ZBS Media Farm
   Fort Edward, NY

Founding members included Greg Shifrin and Pat Anderson. ZBS was created to support alternative radio and audio "production, creation, inspiration, good vibes and self-development".
-from Dumping Ground v. 2

ZBS AIR flyer 1974
ZBS Foundation is beginning an artist-in-residence program at our audio studio in upstate New York. With support from the New York State Council on the Arts, we are inviting ten artists to explore and experiment with the possibilities avail in sound and audio production.

ZBS is a group of 12 people who come from various media, crafts and technical backgrounds. We got together four years ago and built an audio production and recording studio on a 45 acre farm near Saratoga Springs. We have worked to develop a studio that has a wide range of possibilities and a lot of flexibility.

The program extends from October 1, 1974 through July 1975. During this period we will invite one artist each month to spend 5 days in residence. The visiting artist will have the studio at his disposal on a 24-hour basis, and a staff available which includes an engineer (who designed and built the studio) and two experienced producers who have worked in radio and sound production for many years. In addtion, there are a number of people who participate in the operation of the studio and who will be available to help in different ways. Each artist will receive travel expenses and room and board and all necessary audio tape will be provided.

The idea of this nifty program is to encourage experimentation by artists in any field and to work out audio ideas which may have been unrealized because of the lack of technical facilities available. Artists who have not worked in audio production before are invited to participate in a situation which provides them with assistance from experiences personnel, with a view toward fulfilling the potential of cooperation between artists in sound and other media. Another possibility could be to use the period as a workshop in which to develop the audio segment of a mixed media short or long-term project. Another possibility could be nestling within your mind at this very moment.

In fact, anything is possible, so rush right down to your brain and send us a proposal detailing your ideas for utilizing this facility. We have a fully-equipped 4-track studio with 12 input mixdown capabilities. The studio itself is 500 square feet of real space, including an adjacent isolation room and accessible space for additional recording areas. We have an extensive sound effects library ranging from every conceivable environmental effect to camels running in the Grand Atlas Mountains, actually recorded live in Morocco. We have portable hardware for outdoor work, and arrangements for additional equipment can be made upon request. Our equipment inventory includes the following:

Tape Machines
Ampex 440-4 track (1/2”)
Ampex 440-2 track
Ampex 440-2 track
Ampex AG500-2
Uher 4200
Teac A120OU -
Revox A77
Nagra IV L
Advent 201

Mixing Capability
Phillips console MD12RF-4
12 line input Microphones
12 mic output
built-in equalizers
reverb and pan pots
57 step slide faders

Microphones
Condensors
Dynamics
Ribbons
Shotgun
Parabolic
Hydrophones

Manufacturers include: AKG, Beyer, Electrovoice
RCA, Sennheiser, Shure, Sony

3 Phillips PRT-30ST Turntables

Monitoring
Altec 604 E , JBL, Advent, AR,
Crown Amplifiers
Headphones: Beyer, Sennheiser, Koss, AKG

Signal Processing
Equalizers: 4 Phillips shelving type,
2 Pultec EQP-1A full range, 2 Pultec
MEQ-5 midrange, 1 Pultec HLF-3 sharp
cut-off bandpass, 1 Soundcraftsmen Graphic
2 UREI LA3A compressor/limiters
Sennheiser reverb
Fisher spring reverb
Martin Varispeed 111A

Access to; ARP 2600 synthesizer
ARP soloist synthesizer
DBX noise reduction
Phase and Frequency Shifters
Plate reverb
Noise gates

Complete intermodular patching network for flexible equipment utilization.

Artists are encouraged to bring along any additional hardware they can.

So communicate with us in some manner as to what you would like to do, (try to relate it to the artist-in-residence program described above).

Deadline for proposals is September 21, 1974.

Proposals should be sent to A.I.R. ZBS Foundation

If you have any questions call or Write, we love to talk about it.

This program is made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and is open to New York State residents only.

 

ZBS Programs, from ZBS brochure, 1984
It was a dark and stormy night, and throughout New York State artists were looking for a place where they could record it. As the lightening crashed and the thunder roared, AUDIO ART was born. Later that night, after everything had settled itself a bit and most of the party had wound their way back home, a small group of hard-core hopefuls could be seen furiously building a way out. The idea was to encourage artists who want to work with audio and sound experimentation and to provide an audio studio and personnel for artists in every medium from all over New York State.

Making use of these facilities have been some of the most inventive artists working in the state today. With Les Levine we developed the audio portion of a really spectacular piece of installation art. A game room filled with pinball machines and game machines of all kinds -dedicated to the Great American Loser. The sound of it is of a football stadium gone crazy, some maniac rooting section demoniacally urging the player on to failure. He is begged, importuned, taunted, and cajoled into losing. The almost haunting chant-like quality of the tape is very hypnotic and convoluted. The work was created utilizing the technique of overdubbing, by which small groups of people can become huge stadiums of screaming fans, and one or two dancers become giant armies on the march. A videotape soundtrack we did with Ed Emshwiller turned a few feet into many feet, the entire track consisting of feet - a beautiful sound -the sound of feet. Feet upon carpet, wood, asphalt, gravel, frosted grass, snow, water - multiple soft shoe shuffle feet - Crossings and Meetings.

Jim Borden took us out in the forest to record monster freight trains. We used 12 microphones placed at 20 ft. intervals along the tracks. The result was truly impressive. At first there is nothing - only ambient sound (a wood in autumn), then slowly one perceives the far away train, closer and closer until it is roaring past you - finally rolling away into the distance again. Trains, boats, balloons. Nick Collins and Ron Kuivila sent transmitters aloft in helium balloons and adrift in boats on the river. Following the Hudson the transmitters trace a map of the water way - the balloons trace a map of the air currents - all charted in sound. Bill Viola spent 5 days in an inner tube taking soundings from the dark depths of our gigantic frog pond. Recording deep below the surface at 4-hour periods during the days and nights, he plotted subtle variations in the underwater pond life.

FIELD RECORDINGS

1 SINGING ROCK WORK
2 ANDRE AH MA
3 ANDRE #2 AH MA
4 FLUID
5 MOURNING MEN AND ARBITER
6 CARPENTER WORK SONG (NEONATAL)
7 TWO SICK MEN/HEALER
8 MISSION CAFETERIA SUNDAY NOON
9 CHILDREN IN COURTYARD LAUGHING
10 BEGGARS ON STREET
II MEAL PREPARATION
12 MOANING MEN
13 CHASON

Inspired by the UNESCO series of field recordings. Diego Cortez captured the peculiar tone and quality of audio tape as anthropological art. Using essentially just his voice and hands, he produced an entire environment, calling up an image that we immediately associate with the standard classical field recording; evoking the spirits of the ancestors of the primitives.

Another classical interpretation which can be modulated and transformed is that of the poet reading his work. John Giorno has utilized some of the possibilities of our production studio (multi-track loops, reverse echoes, speed reverberation), to create a poetry of incredible power.

A rare approach to dealing with the relationship between sound and film was undertaken by the incomparable Oscar-winning hot dog Frank Mouris. He experimented with recording the soundtrack before shooting his film. Because of the sound experiments new kinds of visual imagery suggested themselves. David Hykes made a film called “Mutual Exclusives” and the source signal he used as a basis for the soundtrack was the sound of deaf children’s voices. David did many extraordinary sound experiments developing his concepts of synchronous pitch refraction, polymetric silence and defining the shadow of sound in a piece called “Shadow Frequency.”

TRANSDUCER
*** “any of various substances or devices, as a piezoelectric crystal or a photo electric cell, that convert input energy of one form into output energy of another. From the Latin transducere - to lead across, transfer “

Such artists as David Tudor, Phil Glass, Tim Clark, Jude Quintiere, George Kindler and John Driscoll deal with sound itself. The finalized work often appears as dance, opera, performance, installation, mixed-media piece. The early work always appears slightly off the wall -one of the facets of electronic or synthesized composition. These guys will transduce anything. We have recorded tubs of water, ponds and rivers, junkyards, flash bulbs, bridges, steel cables, cabbages, chickens, crickets, frogs and all manner of outdoor life, pigs, peas, popcorn, and people (awake and otherwise). All of this and more has become sound-music for people to perform, dance, sing, correlate other media with; it is treated, nursed, walloped, and electronically manipulated in every way possible - or - simply left alone. AUDIO ART

What we hear inside our heads and the attempt to get it out of there intact - an interesting problem and one that AIR is uniquely suited to serve. Beth Anderson proposed to search for a sound she had heard in her dreams. Richard Hayman proposed nothing less than an attempt to record the dreams themselves. Richard, something of an expert on the subject of sleep, is an artist who works with dreams as a medium. There is evidence to show that when we move our eyes in sleep, we are following the action of our dreams. It turns out that the musculature of the ear moves during dreams also. We adapted a microphone in an ear mold and the attempt was made to discover whether this movement corresponded to what we hear in our dreams.

Our dreams, our waking thoughts, our art, and reality -- a quadraphonic dimension. Presenting extraordinarily beautiful and subtle pieces, Laurie Anderson created quadrophonic stories with pictures and sound environments, that make you conscious of the space, not the walls that define the space.

We worked on over eight hours of tape with Stan VanDerBeek experimenting with audio puns and pawdio uns, to be used in concert with his ongoing Cine Dreams design. We also made water tapes for use with -.series of projections onto-, water-falls and walls of mist.

Video artists such as Stan VanDerBeek, Bill Viola, William Wegman, Les Levine, and Ed Emshwiller have taught us a great deal, and the need that videotape makers have for good sound production cannot be overestimated, It is our hope that this program will help a little to better define and understand the importance of audio arid it’s relationship to the video image.

AUDIO PUN (o’ de-o/-pun) n. A play on sounds, sometimes on different senses of the same sound and sometimes, on the similar sense or similar sound of different sounds.

PAWDIO UNS (po’ de-o/-unz) n. A play on paws or a reversal of a play on pause, as in applause or clapping of paws: 2. v. to make clumsy or grasping motions with the hands.

Artists in every field are encouraged to participate in this program. Jim Burton was a painter before his developing interest in sound and the instruments of sound became his primary work. Alan Sondheim is a writer, with an interest in mathematics, as well as a videotape artist who worked with us on, among other things, recording the sound of photography, and defining a landscape environment through the device of recording the environment. Chris Roberts, a sculptor, was interested in working with the sound of stress. His experience with the phenomenon of stress and it’s effect on different materials led us to explore recording the sounds that occur during the application of pressure on an object. We lost a lot of microphones but it was very exciting.

Not only has all this incredible recording been done, but the tapes produced have been utilized in one way or another in further performances or work by the artist.

This program is unique and innovative, improving the quality of the audio aspect of mixed media and helping to promote an appreciation of sound as an art form. Audio is a field of great creative potential and one which is concordant with almost every other medium. Yum Yum.

These people have participated in the AIR Program to date.
BETH ANDERSON     ED EMSHWILLER     FRANK MOURIS
LAURIE ANDERSON     JOHN GIORNO     JUDE QUINTIERE
JIM BARDEN     PHIL GLASS     CHRIS ROBERTS
JIM BURTON     RICHARD HAYMAN     ALAN SONDHEIM
TIM CLARK     MICHAEL HELEUS     DAVID TUDOR
NICK COLLINS     DAVID HYKES     STAN VANDERBEEK
DIEGO CORTEZ     GEORGE KINDLER     BILL VIOLA
JOHN DRISCOLL     RON KUIVILA     WILLIAM WEGMAN
LES LEVINE

Every artist who has come to the ZBS Studio has contributed a great deal in turn to the AIR Program itself. AIR becomes a point of intermix for information, assistance, and encouragement. Each of these people has meant a great deal to us and we wish to thank them. THANKS GUYS

The program allows for a five-day residency at ZBS Studios in Fort Edward, New York. During this period the visiting artist has the studio at his disposal on a 24-hour basis, and an engineering and production staff available to cater to his every whim. In addition there are a number of people who participate in the operation of the studio and who are available to help in different ways. Each artist receives travel expenses and room and board, and audio tape is provided.

ZBS audio production and recording studio is located on a 45-acre farm, where we live and work, near Saratoga Springs. We have a fully equipped 4-track facility with 12-input mixdown capabilities. The studio itself is 500 feet of real space for additional recording areas. We have an extensive sound effects library and there is portable hardware for field work. Additional equipment can be appropriated upon request. We can record outside, inside, underwater, overwater, human beings, other creatures, and things that don’t make any noise. If you don’t know how to use the equipment we can show you. If you do, we can try to build something you can’t figure out how to use.

The idea behind the program is to encourage experimentation by artists in many fields and to work out audio ideas which may have been unrealized because of a lack of available technical facilities. Artists who have not worked in audio production before are invited to participate in a situation which provides them with assistance from experienced personnel and with necessary hardware. Also invited are those who are already up to their ears in it. The residency allows for any kind of experimentation. Another possibility could be to use the period as a workshop in which to develop the audio segment of a mixed-media short or long-term project. Another possibility could be unheard of as yet.

Proposals should be sent to: AIR ZBS FOUNDATION

If you have any questions call or write, we love to talk about it.

This program is made possible with support from the New York State Council on the Arts and is open to New York State Residents only.