todd merrell

Since 1978 Todd Merrell has been fascinated with the imperceptible environment of electromagnetic radiation that shortwave radio and processing can capture, and transform into an immersive, musical environment. In 1991 he began exploring the musical possibilities of this world in a collaboration with Patrick Jordan. The result was SWR, a two movement work that was performed several times in Chicago, and on WBEZ National Public Radio. Composer Lou Mallozzi, of the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, wrote in P-Form Magazine:"It soon becomes clear that the focus of the work is not on acheiving any particular musical moment, but on the ephemerality of sonic transformation itself. Unlike compositions that utilize radio in part for its referential or signifying qualities, SWR is more in the minimalist tradition of relying on the primacy of the material itself. The work is a celebration of the radio as material and of the belief that minutiae and limited systems can yield rich results. But it is also a celebration of the rich, ragged, unstable thickness of analog sound in a world anesthetized by the crisp and clean precision of digital audio."He has since developed these techniques and incorporated them into a larger, more visually and sonically evocative world, with an emphasis on live performance, and the thrilling contingency and danger that such site- and time- specifically dependent work produces. Along with several current solo projects, he continues to work with like-minded musicians and sound artists, and recently completed a new project with Aidan Baker, who joined him in 2004 on a mini-tour of the Northeastern United States.Todd Merrell studied music composition and voice at Berklee College of Music, and with composer James Sellars of the Hartt School. His works have been performed by The New York Festival Of Song, Chicago A Capella, and double bassist Robert Black of Bang On A Can Allstars. Merrell has performed in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Hartford, and at such venues as The Guggenheim Museum, Knitting Factory, Issue Project Room, Galapagos Art Space, Cake Shop, Hot House, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, Berklee Performance Center, 119 Gallery, Real Art Ways, and free103point9’s Wave Farm. He has collaborated with BT, Aidan Baker, Duane Pitre, Craig Colorusso, Casey Block, Lou Rossi, Patrick Jordan, Gary Higgins, Bunny Brains, Blaise Siwula, and Jake Bell, and appeared with Francisco Lopez, Joan La Barbara, Robert Dick, Ricardo Arias, Barbara Ess, Peggy Ahwesh, and Sybarite. Merrell’s newest album with Aidan Baker and Patrick Jordan, 'Nagual', was released on Archive Recordings in November, 2007, and he has recorded for Dreamland Recordings and Whirlybird Records. He was also recently named a 2008 recipient of the New Boston Fund Individual Artist Fellowship."Like Tod Dockstader, Connecticut-based Todd Merrell is a sound explorer who has been processing radio frequencies and spectral communications from shortwave radios and transforming them into soundscapes since 1978. Neptune was recorded in real time with no overdubs and no post-production in two-track, direct to DAT with Merrell using only a single band shortwave receiver, a loop sampler, delay and reverb effects processor and mixer. Each of the eight tracks are devoted to one of Neptune's 13 moons (the five most recently discovered have yet to be named). While the eighth planet from the Sun is one of the gaseous planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus), whose composition is made up of ice, rock, helium and hydrogen, and whose winds reach up to 200 kms/hr, astronomers know little about these moons. This leaves the door wide open for Merrell to imagine what the sounds on and surrounding these moons would be. Too often when the solar system is evoked in music, it is often depicted in quasi-mystical terms with the music falling into cliched psychedelia. Merrell avoids this pitfall and wisely assumes that the moons have some of the same characteristics of their parent planet. So that while Merrell's immersive drone-based soundscapes are definitely celestial, they are equally forbidding; gaseous in shape with a temperature that is glacially cold and an omnisciently thick, turbulent, distant roar, something like being trapped in one of Neptune's howling wind storms. Sometimes this ghostly audio manifests as a massive, swirling echo chamber as on "Thalassa" and "Larissa" or a gigantic bass tone on "Galatea" or more benignly as on the piercing, ringing loops of "Naiad" and "Despina". Only "Proteus" and "Nereid" break from the template, the former dominated by a granular buzzing static that comes close to Francisco Lopez's abrasive fissures of sound, the latter employing the microtonal static as a broken rhythm to the companion staccato overtones, as if the Raster-Noton camp had decided to embrace the dark ambience of Robert Rich. Of course, if your source material is radiophonic transmissions, you're bound to tune into some human voices and on "Neptune" they come in two forms, either as barely perceptible echoing voices struggling to be heard amidst the murky waveforms on "Thalassa" or as a washed out angelic choir that forms the basis for "Triton". This, despite the fact, that humanity's first up close contact with Neptune was through the photos relayed by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. Neptune is a compelling and occasionally harrowing celebration of this distant blue-colored orb."— Richard Moule, Signal To Noise (Winter, 2007)"As befitting an album named after a distant planet and with its individual tracks named after said planet's moons, Neptune begins with a dark, evocative chill very much in keeping with many of the best practitioners of the danker side of ambience -- this isn't so much a healing wash of sound as a sense of desolate, empty landscapes under a coal-black sky. But "Naiad" isn't the album in miniature, as Todd Merrell explores various shades of murk and disorienting gloom throughout the album. Rather than being entirely calm to the point of death, activity crops up in careful ways -- the seemingly random, heavily echoed blips and burps on "Galatea" set against the absolute zero of the background wash, the slow, steady rhythm of "Triton," feeling like an endless, regular but syncopated pulse through gauze. Some pieces definitely have the feeling of alien broadcasts -- consider the distorted, bubbling flow of what sounds like language of some form or another on "Thalassa," rising out of infinite depths (all the more appropriate given the nautical imagery applied to the planet and its moons). The concluding "Nereid" provides a fine counterbalance to the opening "Naiad," sounding even more like a Thomas Köner piece lost somewhere in the outer cosmos -- further living up to the inspiration for the album as a whole." 3.5 stars— Ned Raggett, All Music Guide"Admittedly, there are more than a handful of things about this recording that emit new-agey warning signals. The cover kinda screams ECM, 1978, the title along with the track names (eight of Neptune's moons) and, on a superficial level, even the music. But at least that last bit is misleading. Merrell sources short-wave emissions from the electro-magnetosphere, makes minimal adjustments or enhancements, mostly involving loops and reverb, and presents the results as thick, sometimes smooth, sometimes gnarly slabs of hum n static. If, after all is said and done, it tends more toward the tonally agreeable and if the reverb is ladled on a tad heavily for my taste, I can see the music having wide appeal for people who enjoy (for example) Pauline Oliveros drone work or the long string music of Ellen Fullman.Merrell has also worked with Francisco Lopez and you can hear a certain affinity, particularly if you pump up the volume a few notches. In some pieces, such as Larissa, you get toward a similar cavernous massiveness of sonic space; Lopez may seek to place you inside a jet engine but Merrell wants to situate you directly in line with a solar flare. A track like this comes closest to abandoning any traditional musical elements and is most successful, to these ears, as a pure, heady chunk of sonics. One can easily imagine, given a strong enough sound system, how immersive this music could be in live performance. The following cut, Proteus, takes things a step further by injecting some rude splats of static into the mix, creating an even grainier, less cloying stew. Nereid, the final piece here, breaks formation with the others, initially discarding the drone-wash and utilizing a series of semi-regular pulses, dusted with static and navigating between sine-like tones at various aural distances though eventually it too settles into the ether. Its an intriguing tack, recalling (of all things) recordings like Hancocks Sextant, pared and reduced but retaining a vestige of funk.As mentioned above, Neptune is likely to be right up the alley for those already attuned with Oliveros and associated musicians, less so for the noisier inclined."— Brian Olewnick, Bagatellen (August, 2006)"Taking his inspiration from the isolationist music of Thomas Koner or the more recent works of Biosphere, Merrell crafts a dark, empty space in which nothing seems to live. Like a cold, glacier wind coming out of your speakers, with small events happening, but that never work their way upfront. Everything seems to be happening in a low key mode. Silent and tranquil, but ever so dark that 'new age' isn't a term that even comes closely to this. Great stuff..."— Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly (issue 525)"Shortwave radio sounds have been attractive to electronic music composers since John Cage twiddled the dials for his Imaginary Landscapes and Karlheinz Stockhausen sought alien communication in the music of the spheres. More recently, John Duncan has used shortwave sounds extensively in his recent experimental work. The range of sounds that come from the deep unknown connects musicians with something larger than themselves, something from Out There (like Mulder’s Truth). Connecticut composer Todd Merrell has used shortwaves in his work for many years, and his spirit on Neptune is closer to Duncan than Stockhausen, especially to Duncan’s more ambient works like Phantom Broadcast.Neptune is the second album released in the Australian label Dreamland Recordings’ projected set of nine Planetary Series albums. Each of the eight tracks (corresponding to Neptune’s named satellites) was composed in real-time, solo, with no overdubs or post-production. Merrell used only a short wave receiver, a loop sampler, a couple of effects and a mixer. Several tracks are deep ambient drones that wouldn’t be out of place on Oöphoi’s Umbra label, but on Thalassa and Galatea the voices from the original source transmissions are still in evidence, albeit heavily processed. Proteus is the noisiest piece, with a continuous buzzing underlying the sustained drones. The longest track, Nereid, has a repeating rhythmic ostinato with slow melodic lines over a low-fidelity background noise like tape hiss.Merrell succeeds in getting a variety of sounds from his material, with each track like a short vignette of messages from deep space. At low volumes, Neptune is suitable for late-night drifting, but there is a lot of detail for headphone listeners."— Caleb Deupree, Ambient Visions (December, 2006)"Todd Merrell creates powerful, unsettling ambient sound sculptures using short wave radios."— Time Out New York"They take shortwave radios and use a variety of effects to transform the signals they pull out of the air into music. But that's like saying Rachmaninoff wrote music for orchestras. Playing at Real Art Ways on Saturday night, they looked like -- and sometimes sounded like -- spies in a submarine, engineering the next missile crisis. No sooner would a rhythm become familiar than one of them would tear it down with a piercing squawk or an eruption of bass. Baker's chiming guitar offered respite from the storm, multiplying upon itself in minimalist phrases until these, too, were almost too much to bear; he then deftly pulled the plug, letting the listener fall back onto a cushion of ambient white noise. And through it all, echoes of human voices and glimpses of broadcast music wove in and out like tentative reminders that we, indeed, are the stuff their music is made of. Brilliant."— Dan Barry, Hartford Advocate"Todd Merrell is an expert at subtlety. His sounds do not beg for attention, rather they simmer in the background and slowly work their way into the psyche."— Zac Keiller, Dreamland Recordings"Quite enjoyable detailed obscure spaces in there."— Francisco Lopez"Merrell and Jordan construct and traverse a fascinating soundscape choral undulations, mechanical grindings, distant swoops and plunges, waves of white noise. As one vein is exhausted, they find another to mine, moving the piece along at just the right moment and settling momentarily, at just the right place."— Lou Mallozzi, P-Form Magazine"Thanks to the composers' sensitivity to sonic nuances, they remind us that this old and still ubiquitous technology this radiophonic nowhere can be a pleasant place to travel."— Eric Leonardson, New Art Examiner..This profile was edited with Thomas' myspace editor™ V2.5