Marfa, Texas is a place where landscape means everything and nothing. It's situated in the remote west of the state, three hours from an outpost airport serviced by the kind of small planes that swoop and shake as if tracking imaginary topography to counter the flatness below. It's in a harsh desert clime, a vast gasp of land between mountains gone green on one side and brown on the other.
There's a concrete sense of nothingness in Marfa that suited Donald Judd, an artist who served as a sort of West Texas ambassador. When he moved there from New York in the 1970s, Judd went to work framing a disquieting dialogue between ambition and defeat. He acquired an old military base and filled it full of boxes-- austere sculptures that created a sense of space where none had been before. His iconic boxes marked a highpoint of minimalism, and they remain both alien and attuned to their surroundings.
Sound-artist Stephen Vitiello is one of the many who have gone to Marfa to see. Judd died in 1994, but the Marfa he invented lives on. Art-tourists travel there to take in his work as he arranged it, and the lost town of 2,400 has become home to a Taschen-stocked bookstore where talk centers on the semiotics of squares. It's all strange and teeming, but Marfa is still remote enough to make such conversation sound like nothing.
Which is another way of saying it sounds like everything. Vitiello didn't literally sample such talk for Listening to Donald Judd, but it haunts his project just the same. The specs are simple: Vitiello wandered around Marfa and employed "microsensors" to make recordings he later processed to abstraction. He affixed some of them to Judd's sculptures; others found cues "in a glider, in fields of grasshoppers and along some unknown street." The resulting mix, split into six tracks, functions as a sort of metaphysical travelogue, a found-sound survey of a place more talked about than visited.
Or at least it's supposed to. The sound of a train is the album's only sound recognizable for what it is. The rest are all haunted and electronic, the kind of exploratory sine-waves and feedback that Vitiello has rubbed up for art museums and on an album with Scanner. They're sparse, subtle, oftentimes barely-there in terms of volume and shape.
The degree to which they serve their subject is an open question. None of the atmospheric sighs and scrapes ooze the kind of high-"musical" reverence heard in, say, Morton Feldman's score for the Mark Rothko Chapel. But then, Judd was not Rothko. He was an artist whose aesthetic worked against fuzziness. His gestures were gestures of a different sort. By a likeminded metric, Vitiello's remoteness works as a tribute. His sounds summon the heaves and hums of the Marfa where Judd found peace-- a specific place where specificity meant everything and nothing at once.
