Michael Snow Tribute #4: Mercersound

[Various Artists] 

Mercersound

Toronto, Canada: Mercer Union, 2005

Audio CD, 12.4 × 14.3 cm.

Edition of 1000

When I was the Director of Programming and Publications at Mercer Union I compiled this CD of artists' audio to be distributed at the 51st Venice Biennale, in June of 2005. The disk included works by Yoko Ono, Martin Creed, Laurel Woodcock, Thurston Moore, Mathew Sawyer, Jonathan Monk, Kelly Mark, David Cunningham (of the Flying Lizards), Christian Bök, and others. Michael Snow's contribution is very short work from two years prior, called Elevator Music. 

Many of the other contributors have ties to Snow. Yoko Ono cites his 1967 film Wavelength as hugely influential to her work, describing it as "an incredibly beautiful film. A revolution in itself really."

Thurston Moore is also a fan. I saw Snow's band CCMC open for Sonic Youth at a Warehouse show in 1998. I worried that their free-jazz approach - fronted by sound poet Paul Dutton - might not go down so well with pop music audiences, even a band with avant-garde pedigree like Sonic Youth. But before their set, Moore took to the stage and asked the audience to give CCMC their full attention.  Such is the respect for Sonic Youth's curation, that the room fell silent. They pay rapt attention to a performance they might've otherwise talked through, impatiently waiting for the headline act. On the tourbus afterwards, several Sonic Youth members brought out books for Michael to sign. 

I don't know if Christian Bök had a professional relationship with Snow, but he was there the first time I met Michael, at a dinner after a performance at Nathan Philips Square. 

Jonathan Monk had a two-person exhibition with Snow at Jessica Bradley's gallery. It was accompanied by a reception event that Mercer Union co-presented, though I can't recall what the pair did. Unless I'm conflating it with another event, Jonathan served drinks from behind the bar. 

The top image above is from the MoMA website, who have the disk in their library collection. The second is a scan of the inner CD tray card, from Discogs.  With no funds to hire a designer, I typed the track listing on an old typewriter whose ribbon would occasionally jog from black to red. The final image is from my archive of the original CDs used to compile the disk. 

Michael Snow would often attend openings and receptions at Mercer Union, with his partner Peggy Gale. On more than one time a visiting artist would be beside himself with joy at the realization that the legendary Michael Snow was attending his exhibition. 

"In 2003, a curator at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid asked me to do an installation in one of the building elevators which are beautifully glass-enclosed on the facade of the very old building (17th century?). I proposed "Elevator Music", which was to play in one of the elevators. There was to be a computer program that would sustain a single note as the elevator opened, then would resume the piece as the rose or descended. The duration of the two parts of the piece are how long it takes to rise or to descend in the elevator without stops at any other floors. I went to Madrid to work on it, but bureaucratic arguments over who had the right to what where in the museum finally cancelled it". 

- Michael Snow