Speaker Bag

This past week I again visited the Audium, a special sonic space in San Francisco, and one that I have spent much time in over the course of many decades. The Audium has 176 carefully arranged speakers in a small room kept dark during performances, which often are explorations of spatial musique concrète — that is, of sound works made from recordings of sound, rather than using live instrumentation. My friend Łukasz Langa, who went with me, took this shot of the interior after the performance we attended: Founded by Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern, the Audium’s first dedicated physical space, with a quarter as many speakers, was in my longtime neighborhood, the Richmond District, in what is now a small office between a day spa and a hair salon. That was back in 1967. By 1969, the Richmond District space had expanded to 61 speakers. Then in 1975, following an NEA grant and substantial construction work, the Audium moved to its current location, a former donut shop on Bush Street, not far…