REVIEW: Norman W. Long, “Calumet in Dub”
CD cover, “Calumet in Dub.” Image courtesy the artist and Blorpus Editions.
REVIEW
Norman W. Long, Calumet in Dub
By Levi Dayan
Norman W. Long is a Chicago-based sound artist whose music has been released on labels such as Reserve Matinee and Hausu Mountain. His latest release, Calumet in Dub, was released last month on Blorpus Editions, a sub-label of Hausu Mountain. The project was initially an eight channel sound installation at the Glass Curtain Gallery last year, which I had the privilege of experiencing in person. Long works primarily with field recordings, and his work is influenced by Annea Lockwood’s sound maps and the deep listening practices pioneered by Pauline Oliveros. The nature recordings Long utilizes are not the loud, vast natural soundscapes one would associate with artists such as Francisco Lopez. Rather, Long focuses on the intricacies of natural sonic phenomena, with examples including the percussive textures on “Indian Marsh Ridge” and the rippling aquatic sounds on “Little Calumet.” These are sounds that are always peeking out of the fray, never bursting out like a waterfall.
When thinking about Norman W. Long’s music, I often think about a quote from a SHOWstudio interview with the legendary video artist Arthur Jafa describing the resonance of dub structures in Black art and culture. “What that structure does, it makes you hyper aware of all the things that are no longer there. In other words, it makes the silence and the emptiness surrounding that single instrument really prominent. So on a psychoanalytical level, I think, in the context of Black people in the americas, what the dub structure is about is about loss and missing,” he posited. “There’s a kind of rupture, a loss, everything piles out, and then there’s a kind of wish fulfillment where it all gets piled back in, so in the music what you see getting played out is not just a rupture but a kind of repair of that emptiness and that absence.” Indeed, part of what makes Long such a singular artist is his understanding of dub music as being part of the same experimental sonic history as Lockwood and Oliveros. Much like Lockwood’s field recordings, dub takes deep inspiration from nature - a perfect example would be Augustus Pablo’s East of the River Nile album, whose cover has Pablo playing his melodica on a rock overlooking a river and includes a track called “Nature Dub.” But dub as a musical form is inseparable from its origins in Jamaica’s Black working class, emerging from dancefloors, sound-systems, and mass proliferation on 45 rpm records. Compared to the revolutionary electronic compositions of France’s Groupe de Recherches Musicales, this music was produced on incredibly cheap studio equipment, but it radically altered listeners' understanding of sound (and its production) in a way that only the greatest, most forward-thinking experimental music can.
Like these musicians, Long also has roots in the Black working class. Long comes from South Chicago, a city community area bordering the basin of the Calumet River that gives Calumet In Dub its name. South Chicago’s location made it a prosperous industrial hub, but in the 80s the industries that had given much of the community a living income pulled out of the region. What remained was a community devastated by mass layoffs and wage theft, and a rich environment devastated by extraction and pollution. This is a story far too common in Black America, particularly in rust belt cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, and of course Chicago. However, the story of the Calumet region also provides a way forward. Just ten miles southwest of South Chicago is Altgeld Gardens, a housing project which, thanks to the work of Hazel M. Johnson, became the catalyst of the environmental justice movement. Often dubbed the “mother of environmental justice,” Johnson investigated her local environment after noticing health problems arising in her family and fellow community members. Johnson found that the Altgeld Gardens area had been a victim of pollution and neglect on an industrial scale, and in response founded the People for Community Recovery. Her tireless activism played a crucial role in improving environmental conditions in the city, while also challenging the image of environmentalists as white, college-educated bleeding hearts.
The detritus of industrialization that has plagued communities such as Altgeld Gardens and South Chicago is certainly reflected in the soundscapes Long put together for Calumet in Dub. The sounds of flowing water, chirping bugs and glowing synthesis are often undercut by the booming, alarming sounds of freight trains and ships. Perhaps most haunting is when human voices enter the fray, such as on “FieldHollarDUB,” a track named for the work songs sung by Black slaves working on plantations, and later railways and prison chain gangs. This particular feels like a subversion of the tendency of what David Toop once referred to as the “early white minimalists” to utilize recordings of Black voices as sound sources and then steadily manipulate and distort them throughout the duration of the piece (Steve Reich’s “Come Out,” Terry Riley’s “You’re Nogood” and Gavin Bryars’ “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” are the most well-known examples, but many composers have incorporated similar dynamics into their work). On “FieldHollarDUB,” these voices reverberate through the sounds of wind and birdsong like an apparition haunting the landscape. It perhaps represents the presence of Black labor in shaping the American landscapes that have since been thoroughly decontextualized. In addition to field recordings, Calumet in Dub also incorporates sonified data taken from the US Census, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, and the EPA, displaying the changes in these landscapes over time in sonic form. The final track on the album, “RUN-ON-DUB,” consists of choppy, processed screaming voices piling onto each other, and it raises this question: if these landscapes could express the sweeping change of the past century in audible form, what would it sound like?
Answering this question is deeply complicated, but what is clear is that Long’s work reflects a great deal of faith in the healing powers of sound, nature and listening. In recent years the city of Chicago has made a number of efforts to restore the ecology of formerly industrial sites in the South and West sides. Many of the field recordings utilized on Calumet in Dub were taken at sites such as Indian Marsh Ridge and SteelWorkers Park, both of which were initially utilized for disposal of slag (a form of steel manufacturing waste) and have, in recent years, been turned into parks and green spaces. In the notes for Return and Recovery, released on LINE Imprint last year (and also commissioned for an exhibition at Columbia College) Long stated “what I have observed is that if we can create ecological conditions to bring back a biodiverse ecology perhaps we can create conditions to bring back an economy that benefits the people and wildlife living here.” By creating field recordings in these spaces, Long is effectively documenting their recovery, showcasing the sounds of natural phenomena that were silenced by destructive industrial practices. In line with the inspiration of Hazel Johnson, Long’s work is a testament to the power and resilience of the Black working class and their capacity to heal from the violence of economic and environmental degradation.
In many ways, the trajectory of the region surrounding Calumet relates to Jafa’s description of the dub structure. The economic and environmental devastation that the Black working class there experienced in the 80s is a clear moment of rupture, and the efforts of people such as Johnson in bringing about environmental reforms, as well as recent efforts by the city of Chicago to restore the ecology of the region, represent a recovery. Just as dub structures play out cycles of rupture and recovery in real time, in the context of a collective experience, Long’s music plays out the rupture and recovery of the Calumet region in the context of a listening experience. The end result is not just a transfixing, singular work of sound art, but also music that speaks to present day socioeconomic struggles with unequaled clarity - something that is needed now more than ever.
BRIDGE AUDIO’S NORMAN W. LONG DISCOVERY PLAYLIST:
ON SOUNDCLOUD
ON SPOTIFY
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