Knowles, Christopher, artist.

Popular Songs A.

[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2016.

1 online resource.

Lateral Addition ; 27

"Late last year, I visited Christopher Knowles in his studio on 20th street in New York City to discuss his contribution to this publication. Knowles shares the studio with his wife, the artist Sylvia Netzer, and the three of us sat down and listened to many of Knowles's recordings before he decided on the one he wanted to include. As we played a selection of the sound works, most of which were created in the 1970s and early 1980s, Knowles spoke about the condition of each tape's production. He readily called to mind where he made each tape, the day and year of each recording, and the references it made to contemporary popular culture. The noise of street traffic mingled with the sounds of the recordings and our conversation as we revisited Knowles's memories of growing up and making art in New York. Knowles's artistic practice is wide-ranging, and includes painting, sculpture, dance, and poetry. He began making audiotape recordings in 1970, at the age of eleven, and maintains a keen interest in using cassette tape players to break apart and reconfigure the aural components of spoken language. Popular music figures prominently in his work, and in "Popular Songs A," Knowles introduces a series of short excerpts from Billboard's Top 20 songs of fourteen different years from 1957 to 1971. The songs are recorded from the Top 20 countdown series on WCBS-FM, an oldies radio station in New York City that offered a programmed countdown of classic hits in the early 1980s. He made this work on fourteen different days throughout the winter and spring of 1984, and each of the recordings is comprised of songs that were popular on the same day of the referenced year. This temporal layering, in which we hear Knowles in 1984 introducing songs from the previous decades, creates a folding effect that draws sonic connections across moments in mid-twentieth century popular music. Here, Knowles takes us on a tour of this formative period in music history, showing us the differences between the smooth soul lyricism of the late '50s, the funk-rock beats of the '60s, and the psychedelic poetry of the early '70s as we hear cropped excerpts of "Pretty Girls Everywhere" by Eugene Church & the Fellows from 1958, "Dance to the Music" by Sly & the Family Stone from 1968, and "Toast and Marmalade for Tea" by Tin Tin from 1971. As listeners, we are invited to tune in to the soundtrack of Knowles's everyday world, and to shift effortlessly with him across these carefully measured distances. - Lauren DiGiulio, February 14, 2016 The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Christopher Knowles and Lauren DiGiulio: CK: It was 1984. February 4th, 1984. LD: So you made this on Saturday, February 4th, 1984? CK: Yes, that's right. And I remember it was the Top 20 countdown from 5-7pm. WCBS-FM. LD: And here you're going through how many of the songs? CK: Well, I don't know how many there are... thirteen or fourteen of the Top 20 songs. LD: So is there anything that you would like people to know about this tape? CK: Yeah, I guess so. Just listen to it. It's a tape that I made in 1984. I started making tapes in 1982 when they first did the Top 20 Countdown. LD: And who was it that did the Top 20 Countdown? CK: It was Mr. Music Norm at Night. And he lives in Cleveland, Ohio. I remember he was a disc jockey and he remembers everything. He was on WCBS-FM here in New York. LD: So right now we're listening to the Top 20 songs of 1959? CK: I think it was February 5th, 1959. And that's when I made the tape, 1984. It's pretty complicated. LD: So, these (songs) go on. CK: Uh oh (laughing). Yes, they do."-- provided by distributor.

Art and music.
Art et musique.

Music.
Sound recordings.

DiGiulio, Lauren, contributor.
Laska, Eric, editor.
Library Stack, distributor.
Library Stack.