Dan Lander
Dan Lander turns exclusively towards recorded sound. As a producer of audio works, he engages in an aspect of audio art that practices the dematerialization of art, maintaining a marginal position outside of the cult of the autonomous object and remains a purposeful thorn in the side of widespread heterogeneity that exists in our culture. Lander's basis of composition is not unlike that used in documentary photography, an objective of which is to capture and transpose reality. Instead of camera, Lander's tools of represantation are a microphone and tape recorder, aimed aat the sounds of life and attracted to'the complexity of apparent simplicity".The process is comprised of isolating cultural representations to profile and playback to the listener and involves choosing when to turn the tape recorder on and off, consciously selecting the microphone, tape stock and sound treatments used for the work and, often, physically cutting and splicing the audio tape to obtain the final "composition". Lander records from all facets of his experience. He recontextualizes: a telephone concersation with a collections agent, annoyance calls on his radio show; the dialogue on a walky-talky while executing a soundcheck, the sounds of crossing the street, attending a political rally and riding the subway to work. He transforms the ubiquitous "Walkman" into a pro-active rather than passive device, absorbing rather than shutting out his environment and uncovering the daily politics carried by its aural traces. When appropriating existing or "used" sounds and then editing to shift their context and subsequent meaning, he depends on these sounds to carry their cultural significance, retrieving them from society as markings of our urban and natural environments. In making his selections of cultural noise, Lander eradicates all sense of hierarchy, discerning instead the subtle differences of cultural representations. In accordance with this idea of making "order from disorder" (D.CHARLES), Lander transfers noise from the category of error, absorbing it into a logical process of attempting to comprehend the whole. In their residual impact, Lander's juxtapositions of sound give off new information, encouraging, for example, a consideration ofthe technological interface we experience while communicating, whether this occurs through computers, television, the telephone, or, as in Lander's case, tape playback systems and radio.
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