Stephen Vitiello will present an evening of his sound and video work to round out his recent Hallwalls Artist in Residence Project, which resulted in the original CD BuffaloBassDelay. Copies of the CD will be available for purchase.

• Read the full review
• Listen to an excerpt (MP3)
• Buy the CD

BUFFALO BASS DELAY, a new sound recording by 2003 Hallwalls Artist in Residency Project (HARP) recipient Stephen Vitiello, is now available through Hallwalls. The CD consists of one 54 minute track developed from field recordings Vitiello made while exploring abandoned grain elevators along the Buffalo River in 2003. Vitiello will return to Hallwalls later in 2005 for an in- person presentation of his work.

Stephen Vitiello is a sound and media artist. In his work, he is particularly interested in the physical aspect of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a spatial environment. Recent solo exhibitions include The Project NY; Galerie Almine Rech, Paris; and The Project, Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include the 2002 Whitney Biennial; Ce qui arrive at the Cartier Foundation, Paris, curated by Paul Virilio; and Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest, also at The Cartier Foundation. Previous exhibitions include Greater New York at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center presented in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art. In 1999, Stephen Vitiello was awarded a 6-month WorldViews residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. The residency resulted in a site-specific sound installation, which has been broadcast and exhibited internationally.

Vitiello's other CD releases include Scanner/Vitiello (Audiosphere/Sub Rosa), Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records), Scratchy Marimba (Sulphur UK/Sulfur USA), Light of Falling Cars (JDK Productions) and Uitti/Vitiello (JDK Productions).

He is currently Assistant Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and Archivist for The Kitchen, NYC.




Review by Tony Conrad, June 2005

Stephen Vitiello is best known for the eerie recordings he made high up in the World Trade Center, by attaching microphones to the huge glass windows on the 91st floor. His sound works are site specific-marked by relationships to special places, reworking and echoing an often harsh and barren reality.

L.A. is not the future, and Arnold should be the first to know it. You know his films, and the dozens of post-apocalyptic movies and sci-fi novels: the tribal post-industrial future, where bands of survivors scavenge the leavings of the military-industrial complex. Stephen Vitiello has found this future in Buffalo, New York.

Buffalo was the L.A. of 1900: the first movies shot by electric lighting, houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, gateway to the West, and the most advanced transportation and industrial technologies of the day. In particular, advanced grain elevators were first introduced in Buffalo. Now those concrete Great Northern and Electric elevators stand empty and rusting in weedy fields, huge honeycombs of vertical cylindrical shafts, each tube the size of a New York apartment and running from over a hundred feet high almost to the ground. There, in the cobwebs, fallen concrete and rust of decades, is where Stephen Vitiello recorded the future.

Buffalo Bass Delay is haunted by the remembered sounds of 2005, today: the sounds of distant sirens and traffic on nearby Route 5, and the mournful heaving of passing locomotives. Then, amid occasional wisps of faraway conversation, the sallow tribal rhythms and low whistling of the Last Men carry us up the time tunnel into that vague Never (or Ever) that good music always inhabits.

---------------t0ny c0nrad, June-05

Some publications related to this event:
March, 2006 - 2006