Ambient Jukebox; 2024

Ambient Jukebox; 2024; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
During the Covid lockdown George spent a lot of time making ambient music with guitars and distortion pedals. He was exploring how sounds conjure images and emotions and imagined that he was creating soundscapes for a non-existent film. He would fool around in the studio with the pedals, guitars, and amps and then when he found a sound and mood that he liked, he would record it immediately. He ended up with hours and hours of this "music".
For many years we had an old Rock-Ola jukebox kicking around in our props building and one day we had the idea of using that classic instrument of rock and roll to play back George's abstract film music. We hoped that it would create a disjunction between the original concept of the machine and it’s content. We also liked the idea that these long ambient tracks had to be shortened to a 45 record's timespan of under 4 minutes. So they became ambient singles.
We imagine the jukebox in somebody's home, a couple of old leather chairs sitting in front of it and maybe a bottle of good scotch, or a Venetian style Spritz sitting on the coffee table. You can listen or not... let the music be the background to an interesting conversation, let it "fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends" * or focus on it and let it take your mind on a journey far, far from home.
The piece sits silent until someone pushes a letter and a number to select a track. The magic of watching the mechanical arm mechanism retrieving a particular record and starting to play it never gets old.
The track playing in this video is Slow Descent (composed and performed by George Bures Miller © 2021).
* Quote is from Erik Satie talking about his idea of "furniture music" in 1917, "a music which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometime fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need." Satie composed 5 pieces that he called furniture music.