Drawing Building Hearing

There are at least two events tonight, Tuesday, November 27th, that are worth stopping by if you're in New York.

[Image: "Salvage Architecture" by production designer Paul Lasaine from Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb's Drawing Building archive].

While I will be busy co-hosting a book release party for Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb—who just published a collection of images from their Drawing Building online archive of "works that convey architectural alternatives, by-products, expansions, or critiques of our inhabited environments"—at Studio-X NYC, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, at 7pm, I also wanted to post a quick note that there is an interesting sonic event happening nearby, at 291 Church Street, for a new project by Marc Weidenbaum's Disquiet Junto exploring the sonic universe of retail sounds.

Weidenbaum is a highly prolific, Bay Area-based collaborative producer of always surprising music, sound, and noise projects, including a soundtrack for the city of Lisbon and Instagr/am/bient, which produced "25 sonic postcards" inspired by musicians' images on Instragram.

Tonight's event—part of an exhibition curated by Rob Walker called As Real As It Gets—will be "an exercise in sonic branding," as the participating musicians "will gather to perform speculative sound works that employ as source material documentary audio from retail establishments." Each "will present imagined soundscapes inspired by Émile Zola's characterization of the department store, in his novel The Ladies' Paradise, as 'a machine working at high pressure.'" (Read an interview with Weidenbaum about the project at the Free Music Archive or Rob Walker's essay on the project, "Listening to Retail").

Retail soundscapes will buzz, hum, and sing starting at 6:30pm at 291 Church Street, and, a half-hour later, up the street at 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610, we'll be kicking things off with Matt Bua and Maximilian Goldfarb. Stop by both if you can.