Long, Norman W. - BLACK BROWN GRAY GREEN - BRAND NEW CASSETTE TAPE

Norman W. Long is a Chicago-based sound artist. His practice involves walking, listening, improvising, performing, recording and composing to create environments and situations in which he and the audience are engaged in dialogues about memory space, value, silence and the invisible. Long has performed and toured as a member of Angel Bat Dawid and Tha Brothahood, and has collaborated with Dan Bitney and John Herndon (Tortoise), Standing On the Corner, Damon Locks (The Eternals), and Lia Kohl, among many other artists. BLACK BROWN GRAY GREEN compiles two years of recording soundscapes from the post-industrial sites and urban areas of Chicago’s southeast side, presented along with a live pre-pandemic performance recorded at Experimental Sound Studio in 2019. On BLACK BROWN GRAY GREEN, Norman W. Long presents dense collages that highlight the pure textural qualities of the environmental sound he captures: insects and birds chirping, the distant hum of machinery, the resonance of the open space around him, the muted burble of a hydrophone submerged in water. Long manipulates and processes his field recordings with a semi-modular analog synth and effects units, transforming familiar sounds into abstracted dollops of pointillist synthesis, abrasive volleys of noise, and stochastic grooves made up of elliptical percussive bursts. While some of his sessions flow through diverse narratives marked by regular introductions of contrasting tones, rhythmic figures, and mix-consuming washes of texture, other pieces draw their power from presenting the natural environment without any obvious human manipulation, beyond the subtle murmur of his electronic processing somewhere in the background. The balance between Long’s active recontextualization of his field recordings and his decisions to let them breathe in their unmodulated forms casts the album as a meditation on the relationship between humanity and the forces of nature present in post-industrial urban environments within Chic