PREVIEW: Artist Hayden Beck’s Solo Exhibition and Debut Album Release
6/27 through July @ Context Collective Gallery
Image provided by Mariah Kitner
We could all be better listeners. It’s not exactly a controversial take, but many of us probably believe we’re “good enough” listeners. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re likely just skimming the surface of how to really listen—to each other, to our surroundings, to our own inner voice.
Modern living provides a daily onslaught of distractions and opportunities to tune out of the present moment, and it’s easy to let everyday noise wash over us unnoticed. Are we too impatient to slow down? What happens when we do? The answer might be something you want to hear but are just too preoccupied to realize.
Hayden Beck’s work is a meditation on the practice of deep listening. His album Good Luck Out There was released in May of this year and consists of field recordings he captured over the last several years living in the Troy area. Beck was selected for Context Collective’s July open-call solo show and will incorporate his own immersive visuals as part of the exhibition. The field recordings are further enhanced by samplers, drum machines, piano and synths alongside visual components. These include sketches from a journal Beck kept while recording and serve as a natural accompaniment to the process. Good Luck Out There challenges audiences to dial into what the majority of us are missing and all the sounds and sensations we may never experience again.
One of the most compelling aspects to Beck’s work is the idea of archiving vast temporal landscapes of sound and preserving them, either as is or arranging them with other sounds to create a completely new reality. Beck posits the idea of “sound as memory” and the ways specific noises have the ability to trigger thoughts and emotion, even possessing the power to transport us to different places and times. For some people, these may be the tones and chimes that make up the fabric of a city (think New York’s subway system: the familiar “bing-bong” tone that follows the voice: “Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”) On the opposite end, in more rural landscapes, you might conjure up a completely different melody: the twittering of birds, humming of insects, or trickling of water as part of a field recording. In Beck’s mind, this is all just as much music as any song you might hear.
“My partner and I went down to Central Park in March,” he tells me. “...and [while recording] I said, ‘let’s just walk,’ and in five minutes, I had captured a totally musical passage: someone playing the saxophone, people talking, going down through a tunnel where reverb then takes over and washes everything out, coming back out into a whole new space… and then going home and listening to it. The way that it all plays out, it’s a song.”
There’s an accessibility to Beck’s work that gives agency and power to the audience in addition to listening. All you need to create your own unique field recording is a device that can record your surroundings (for most of us, it’s our cellphones). Beck encourages, “You can just walk around… tap in for 30 seconds and you can capture some of this stuff. You just don’t know when it’ll be there again.”
His philosophy towards sound is also a bit cautionary. In the context of the environment, one of the layers to field recordings is the way regions and landscapes can change over time due to factors like climate change, pollution, or the degradation of important ecosystems and habitats. All of these things will impact the way a place sounds and feels over a period of time, be it centuries or seconds. Beck’s art encompasses singular moments in time, chance encounters, vibrations. By hitting “play” he also hits “save” on unique slices of time.
Visit Hayden Beck’s work on Bandcamp
Want to make your own field recordings? On July 19, Hayden Beck will guide participants in a field recording workshop utilizing just your phone from 11:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. at Context Collective. 95 4th Street, Troy, NY. $25 per person.
