The Chaos and Claustrophobia of Feedback - Reflecting with Resident Artist Joseph Brock
The Chaos and Claustrophobia of Feedback – Reflecting with Resident Artist Joseph Brock
June 22, 2021
When I talk with Joseph Brock, I’m thinking about feedback. I’ve been listening to some of Brock’s audio work: looping tracks of Brock talking over his own musical performance, discussing it, critiquing it. Some of it is reminiscent of Steve Reich’s ‘Pendulum Music’, taking the chaos of audio feedback and turning it into rhythm. I’m asking him: is feedback always a loop? Is a loop always fed back?
Because Brock is stuck on loops. Aren’t we all? Brock is a classically trained double bassist, but he always knew it was a job. Jazz finds its freedom inside highly constrained loops, inside the loops of convention, the loops your bandmates perform and you must work within. Our jobs are loops too, as we return to them day after day, talking with the same coworkers, attending to the same tasks. The pandemic has highlighted this feeling of circling. Our conversation loops, as I keep going back to Brock’s past experiences as a musician, as a student, as a painter. I’m the questioner of his life, the interviewer, trying to draw something out.
Brock has been thinking about the piece he developed at CultureHub – Nikeloops – for a long time. It’s looped in his head for years, shifting as the world shifts around him. At one point, Brock wanted to show himself running and falling, running and falling, the continuous feeling of trying to escape over and over again. Later, he describes the running as the mechanics of survival, the repeated motion of the legs. Each loop is different in the details, but loops onto itself all the same. There’s a claustrophobia I feel when he describes it to me, as if I’m already there, tripping over myself through the pandemic. Chaos settling into rhythm. A kind of taming.
A few days after our conversation I send him an email with some questions about his audio work. Are these sounds meant to be a controlled use of instability and flaws? Are you critiquing your performance or commenting on the music? But these questions are actually the questions Brock has for his own work. They’re the questions he wants me to be asking, but they’re not the questions he’s answering. They’re the chaos he’s settling into, the way his mind is spinning. They’re what happens when we’re inside the feedback, looking out.
Katy Ilonka Gero is a poet, essayist, and scientist, and is a CultureHub Resident Contributing Writer (2020–2021). Read more about their work.