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In an addendum to my last post on the publishing of my biography of the project "Scrap Metal Music" Here is a transcript from a recently published book by author and associate professor at Pratt University Cisco Bradley. In his book "The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront" Mr. Bradley provides another view of my piece. Here is the transcript and the link to the book:

Michael Zwicky’s Scrap Metal Music (1990)
(From The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the BrooklynWaterfront by Cisco Bradley).

"At the other end of the ten-thousand-square-foot space, opposite the main stage, Michael Zwicky's Scrap Metal Music project was suspended on cables and arranged on tables, composed of pieces of scrap metal he had gleaned from the nearby area.

Zwicky's Scrap Metal Music had been seven years in the making. Zwicky had been trained as a sculptor and painter at the University of Wisconsin and had moved to New York in 1983. He alsoplayed saxophone, guitar, and other instruments. Soon after his arrival, he participated in the movement that became known as the Rivington School, a circle of sculptors, metalworkers,
performers and painters who forged the massive public art piece in the Rivington Sculpture Garden. Zwicky was further inspired by a street performer, violinist Mike Mason, whom he had encoun- tered in Madison, Wisconsin. Mason made bows by wrapping horsehair around tree branches, and he would build fires down by the railroad tracks and fashion gongs, using the fire to temper and shape the metal. Mason sparked Zwicky's interest in scav- enged and self-designed instruments and the idea that one could draw sounds from all manner of natural or found objects. After moving to New York City, Zwicky noted, “My work became more and more abstract as my psyche became permeated by the pulse of the city. Graffiti art was a big influence.” Zwicky also consid- ered an array of downtown Manhattan influences to have made
their mark on him, including saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc's Jus Grew Orchestra, the free jazz-noise rock band Borbetomagus, and Sun Ra.

Zwicky first conceived of the idea for Scrap Metal Music in collaboration with saxophonist Steve Hagglund when they met in Lower East Side Manhattan soon after Zwicky's arrival. They went around the neighborhood in what they called “scavenging,” to put together “a rig” that could be used to create metallic percussive sounds. Zwicky's rig was composed of an oil drum that he cut in half, to which he affixed a bass drum pedal. There was a piece of rebar in the middle of the rig, on which he placed myriad other pieces of metal that collectively resembled a Christmas tree. The duo began to workshop Scrap Metal Music at Nada Gallery, which was around the corner from the Rivington Sculpture Garden, an experimental space where, through successive presentations, they were able to develop the project considerably. More than just a band playing metal trash, they developed a sophisticated vocabulary of rhythms and tones from the various metal pieces they incorporated. Zwicky had become aware of the Cat's Head organizers after he moved into an apartment a few doors down from the Lizard's Tail in early 1990 and immediately felt accepted by the arts community there. He soon placed one foot in the punk scene and became the drummer in the Billy Syndrome for a few years.

To present Scrap Metal Music at the second Cat's Head event, Zwicky took advantage of the ample space and spent the week prior gathering pieces of scrap from the site itself, including pieces from abandoned cars, stainless-steel sinks, a five-hundred-gallon tank, and oil drums. He suspended a number of metal pieces from cables that were hanging from the ceiling, arranging them to allow for an array of different tones, and assembled the remainder of the pieces on tables and on the floor for people to use.

From the very beginning, “audience members naturally wanted to take part in scrap metal events. People feel apprehensive about playing a guitar in front of other people if they have never trained with it, but there was no such anxiety with these found objects. So the audience-as-performers experiment developed quite naturally.” Indeed, one observer described the project as “a riotous cacophony of rhythm and noise. The players were the audience, watched in fascination by more audience who in turn took to the metal themselves. The unleashed energy was electrifying.” The rhythms evolved and changed as between ten and twenty people played at any one time. “Everybody was an equal in that performance,” Zwicky reminisced. For the
entire evening, from ten o'clock until the early hours of the morning, audience members coaxed different tones from the assembled metal mass, often in concert with one another. It was the last time Zwicky ever presented the project, feeling such a level of catharsis that he did not want to revisit it again. Zwicky's performance situated environmental sound-noise art within the
milieu of the Williamsburg avant-garde, foreshadowing much that was to come.

(mucho, mucho thanks to Cisco Bradley)
(transcription by David Dodd)

The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront

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