In Scenester, we cover worthwhile events of all stripes happening in San Francisco. Want us to stop by? Contact Joshua at joshua@gazetteer.co.
About a mile away from the Skrillex-Fred Again set at Civic Center Plaza (with an estimated 25,000 in attendance) was another high-profile producer who opted for a decidedly lower-key museum gig.
Mark Ronson — the retro-revivalist producer behind the Barbie soundtrack and “Uptown Funk” and Back to Black fame and many, many other Big 21st Century Pop Moments — is arguably one of the architects most responsible for the way popular music has sounded in the past two decades.
But on a sunny Saturday afternoon at SFMOMA, Ronson is just a guy who wanted to spin some records, man. He’s dressed in all-black, as if to cloak himself from his fame and blend in with the austere backdrop. There’s not any applause or crowd work in between songs. Ronson isn’t the star of the show; the towering speakers playing his record collection are.
The centerpiece of SFMOMA’s Art of Noise exhibit is HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2, a brutalist audio installation built by sound artist and engineer Devon Turnbull that stands statuesque in a room on the museum’s seventh floor.
Around a couple hundred people are floating in and out of the dim room to sit and listen to music. Which, of course: That’s what the room is for. But rarely is there an opportunity for close listening at the level that the listening room affords. To paraphrase a modern adage, there are no cell phones in sight — just vibes and deep listening. Ronson has his head in his hands, seemingly in deep, meditative thought. There were people taking pictures of the majestic speakers in front of them and some idle chatter; a man in front of me was opening up Shazam to identify the cuts Ronson played. But, save for a handful of people, including a woman in white who walks the perimeter of the room and snaps a shot of Ronson before exiting, the audience lets the music wash over them. (A dog someone brought inside is also well-behaved, save for a couple of zoomies around the space.) When so much music consumption operates in two extremes — background muzak for the gym or work or Big Event a la Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour or, frankly, the other big-profile downtown San Francisco concert on Saturday — moments to engage with music like this are invaluable and increasingly rare.
Turnbull’s installation insists that it be seen and heard on its own terms. “The sound is so pure and immense, the way it washes over you is overwhelming and transformative, almost holy,” Ronson said on Instagram in a lowkey announcement promoting the event.
He’s not wrong. When I walk into the space, the last couple minutes of a rollicking Grateful Dead live recording drones through the room, an inspired “visiting the City by the Bay” choice. For this session, Ronson gravitates toward British rock and American folk, jazz, and soul, musical traditions that bloom on an otherworldly speaker setup.
Songs like “Soon,” by the legendary shoegaze group My Bloody Valentine, take on new life with Turnbull’s setup. Live and on record, the instrumentation is bound together, all its composite parts threatening to swallow the song whole. But listening in this room — Kevin Shields’ gorgeous, punishing guitar drone, the looping flute, the Madchester drum fill, all intentionally compacted on record — each part felt tangible, a mille-feuille of musicianship and studio wizardry.
There were many moments like that throughout, where each layer of sound captures the entire room. Radiohead’s fretful “Optimistic” feels all-consuming. The gentle harmonica and guitar plucks of Willie Nelson classic “Stardust” crackles, while the swooning orchestral swells of Charlie Parker’s take on jazz standard “If I Should Lose You” is romantic beyond measure.
But the room stands still when Ronson put on “Love is a Losing Game,” the mid-album gem from Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. Of the handful of Ronson-Winehouse collaborations put to tape, that one stands as perhaps the most lasting, a plainspoken torch song that captures the best of Amy. It is a rare, unvarnished moment of vulnerability told through song, a feeling that can’t really be captured anywhere else but in a room of people whose attention is purely in what they’re hearing.
The Art of Noise, which includes Devon Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2, runs through August 18 at SFMOMA.
