“I love writing music but always write it with the intention of it being used as supplies for sound design,” Ryan Trecartin confided to Artnews in 2016. “I’ve always wanted to translate it to live instruments.” For only the second time ever, an Aspen ArtWeek 2024 performance will see Trecartin do just that, in collaboration with musician Michael Beharie, Trecartin’s long-time creative partner Lizzie Fitch, the DJ Ashland Mines (aka Bobby Beethoven, fka Total Freedom), ArtCrush Honoree Jason Moran, and artist and composer Aaron David Ross (aka ADR).
Sound might not be the first discipline associated with Trecartin, but in the sprawling video installations for which he is renowned, there’s rarely ever a moment of silence. When Trecartin’s characters aren’t singing, screeching or shouting into the void, they’re usually being accompanied by ambient patter or drowned out by successive waves of sonic blasts. His sound design can be as tactile as fingernails on a chalkboard or as blaring and relentless as a DJ set. In the odd moments when the dialogue does cut off, it’s usually a brief faint before the volume resumes at an even more frenzied level. This non-stop cacophony serves to characterize Trecartin’s distorted and outsized creatures — a cast of hyper-articulate, motor-mouthed mutants who bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary YouTubers and TikTokers. It also works as a kind of echolocation: a means of “sounding out” where they stand in relation to one another and the wider world. “The characters are constantly negotiating ideas that I conceive of as architecture,” Trecartin explained in a 2013 interview with frieze, “[they] are always declaring things to explore and define where they are situated, to find out if they’re participating in the same architecture; to find out if they’re collaborating or not.”
Ryan Trecartin, Ashland Mines and Lizzie Fitch, 2024. Photography Trent Davis Bailey.
You could trace this concern with collaboration back to Experimental People (aka XPPL), the band which Trecartin was part of in college and describes as “deeply collaborative and ever evolving.” While he played keyboard and bass guitar, XPPL bandmate Lizzie Fitch began to mess around with the software FruityLoops to create rudimentary but intricate instrumental beats. However, rather than building out a functioning rhythmic floor, Fitch’s beat-making was brittle, elaborate and interwoven — in our recent conversation, she spoke of them as being more like creating a knotty textile rather than generating something that you could rap over. Fitch would go on to become Trecartin’s most consistent collaborator, and together the duo have built a sprawling multi-media practice with a revolving cast of regular associates, among them Ashland Mines. Mines has worked on-and-off with the duo since at least 2007, when he first appeared in Trecartin’s 2007 film I-Be Area. Their collaborations have taken all manner of forms: from bizarro fashion editorials for DIS to opening for Cardi B at MoMA PS1, New York, in 2017. All three are casually self-effacing and eager to credit the other’s contributions, and their decentered approach to authorship and fascination with how to wrong-foot their audience has been a reliable engine for new work.
When, in a recent conversation, I characterized Mines as a “musician,” he balked slightly. Mines doesn’t think of himself as fitting neatly into that category, nor that of “artist.” (If pushed, I imagine Fitch and Trecartin would feel the same.) But music has been a constant throughout Fitch and Trecartin’s collaborations across the decades. “I try to make my movies feel like music,” Trecartin confided to the journalist Annie Armstrong in an interview this January. “You know how the first time you hear a song, you hear the whole form, and it’s more of a ride and an experience than when you obsessively play it on repeat and you start to hear all the components that make the song. [My movies] are designed to be more of a ride that you have to let wash over you and dive into.” This hyper-textural approach to sound is in keeping with the rest of the duo’s output, as is their tendency to remix and recontextualize whole raw elements into their work. Trecartin also mentioned in our conversation his desire to create a “sculptural” aspect to music — something more deeply felt than a simple accompaniment. This syncs extremely well with Mines, in whose mixes, produced as Bobby Beethoven (fka Total Freedom), pop hooks gasping for air accelerate into a flurry of jagged sound, hard-hitting drum breaks and ear-shreddingly harsh noise: a fascinating counterpart to the mangled language of Trecartin’s scripts, themselves combinations of original writing and found sound.
In one sense, the roots of this year’s Aspen ArtWeek commission can be traced back to 2016, when Jason Moran was programming a series of performances at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Trecartin relates how Moran’s “way of experiencing the movies, and the way he noticed the sound design” led him to ask Moran to consider translating his work on video scores into a composition that could be played live. The resulting piece was realized in collaboration by Trecartin and ADR, Fitch, Mines, and vocalists Ian Isiah and Akeem Smith. Eight years on, the ArtWeek performance, Trecartin says, will be “taking that first experience, the first ‘try,’ to a new level.” Commissioned by curator Eliza Ryan, the project’s title — Audience Plant 2024 — sums up the warped but engaged vantage point it aims to establish. Fitch, Trecartin and Mines will once again be joined by Moran, as well as 15 other musicians. For this performance, the group has been working with an ensemble to adapt music Trecartin has composed on his computer for live performance (besides two songs from the 2016 composition, it will all be music written after 2022). This element of translation, from sound waves that can be infinitely manipulated to the reality of musicians with only so many hands, has a certain poignancy that speaks to the present but, in a way, also harkens back to Trecartin and Fitch’s earlier years with XPPL. “Live music has always been quietly happening,” Trecartin observes.
To my mind, Trecartin, Fitch, Mines and their milieu are inextricably linked to the most exciting currents that ran through culture in the early 2010s — a period when, with fellow experimentalists like Jacolby Satterwhite, Telfar Clemens and DIS, they attempted to get to grips with a world that was both flattened and heightened by the internet, by mapping it out for themselves. The three of them set out into uncharted digital territory but weren’t afraid to work through the strangeness at its heart. Social media prompts its users to endlessly express themselves, while simultaneously collapsing everything into an undifferentiated heap of content. But, rather than being overwhelmed by this glut of information or becoming a cowed and passive subject to the algorithm, Trecartin and his collaborators have long suggested that one could not only adapt to this landscape but be active and thrive in it together. The vision they created was manicured and messy, fun and threatening, performative and confessional. It might appear to be a cliché to call their work “prescient,” but the world we inhabit feels strikingly similar to theirs. In some ways, the piece for Aspen ArtWeek represents both a departure and a return — a reminder of the trio’s gifts for manipulating sound and of breaking through with all new IRL capabilities.
Harry Tafoya is an art and music writer and arts editor-at-large of Paper magazine. He lives in New York.
