Audio – Tom Tenney

Reunion

Tom Tenney — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:57:30 +0000

This piece, created for the Deep Wireless Festival, is an audio document my trip back to Boston for my high school reunion. I recorded several hours of the trip before, during, and after the reunion, and what emerged from the piece was a personal reflection on friendship and aging.

As always, please listen with a good set of headphones if possible.

https://www.tomtenney.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Reunion-TT.mp3

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Off the Grid

Tom Tenney — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:12:44 +0000

Profiles of three of my favorite art stars: Don Eng, John King, and Walter Gambin – ‘outsider’ artists for whom performance serves as a way to navigate their lives. Special thanks to Reverend Jen for providing some miraculous VO which pulled everything together for me. As always, I recommend listening with a good set of headphones.

https://www.tomtenney.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Off_the_Grid_FINAL.mp3

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We Are All Underground (ft. Moonshine Shorey)

Tom Tenney — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:18:38 +0000

There’s something that has just always seemed tragically lonely about NYC subway musicians. Making music is (or seems) to be an inherently social activity – something we do with, and for others – and yet most buskers perform by themselves. This isn’t unusual of course, there are many people out there who identify as “solo musicians.” But the busker seems to amplify the solitude of the artist… whether it’s because s/he is playing underground, or because their donation tray that sadly usually only contains a couple of dollars (if that), revealing the fact that most people are unable to connect with the interior space that the artist inhabits or that, more probably, they just don’t care. As I started recording some of these artists (and always paying them to do so), I began to realize that, in fact, these artists weren’t playing entirely alone, in many cases they were creating these incredible duets with the sounds of the trains, the echoes, and even with the people who were ignoring them.

I started wondering what it would sound like if some of these artists *could* play together…. I concocted an imaginary installation in which buskers from all over New York (or maybe all over the world?) were mic’d and their music broadcast to each other so that they could all play in a continuous, 24-hour jam in real time. Logistically, I’m not sure how this would work, but it would be an interesting experiment – maybe start with 2 or 3 just in New York, and then gradually scale up to include many others. Anyway, this piece is simply a meditation on that thought….

Thank you to Moonshine Shorey for providing the vocals. As always, please listen with quality headphones if available.

https://www.tomtenney.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/tomtenney_underground.mp3

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Scream Symphony #1

Tom Tenney — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:08:33 +0000

At the risk of saying too much about the ‘intent’ of this piece (something I usually steer clear of), I feel as though explaining a bit about how it was constructed might enhance the listening. When creating Scream Symphony #1, I tried to find screams that were as “authentic” as possible – some of my sources were CVR (cockpit voice recorders) from plane crashes, phone calls from WTC on 911, and sounds from the Haiti earthquake aftermath to name a few. In other words, screams as media that were never meant to be media, the most unwilling participants in art you’ll ever find. Pulling these together and listening to each one was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever worked on – just completely draining emotionally.

There is one scream of my own, made by taping a homemade piezo transducer mic to my throat and screaming into my pillow. The scream was 4 seconds long, but I time-remapped it to 5 minutes, the length of the piece. Then I remapped the other screams at various lengths and used these to form the backbone of the “symphony” – the underlying rhythm and melody – trying to layer them in a way that was eerily musical. Other layers were then added, including many of the screams heard at their original speed.

WARNING: Some have found the content of this piece disturbing. Proceed at your own risk.

Listen with a good set of headphones if at all possible: [Runtime: 5:00]

https://www.tomtenney.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Scream_Symphony_1.mp3

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Great Expectations: A Love Story

Tom Tenney — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:52:47 +0000

This piece was created following the Snap Judgement guidelines, with one of the following titles/themes: Great Expectations, The Wizard of Oz, or Busted. I chose the first, and wrote a script about my romance with a young German actress back in 1986, based on my journal entries and her letters. Thanks to Noel Dinneen and Emilie Blythe McDonald for providing voices for the young me and the young Heidi.

https://www.tomtenney.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/tt_ge.mp3

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‘I Didn’t Know That’ – A Collage for Radio

Tom Tenney — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:30:47 +0000

A three-minute sonic collage created almost entirely from appropriated materials, mostly soundtracks from military training and educational films, following the guidelines for the Third Coast Festival Short Docs Challenge. I’ve included a brief statement of intent below.

https://www.tomtenney.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ididntknowthat_ttt.mp3

Statement of Intent:
The piece was actually inspired by a Brecht quote about “an inescapable profusion and confusion in the tower of Babel.” I thought that “I didn’t know that” would be a good starting point for an exploration of state-controlled “truths” with the title phrase representing the public’s naive willingness to accept what we now recognize as mistruth and propaganda. I wanted the tension between time periods to emphasize how relativistic these messages are, depending on when we hear them – hopefully the mixing of periods emphasized the relationship between contemporary and dated material.

I originally titled the piece ” I Didn’t Know That: A Triptych” because I tried to create three distinct sections. The first is the monologue of media controlled messages, the second is a dialogue between the messages. The third section actually begins with Brecht himself reading a poem in his native German entitled “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake”, which, in translation, begins:

Truly, I live in dark times!
An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.

Layered on top of this is the voice of McLuhan discussing his idea of “resonance” – nonlinear, nonlogical comprehension of sounds and images. These are the 2 voice of “authenticity” that are eventually buried by the familiar voices introduced in the first two parts, which are layered over them to create a cacophony that is (hopefully) a sum greater than its parts. Anyway, I removed the subtitle since it didn’t strictly fit within the Third Coast guidelines and I’m sort of glad I did, as I felt it opened the piece up to a greater breadth of interpretation.

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