks leading into SoundWalk are active with sound-art events all over the central city, from the east end of 4th Street to the core corner of the East Village. FLOOD hopes to one day make SoundWalk a monthlong event, spread over multiple venues up to and including the Carpenter Center: “Four years ago it was a dream,” says Kamran. “Now it’s not so far-fetched.”

And actually, it’s almost already happening—SoundWalk and its satellite events now cover five venues with nine stationary artists, climaxing with a “multivenue progressive sound event” led through Retro Row by Eric Strauss and his impressively Verne-ian mobile fog horn machine this weekend, and CSULB—until recently home to local sound-art mainstay Glenn Bach—has two officially unaffiliated but spiritually complementary events with this weekend’s Wide Angle robotics opera and October’s Sound Oasis. Sound as a medium is enjoying a sort of resurrection, says Kamran, and SoundWalk itself is gaining recognition with sound artists around the world, says Shea: “The more people and the more established artists we can invite, the more it will gain momentum. As far as it looks for the medium—it’s ripe for it.” (Who’s on the FLOOD shortlist? “Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and the Kronos Quartet,” says Kamran instantly. “And we’re working on it,” adds Shea.)

San Diego’s Tristan Shone will be hauling up a colossally cumbersome set of home-built robotic-ish-devices that add fearsome physicality to a laptop-generated tone—his newest, called the rotary encoder, weighs about 700 pounds. When people think experimental sound, they immediately think noise, he says—annoying noise, not intriguing noise—and they don’t want to see it. Opportunities to actually perform, he says, don’t come often. That’s sentiment echoed by Chicago’s Kannenberg, who also appreciates the audience and the artistic community—“It’s a really great showcase of what’s going on around the world,” he says. “So many artists are there for the event, just milling around with the audience. I’ve never been to an installation or performance where there were elderly people and people bringing small children and it seemed like everyone was enjoying it.”

“A lot of people who are hesitant to go into a gallery or a museum can go on this adventure through the neighborhood and discover things that maybe they thought they’d have to go to a gallery to experience,” says Shelley. “Instead, they go on a scavenger hunt of art through the neighborhood.”

“And people get confused about the line between art and just sound,” says Kamran. “They become kind of hyper-alert.”

“It tunes peoples’ ears to everything,” says Shea.

“It’s the development of poetic perception,” says Marco.

“It changes the way people walk through their own environment,” says Shea.

“Life as aesthetic instead of life as lifestyle,” says Marco.

“It’s beautiful to get people to listen,” says Shea. “To walk and listen and stop if they hear something.”

“In Japan,” says Marco, “they have these festivals where they listen to insects—where they go out in the country and listen, and this is the urban equivalent.”

“You may find art,” says Frauke, “that we haven’t planned.”

SOUNDWALK 2007 THE EAST VILLAGE ARTS DISTRICT | LONG BEACH 90802 | SAT SEPT 22 5PM | FREE | ALL AGES | MAPS AVAILABLE AT KOO’S 540 E BROADWAY | LONG BEACH 90802 | FOR COMPLETE LINEUP AND PRE-EVENT INFO VISIT SOUNDWALK.ORG. SOUNDWALK PRE-EVENT #3 WITH LEWIS KELLER & CAT LAMB, TROPIC OF CANCER AND MIDNIGHT GARDENERS {OPEN}, PORTFOLIO AND THE VINTAGE COLLECTIVE | BETWEEN 2122 E FOURTH ST AND 2300 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | SAT 8PM | FREE | ALL AGES | ALSO CIRCUIT-BENDING WORKSHOP BY POTAR AND HOORAY FOR HUMANS {OPEN} | 2226 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | SUN 2PM | $25 INCLUDES MATERIALS AND CIRCUIT-BENT TOY | ALL AGES | HOORAYFORHUMANS.ORG

Tags: East Village, FLOOD, Long Beach, soundwalk