mattie barbier has spent years interrogating the spaces where sound and structure meet. Their work reveals what can be found beyond the reach of conventional playing. Two recent recordings, the solo work Is This The Land I Wish Death To Find Me and RAGE Thormbones’ (their duo with Weston Olencki) tilth soil, capture different aspects of that investigation. barbier uses magnetic geophones to listen through steel, turning the building at The Tank (where half of Is This The Land… was recorded) into a transducer while slow progressions of minor thirds activate latent vibrations in the structure. Elsewhere, they build phantom choirs from trombones re-recording themselves, sonifying the acoustic reality of brass when human control recedes.
With RAGE Thormbones, the decade-long collaboration with Olencki, the inquiry extends further into physical process. On tilth soil, microphones become listening devices placed where sound normally exits, transforming trombones into stethoscopes pressed against harbors and museum walls. barbier’s approach draws from psychoacoustics and environmental resonance, treating sound as something already present, waiting to be uncovered rather than imposed. Instruments become collaborators in constant conversation with the spaces holding them. These recordings ask what happens when brass stops being a voice and becomes an ear instead. It’s hard not to be transfixed.
Is This The Land… is OUT NOW on Discreet Archive. tilth soil is OUT NOW on Marginal Frequency. mattie barbier’s website can be found HERE.
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What are your earliest memories of sound? Not necessarily music, but the sounds that first captured your attention as a child.
I find that most of my childhood memories are largely devoid of sound- I think I’ve generally found that memory of sound is something that I’ve had to consciously create a capacity for. This process has really informed my practice, both of field recording and actively listening to my environment. I feel like my sonic memory and how it affects me has gotten significantly stronger as I’ve aged. However, I do have a very dim memory of visiting Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, as a young child, and how different the wind sounded and felt when directly on the water, rather than through a city.
When did you first encounter the trombone, and what drew you to it specifically? Was there a particular sound or moment that made you think, “This is the instrument”?
The trombone very much found me, largely by accident. I was quite tall as a child and pretty ambidextrous. Because of this, I was fairly clumsy and did not quite understand left from right, since they both did the same thing. When the band director came around, I, like most kids, wanted to play drums but didn’t understand the rudiments and did them all backwards. I was told then to go see the person with a trombone. At the time, I was quite upset, but I’m fairly grateful for this choice after years of watching percussionists have to deal with teardowns and rentals when I’m able to go on tour with a trombone and a backpack. I wasn’t a particularly motivated trombonist at a young age until I heard a performance of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony at age 16, and its sheer weight of sound. Something about the clarity and stillness of the trombone choral in the final movement really ignited something, and the trombone has been central to my life since then.
You’ve mentioned working with experimental intonation and “latent acoustic worlds.” When did you first become aware that instruments and spaces could produce sounds beyond their conventional use? Was there a specific experience that opened that door?
I was pretty fortunate in my studies to fall into a bit of sackbut playing very early in college- I don’t really remember how I found the instrument, but I got to play with Nathaniel Wood, who is a very wonderful and active period brass performer and maker in Germany now, and Ross Duffin who wrote a very wonderful book, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony. I was totally clueless as to what was happening and left the experience not really knowing (or properly appreciating) what I had participated in, but it gave me a real curiosity for timbral and pitch flexibility in music that was distinctly absent from my conservatory education. I was quite fortunate to find a lot of what I was looking for when I enrolled at CalArts and met Wolfgang von Schweinitz directly at the beginning of my MFA. I got to study and collaborate with him quite extensively, especially engaging with his research into brass scordatura. Pretty quickly into that work, it became apparent that the ‘overtone series’ brass instruments are supposed to be built from are really just collections of completely chaotic forces that masquerade as one process. The discovery of this latent chaos that lurked inside brass instruments has led me to question what is present in the acoustic environments around us, given how much the environment affects the instrument, and how one can turn this alternative reality into heard experiences. It’s been much more of a slow drip of going from thinking instruments and harmony function on a singular reality towards understanding that they all exist in a spectrum that’s far beyond my comprehension, but one I very much enjoy doing my best to explore and interface with.
The title of this recent solo work on Discreet Archive, Is This The Land I Wish Death to Find Me, carries significant weight. Can you talk about where that phrase comes from and what it means to you in the context of this recording?
The title, maybe somewhat darkly, came to me on my drive to go teach on the 405, which is a 12-lane highway in Los Angeles that often resembles a parking lot. While the title came to me, as they often do, while driving, it’s thankfully not directly about the interstate.
The work is largely drawing from feelings of anxiety about our long-term stability in the wake of the fires in Los Angeles earlier this year (and the particular mistake of reading Parable of the Sower in its immediate aftermath), which revived long-dormant feelings about Hurricane Katrina and its effect on New Orleans, where my family has lived for multiple generations. Being largely from and currently living in environments that are potentially ecologically unsustainable, with our world’s seeming addiction to accelerationism, has left me thinking quite a lot about how and where one exists.
The title itself has been used for two works- the solo piece on this record, as well as a piece for the wonderful Berlin-based brass ensemble, Apparat. Both works are structured from a series of minor thirds that slowly shift up the overtone series. They were written concurrently, with the solo growing out of playing through the harmonic ideas while I was in the early stages of writing for Apparat.
You recorded this at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts using magnetic geophones attached to the steel exterior. How did you discover this approach? What were you hoping the Tank’s structure would reveal?
Geophonic recordings have been a pretty central part of my field recording practice for a while, but about two years ago, I captured a really singular and beautifully otherworldly recording from a building at an organization called Tree People in Los Angeles. The recording itself is basically unaltered on the back half of my record, Paper Blown Between the Spaces in my Ribs, which was released last year on Dinzu Artefacts. I have no idea what caused such a complex and rich recording- I had ten minutes until a soundcheck that day, so in this spare time, I thought I’d attach it to this building. This sound occurred for exactly ten minutes, then stopped and did not come back. I’ve been kind of chasing the sonic spectre that was that moment ever since, so I brought the geophone to the Tank in the hopes that it might capture something else magical. After listening back to this session, I had no idea that a geophone attached to the walls could capture such a clear sound or that the trombone could so thoroughly vibrate the walls of a space. Harking back to the previous question about latent acoustic worlds, it was quite an expansive experience to realize just how much effect one’s sound has on the space and the unheard ways it’s interacting with the external resonances acting on the Tank.
Can you talk a little more generally about the experience of playing and recording at The Tank?
It’s a truly wonderful space and experience to have- I feel so fortunate that my mother-in-law lives relatively nearby, which has allowed several trips. Even the process of getting there really affects the session and one’s mental state. The drive there involves going through a relatively narrow valley with cattle pasture on either side. On my first trip there, I suddenly had to stop as the cattle had gone through a gap in the fence and were covering the road. It was a deeply surreal experience of sitting in a car, surrounded by cows and having no clue what to do, when a group of literal cowboys showed up and herded them away. As a person who grew up in swampland, it really felt like some kind of fever dream from a movie one watches as a child.
The actual experience of being there is really wonderful- outside of its obvious sustain, the space incredibly focuses one’s awareness of every sound you make. A slight click or dragging of a shoe creates a sound that blossoms and decays for half a minute. The space demands you sink into your entire body as a sound-making apparatus, which inspires a very intense focus on and stillness about the sounds that you put into the Tank. Waiting for the sound to clear, to start a take, really gives you a chance to listen to the ambient sound of the building and make musical choices that are really in duo with the space, rather than a solo inside of it. It’s really a wonderful place to play and record. Michael and Samantha, the resident engineers, do a wonderful job both of getting an excellent recording in the space and creating an environment where you feel comfortable with the slow and reflective pace that the space inspires.
In the recording, you’re essentially using the trombone to activate the Tank rather than performing in a traditional sense. How does that change your relationship to playing? What are you listening for when you work this way?
In this case, I didn’t really have any clue that the trombone would activate the Tank so thoroughly. I did a few tests to see if it picked anything up and then more or less did the rest of the session as I had done the previous sessions in the Tank- largely trying to play in a way that listened to the way the space responded and make sonic responses that try to be in conversation with it. I generally have found that clear plans don’t tend, at least for me, to translate well to the Tank- I’ve found it a space that needs to express an opinion, so I try to play in a way that asks it questions and leaves space for it to respond. In this case, I mostly did that and then found this really incredible surprise that was waiting for me on my recorder when I got home.
And on the second piece, “Teeth of the Second Range,” you’re creating this choir of ‘unplayed’ or ‘phantom’ brass instruments through iterative re-recording. How did you develop this process? What were you chasing?
The fundamental process is essentially the same as Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room, minus the speaking. The impetus to experiment with instrumental ‘room tones’ grew out of interest in how the resonance of brass instruments deviate from the overtone series and the significant timbral gulf that exists within that deviation based on how one activates the instrument (i.e., just playing up the series, vs multiphonics, vs alternative means of activation like reeds). This significant timbral diversity made me really curious about what an instrument’s resonance is without human input and how the intersection of those forces change that resonant reality.
The title comes from an early poetic name for the Organ of Corti. How did you encounter that phrase, and what connection do you see between the physiology of hearing and what you’re creating sonically?
I came across the title in Veit Erlmann’s Reason and Resonance, which is an incredibly interesting, if overly dense, book. It was apparently Alfonso Corti’s original name for the organ, later named after him. I find a huge amount of inspiration in reading about aurality and psychoacoustics, both our current understanding and the history of our learning about how we hear and our understanding of how sound functions. I think that the process of making exploratory sound and alternative sound practices is deeply connected to and inspired by a deeper understanding of how sound functions and how our bodies turn vibration into a sound that we hear. And all the weird and amazing ways that that process breaks down! I’ve been incredibly grateful the last few months as Robert Wannamaker, a wonderful composer and James Tenney scholar, taught a psychoacoustics class this past semester, and somehow it worked out schedule-wise that I could take it. It’s been such an incredibly inspiring experience.
And of course there’s the new RAGE THORMBONES album with Weston Olencki, tilth soil. You and Weston Olencki have been working together for over a decade. How has the collaboration evolved? What can you do together that you can’t do alone?
It’s pretty amazing to me that we’ve been so fortunate to keep this collaboration going for so long while never living in the same city and having gone through significant artistic changes individually that have allowed us to grow together, which has strengthened our collaborative and personal relationships. It’s truly a very fortunate chosen family relationship. When we first met at Darmstadt, we were both writing music, but were mostly interpreters who sought to commission works from composers, so we started as a relatively traditional new music group, or as traditional as a trombone duo can be. While we both, individually and together, still maintain collaborative relationships with composers, our primary focus has shifted to our individual voices and creating our own work, so the duo has evolved into a group that makes its own work. I think Weston and I are, fortunately, very interested in quite similar questions and have overlapping histories, but we ask our questions and approach problems quite differently, so the work that we make together is quite different from our individual work, as we push each other to ask questions about and use our ideas in ways that we would not when working alone. Additionally, as trombonists, it’s made a huge difference for both of us to be able to constantly share ideas and alternative approaches, which has both driven our instrumental innovations and created an idea-sharing environment that necessitates an ability to articulate what one is doing, which is normally not part of such a physiological process. That learning process of articulation and sharing has really accelerated our individual and collective abilities by better understanding the logic that drives our bodily interaction with the instruments. I’m deeply grateful for the familial and collaborative relationship we’ve been able to build and maintain. One often feels like they’re wandering the woods alone, and I don’t know where I would be without such a dear friend to wander them with.
The album description says you’re “physically using the instruments” rather than just playing them unconventionally. Can you give me some specific examples of what that means in practice?
Definitely! The record itself was made essentially as a tour diary of the time we got to spend together. Somewhere along the line, we started recording spaces we were in by putting microphones into the trombone and recording places by pointing the bells at parts of cities- largely inspired by the strange and amazing photos of historic war tubas that were used as listening devices pre-radar. Harking back to the psychoacoustics class I mentioned, it was really interesting to learn about the how and why they work, but that’s a total aside. That approach led to the ‘Buoy’ track as well, which I’ll go into detail on in its question. We also used the trombones like bows- a lot of the high frequency content on the record came from using the bells to bow heaters and windows in the CowShed- a wonderful, sadly gone, venue in Berlin with very special acoustics, where we also recorded the segments of Wolfgang’s Juz for the record.
“Buoy” uses microphones placed inside two trombones floating in the harbor of Bergen, Norway. I love the mental image of this (let alone how great the piece sounds!) How did that piece come about? What were you hoping to capture by letting the horns literally float?
It was a really fun and slightly stressful experience to make! We had used poster tack to attach mics into the small ends of our bells, which detach from the instrument, and were wandering around the Bergen Harbour recording the space. I don’t know which of us had the idea, but this somehow quickly led to us dunking the bells into the water. We couldn’t actually let go and let them float, but there was a mental calculus of where in the harbour is shallow enough that we can dive in and retrieve our bells if they somehow slipped into the water, which was a daunting concern in Norway in March. Thankfully, none of that happened. We kind of turned our horns into hydrophones that we could play in real time by dunking them in and out of the water and controlling their depths, which created a constantly shifting filter of the harbour above and below water, as filtered by a trombone.
And then on “The lamps are going out,” you layer excerpts of Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s “JUZ (A Yodel Cry)” using room resonance from the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Can you talk about your relationship with von Schweinitz and why you wanted to create this tribute?
Wolfgang, for me, is one of the most deeply important and unexpected relationships of my life. I showed up at CalArts for my MFA, having essentially enrolled because the trombonist from my favorite Xenakis record taught there- I had no clue about James Tenney or his history with the school or the amazing human they had just hired in Wolfgang to be his successor. I was very fortunate that he was somehow the first faculty member I met, and it completely changed just about everything for me, musically. Outside of introducing me to so many new concepts, he also had this old trombone piece, Juz, that had been abandoned after a somewhat disastrous premiere. He had blamed the piece not being playable, but it really was due to quite a poor performance. We worked together quite closely for an extended period to rework Juz, and it became both a staple of my performance career and a foundational part of how I learned to think about sound and brass acoustics. I eventually reworked it again, with his blessing, for Weston and I as a duo, excerpts of which are what is on the record. We recorded them at the aforementioned CowShed in Berlin, which holds a special place in my heart as I performed the solo version there with Wolfgang shortly after we finished reworking it. The memory of that performance and the travels with Wolfgang to do it have been very close to my heart for a long time, and the acoustics of that space have provided significant inspiration to seek unique resonant environments, which led me to the Tank.
Before our last RAGE tour, I contacted Christiane, who runs the venue, about the possibility of Weston and I recording there, only to find out that she is sadly losing her lease and the venue will cease to exist. She very kindly was able to have Weston and I in there to record a lot of the material on the record, which turned out to be the last activity in the space before it closed down. It felt deeply special not just to have a chance to say goodbye to this space with sound from Wolfgang, but also as a way to say goodbye to this chapter of life, as Wolfgang informed me shortly before the tour that he’ll be retiring from CalArts and leaving California to return to Germany. It felt especially poignant to get to say goodbye to both in this way. Wolfgang has been a constant guiding presence in my life and a very dear friend and colleague for nearly twenty years, so his and Cecile’s departure has been a very sad loss for our community. It’s been a very strange experience these last months as we finish the record and this tribute to him, as I’ve taken over his Intonation Workshop course and inherited his car when he left the country. I feel very fortunate to have this bittersweet, if slightly surreal, way of keeping him in my daily life.
Both albums seem interested in what instruments sound like when human control is reduced or transformed. What draws you to that territory? What do you hear in those moments?
I think we’re both partially drawn to these kinds of ideas because, in part, brass instruments are something one is never quite in control of. There’s an inherent element of chaos in their functionality- as a pianist friend used to put it, a mistake on a brass instrument is the equivalent to if he were to throw his arms on the keyboard midphrase and then keep playing like nothing happened. There’s a chaotic element where, when one thing goes wrong, every part of the sound completely changes. That has really drawn my interest into how far these things can be pushed, and inherent resonances of the instrument affect them. For me, these moments of reduction or transformation of human control lead to constant surprise and discovery- when I feel like we’ve reached the edge of where the trombone can go or be used, some new world opens up.
And, as always, to close… What are your favorite sounds in the world?
That’s probably an answer that changes constantly, but one of my favorite sounds is the quiet that one finds in the city in the late night after the rain has stopped. At least in Los Angeles, the city is very muted, and the light pollution reflects off the cloud cover in a way that seems to confuse one’s sense of time, which makes the silence much more still.
Alternatively, in my neighborhood, we have this colossal murder of crows that will collectively move at dusk. It fills our entire horizon and is filled with both constant motion and stasis that confuses one’s ears in a way that feels deeply magical.
Also, the low C of a cello.
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