Norman W. Long, The Natural Listener – The People Issue 2024

Composer and sound artist Norman W. Long got hooked on experimental music in the 1990s as a student at Illinois State University. He evolved his multi-media practice as he earned a master of fine arts (in “new genres”) at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001 and a master’s in landscape architecture at Cornell University in 2008. Long has applied his expertise in field recording and ecology to documenting the changing nature of south-side neighborhoods and parks, especially Big Marsh Park in South Deering. Chicagoans can experience this with him firsthand on the soundwalks he leads with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.

I started off playing clarinet through middle school, high school, and some college. Then, along with my listening habits, I started getting into more . . . what you’d call industrial, avant-garde, or electroacoustic music. Like many Black musicians, I started listening and learned how to listen in the Black Catholic church. I went to Catholic school at Our Lady Gate of Heaven in Jeffrey Manor. It’s no longer there. I’m not Catholic—I just went to the school. The choir director for the church was my sixth-grade teacher. 

For the most part I listened to mainly Top 40 as a kid. Sixth and seventh grade, I started listening to more house music and hip-hop and getting more into rock music. I already knew older people who were listening to house music on WBMX and WGCI, so I knew where to turn for that, but for the hip-hop stuff, it was WHPK. I taped stuff off the radio. I can’t really brag about listening to super avant-garde music. My taste got more complex and more esoteric as time went on, and my curiosities just went further and further the more resources I had to explore. When I got into ISU, I started borrowing and listening to records at the library there. 

There was a graduate recital for clarinet. One dude did a Steve Reich piece. He was basically playing his clarinet to a tape. I thought, “Wait a minute, I thought that was cheating,” not understanding tape music and what he was doing. I was like, “I’m really drawn to this.” I went back to the library, listened to [Reich’s] Music for 18 Musicians and Drumming. I started listening to other avant-garde music.

I started grad school in ’99 at the San Francisco Art Institute. My work had been heavily influenced by a strange confluence of people: bell hooks, Mike Kelley, Doris Salcedo, and other artists who did massive works. Also this tradition of African American yard shows had a lot of influence—a lot of Yoruba traditions and the placement of objects and juxtapositions of such to give meaning. One of the books that I found to be really helpful with my particular visual aesthetics was by Robert Farris Thompson, called Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas. I still kept my interest in music—and especially experimental music. Another huge influence was a guy named Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky. 

I started taking my MiniDisc recorder out for my walks. I started focusing on, ‘Let me get some environmental sounds and then process them.’

I was doing these massive works with concrete and stuffed animals, making huge installations. I realized it wasn’t gonna be sustainable for me. It was really fortuitous that Martin Schmidt from Matmos was still working there [at SFAI]—I was able to get tutorials from him for basic programs like SoundEdit 16. 

I was able to TA a class for [sound artist] Laetitia Sonami. She taught me how to use Pro Tools, field recordings, soundwalks. I got a lot of great readings from her, but also really great exercises and assignments as far as digital music goes. I was able to have installations that may not have a lot of things in them, but adding sound to them ended up being somewhat satisfying. 

I started doing more field recording. Walking meditation was really important to me. By 2004, I had a series of panic attacks—headaches, vomiting, and all sorts of things—and had to go on medication. I thought, “This is a really good time to think about meditation and self-care.” A lot of that came through walking and listening—that also helped me regain focus.

I started taking my MiniDisc recorder out for my walks. I started focusing on, “Let me get some environmental sounds and then process them.” I started working with other people on video; I would record my walk, and they would record video for it. Or I’d record something from my walk to a performance, and then the performance would be me mixing in my walk to the performance—for instance, I would take a commute from Oakland to San Francisco, and I’d record my commute, and the sounds of my commute would be what the performance was, in combination with sounds from a police scanner and some digital sounds. I didn’t really get into synthesizer sounds until later. My art practice, it morphed into sound-art performance practice, and that’s where it was by 2005.

The visual art practice wasn’t really there anymore. I wasn’t interested in engaging with the art scene; I had such a negative experience in San Francisco. In 2008, I had some friends that I was doing performances with; I had a chance to perform some of my sound works. These guys had a residency at Kavi Gupta Gallery [in Chicago]. The organizers, Lee Montgomery and Jon Brumit, asked me if I wanted to do another performance for Neighborhood Public Radio, which was the project in residence there. 

By 2009 I was able to get an installation up at the Florasonic series for Experimental Sound Studio [ESS]. The Florasonic series was in Lincoln Park, and I thought it’d be cool to put all the sounds of Lincoln Park in the [Lincoln Park Conservatory] Fern Room; there was a lot of granular synthesis and a lot of dub-style echo that was going on. I was able to have some sort of relationship with a gallery [ESS] that was reputable in the city; it was a very positive thing that I wasn’t really expecting. I was working a regular job, but I was able to do that and get put in touch with people like Eric Leonardson, who I’m on the board with for the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. 

I didn’t perform too many times as a solo musician—it was very sporadic. It felt like I couldn’t get any gigs. I started playing regularly with Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brotherhood, working with mainly synths and samples. There were quite a few projects that Angel had me in. I would say 2018 is when I started playing more with people and doing more solo things as well. That was due to John Daniel and Michael Stumpf’s label, Reserve Matinee—[they] put out a compilation of some of the older work I had done [2018’s Electro​-​Acoustic Dubcology I–IV]. 

I started doing the soundwalks in 2015. The Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology partnered with the Night Out in the Parks program. When we first started doing them, I started leading them at Washington Park, and then once Big Marsh opened, I started leading walks there around 2016.

Being able to have more relationships and friendships with people who may not have the same practices I do but have different perspectives, backgrounds, or resources they pull from—I find that to be very interesting. Over the last few years, [I’ve seen] many Black folks who are very interested in field recordings and experimental music. That was really nice, to see more people of color being interested in what I do—or parts of particular discourses around ecology, history, electronics, or synthesis. That affected me a lot. I’m not practicing, learning, or researching in a vacuum. There are people who are listening now. 

I keep doing it to get in touch with my own higher self. That’s really important to me, coming from a background where I don’t feel as valued and I wasn’t anything to anybody. But with the art, I am something to myself. I’m doing what it is that is mine to do.

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.