The previous LA driving snapshot described a scene of interior calm; this one instead generates car noise from inside the car...
Driving through the streets of San Marino, with its lush, tailored mansions, California's Ear Unit ensemble via their Go CD played Julia Wolfe's Girlfriend. This is a 20-minute work, with various instrumental static drone lines on the bottom and on top the (very) oft repeated recorded sound of a car's squealing tires, with frequent interludes of cars and cymbols crashing. The second movement clangs to an apex, followed by a long, rancorous ending.
This might be an Angeleno's worst nightmare of a work, but at some subconscious level, it could resonate. And it's not as brutal as you might think. Wolfe says that arranging Brian Eno's Music for Airports for Bang on a Can had a soothing effect on Girlfriends. Let's call it urban ambient.
In an interview in Bomb Magazine, Wolfe said:
Girlfriend was first commissioned by a group from Los Angeles, and the piece has a real L.A. attitude. I wasn't conscious of it until afterwards, but it's a piece with sample sounds and there are a lot of car skids and glass breaking. It's a real car culture out there.
Josef Woodard in the LA Times:
Julia Wolfe's "Girlfriend" was the evenings most oddly moving piece. An unexpectedly delicate, rhythmically compelling sample patchwork, the piece combines screeching tires and intimations of a traffic calamity with droning, mournful chords in the live music component.
In the liner notes, Wolfe says "Girlfriend is a state of mind" but I will prudently pass on trying to interpret the meaning of the title.
