Stephen Vitiello came to sound art sideways, the way most interesting careers tend to develop. He started, like many of his New York City contemporaries, playing guitar in punk bands, but a series of encounters and accidents led him elsewhere. Stints as a media archivist at The Kitchen and then as a direct collaborator to video artist Nam June Paik gave him a discipline he hadn't expected to need. Vitiello expressed reluctance about shooting video at a Fluxus festival. Paik was characteristically blunt. "Oh, this will make you better," he said, and it did. Shooting and editing video sharpened Vitiello's sense of time and composition. He also worked at Electronic Arts Intermix, a video art distribution organization, before a handful of curators steered him toward academia—mostly, as Vitiello has acknowledged, for financial reasons. He has been a professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond ever since.
The turning point that most defines his reputation came in 1999, when the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council placed him in a studio on the 91st floor of Tower One in the World Trade Center for a six-month residency. He recorded the building's creaks and oscillations with home-built contact microphones and photocells, the structure responding to winds in the wake of Hurricane Floyd, its sounds filtered up through steel, glass, and ninety-one floors. The recordings became both the album Bright and Dusty Things (New Albion Records) and the installation World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd, and they established Vitiello as an artist with a genuinely original ear for what sound does when it transcends the background. Solo exhibitions followed at MASS MoCA, The High Line, and Museum 52; group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennale, and the Cartier Foundation in Paris. A Guggenheim Fellowship arrived in 2011.
Collaboration runs through Vitiello's practice, present in everything, rarely announced, much like instinct. He has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Taylor Deupree, among many others, and his recent partnership with Australian sound artist Lawrence English has produced some of his most focused work. Their first two records together—Acute Inbetweens (2011) and Fable (2014)—explored modular synthesis and field recordings across the distance between Richmond and Brisbane. On Trinity, released by American Dreams, each of the five tracks adds a single outside voice to the duo. The album is their third together, and the format—one collaborator per piece, the ensemble held to three—is new territory for both artists. The five guests are Chris Abrahams of The Necks, turntablist Marina Rosenfeld, Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, multidisciplinary artist Aki Onda, and the late sound and visual artist Steve Roden, who died of early-onset Alzheimer's in 2023. His contributions to the album's closing track—credited as electronics and "mystery sounds"—were drawn from unreleased material and handled with his estate's involvement.
Stephen Vitiello recently joined host Lawrence Peryer on The Tonearm Podcast. The pair discussed the collaborative process behind Trinity, the ethics of working with a late artist's recordings, how a punk background shapes one's approach to improvisation and instinct, and the World Trade Center residency and its lasting influence on how Vitiello listens.
You can listen to the entire conversation in the audio player below. The transcript has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.
Lawrence Peryer: I would love to begin by asking you a few questions about Trinity, the latest project with Lawrence English. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the decision to add a different third collaborator to each track and how it came about.
Stephen: Lawrence and I have done two albums in the past. We had a discussion about doing something again, and how to do it differently, how to keep it fresh. We're both very active sound artists and composers, and we constantly collaborate with others. I grew up in New York, but moved to Virginia twenty-one years ago, and a lot of how I stay engaged with the scene is through collaboration, both long-distance and in person, because many of the people I want to work with are elsewhere. It's also a way of staying in touch, even socially.
We talked about the different projects we were working on. I was working at that point with Brendan Canty [drummer from Fugazi and The Messthetics] on something that was leading up to an album, and had done a couple projects with him. Lawrence and I were both very close to Steve Roden, who passed away, but we're both very engaged in his legacy. I had come across some unreleased material and thought that, with Steve's wife's permission, one of those pieces could be considered. In some back-and-forth, Lawrence said, "How about Chris from The Necks?" I got very excited because I'm such a fan. Marina Rosenfeld is somebody we both know. Aki Onda, I know a little, but mostly a close colleague and friend of Lawrence's. It just builds from these kinds of discussions and the people we admire.
I once interviewed Ryuichi Sakamoto, who gave very spare answers, but when I asked him, "How do you choose who you collaborate with?" he said—I think this is very close to what he said—"I choose people who can do what I cannot do and who do it well."
Hopefully, none of us replicates each other. Our skill sets are very varied, and with the five people we ended up with, they're incredibly talented and have a lot to offer. With Steve, it was sort of after passing away, but again, it still felt like we were right there with him.
Lawrence: I wanted to focus on Brendan's contribution because the drum work and just that piece—it really stood out to me on my first listen through the record. I wonder, at the risk of sort of deconstructing process and getting too under the hood, could you tell me a little bit about that piece, and how you provide something for Brendan to respond to? Is he providing something to you?
Stephen: That one was a little different because I was in the studio with him. We've done an EP and now an album together. In every case, I go to him with tracks that are roughly in progress, and I always have more than we have time for because I'll book a studio near him outside of Washington, DC. I pay for the studio and the engineer, and I'll play him things and see.
When we were working on the album, I said, "I have this other track with this sound artist, Lawrence English. Would you think about playing on it?" He said, "Great," and just started. Especially with someone like him, I rarely give input because what I get back is so fantastic. I'm not someone who's going to dictate and say, "Make it all tribal with no cymbals." I mean, I trust what comes to him. Or he might give me three options and say, "What do you like best?" and then we discuss.
Brendan is such a thunderous drummer. Being in the room with him is almost overwhelming because there's so much energy and volume. Lawrence took some liberties, I'll say, in mixing, in treating the drums very differently than we treated them in other tracks. But he sent it to Brendan and said, "Is this okay with you?" and Brendan was happy. I think because what Lawrence and I did is so texture-based, there's a need to find a place and a way for the drums to work. Whereas in my other projects with Brendan, it's really clear—drums, drums, drums.
Lawrence: As it relates to Marina Rosenfeld, is what she brings to the table simply the fact that she's a turntablist, or is it something more profound than that about her approach, her musicality?
Stephen: She's a great listener. She's got a real composer's and improviser's mind. I actually wasn't part of the discussion with her this time—it was all Lawrence. But I remember years ago asking her to play with me, thinking she would just bring records of various types and create samples. At least at that time, she said that she didn't do that. It wasn't like she was just going to pull out a Glenn Gould piano and some drumbeat. She would create unique material for that project, whether it was my sounds or her sounds. She brings out the magic with the texture of the vinyl she has.
That was a track where Lawrence and I built a series of textures, and then there's this thought that the person will come in and play on top of it. But we realized, when she heard the mix, that we hadn't created enough space for her, and she wanted some changes in the mix, which was valid, to make sonic room for her, compositional room.
Lawrence: What you're describing sounds like a very thorough type of collaboration. I often talk with artists, especially in the instrumental or composer space, where they take elements or people make contributions, and oftentimes the contributor doesn't even hear what they've done until the work comes out. Yet it sounds like you're really involving your collaborators in the mixing, treatments, and post-production. Why is that important?
Stephen: It's so important. For one thing, collaboration has to be defined at the beginning, so you don't lose friends, and you make people feel satisfied that their input was valued and heard. There are times when I make a project and ask someone to contribute, but I make it clear that I'll be making most of the final decisions. There are other times it's the other way around. If I create sound for a filmmaker, I know it's their film. They're going to make final decisions. But it should always be clear from the beginning.
In something like this, we're not reaching out to session musicians. We're reaching out to musicians because of their sound and their ability to listen. To respect that, we just need to make sure they feel they have space to contribute and that we're not going to manipulate them beyond recognition. We're not going to make choices with their material that they contributed that doesn't speak to what they would want to speak. It's mainly about respect and treating them the way we would hope to be treated.
Lawrence: So, given all of that, how do you deal with the responsibility of handling something like Steve Roden's contribution when he's not there to have that conversation?
Stephen: Yeah, very carefully. The first thing was to check with Sari, Steve's widow, and say, "Is this okay?" I've been working closely with her for the last three years on Steve's archive. We run into ethical decisions that we have to discuss all the time. Sometimes someone wants something from her, and she says, "I don't know." And I'm like, "Yeah, I wouldn't do it." Other times, yes, but within these parameters. Lawrence is also working to release a lot of Steve's work, so we're very conscious of him not being in the room.
Steve and I also did collaborate together. I watched and listened to how he worked. He experienced my process. We adapted to each other. I guess I would just say I had the sensitivity and awareness of the loss of his life. He had Alzheimer's before he passed away, and so even the kind of discussions I was having with him as he was ailing had to be very careful.
I'm stumbling a bit to say that we found a track we thought had space and, with his family's permission, treated it with respect and as a piece of music. I played with it in the way that I kind of imagined playing with him. I remember he and I did these gigs in France together, and we were both using modular synthesizers, but neither of us really knew how to use them well. But we had this kind of friendship where he would be whispering to me, "I forgot to bring an oscillator," and I'd be like, "Well, just patch it to my case." We'd have our hands over each other.
So I felt like I could make decisions I couldn't have made with someone I didn't know as well as a person.
Lawrence: Yeah, there's a real ethical and moral overlay of what you're talking about here. This is not just about aesthetics.
Stephen: No, not at all. I used to ask him to collaborate fairly often, and sometimes he said no. He was very open when he was either interested in an idea or just felt he needed to put time elsewhere. So, in some ways, I had to imagine what if he had said no. We weren't changing his material, only adding to it. I wouldn't slow his track down and mutate it into something that he wouldn't recognize. I guess that was part of it, too.
Lawrence: It's really interesting to hear you talk about, in two different anecdotes, this idea of potential rejection from your collaborator. You mentioned that you present lots of ideas to Brendan, and he sometimes says no.
Stephen: This is genuine. I feel so lucky when I'm in the room with Brendan. We've come to be kind of bandmates. But man, there's also part of me that just is like, "I am not worthy. I'm not worthy," in a Wayne's World way, and remembering going to see Fugazi and thinking, "That's the best rhythm section I've ever imagined." Then here I am playing with him. So I'm just happy if he finds something that he connects to. He also looks back to me for input.
Lawrence: I have to remind myself, because it's buried in my notes, that that punk rock lineage is part of your background. It's not obviously top of mind for the types of work we're discussing today. How does one evolve from that scene to what you do now?
Stephen: It's a long one. Steve and I once had this discussion in Bomb magazine. We both came out of punk rock, were born the same year, came to it in the late seventies and early eighties, and then eventually moved into visual and sound arts. I played in bands when I was a teenager, mostly because that was what you did, but not necessarily because I was very good at straight-up traditional guitar. But through discovery of avant-garde cinema and video, performance art, dance, starting to see other ways of expressing oneself even with the same material, and through collaboration, for me in particular, absorbing so much about how different people create their work, step by step by step, I found my own voice.
In the late nineties, I was mostly known for doing soundtracks for video art and performance. Some curators in France who were doing a museum exhibition said, "We're thinking of doing a retrospective of your soundtracks—unless you do installations." I was like, "Oh, I do installations," but I hadn't. But I was ready, and I had done sound for enough installations that I felt I could now see what I had to offer uniquely and potentially step outside just that part of a collaborative relationship.
I know that Steve Roden also came out of a rejection of noise, but also a kind of brashness of the art world in the eighties. The bigger, the bolder, the more expensive it got, the quieter he felt he wanted to be, pulling people in rather than blasting them with the bigness of it all.
Lawrence: Are you able to identify the common strand, if there is one? Like, what would you call the punk element of what you do now?
Stephen: There is a DIY nature. I'm not in any way properly trained. I feel like I can trust my intuition more than any skill set. I think that comes from punk rock. Playing guitar traditionally didn't work for me, but then somebody played me Fred Frith's Guitar Solos CD at the time. I had no idea that you could do this with that same instrument. It wasn't that you couldn't be skilled to make something worthy or interesting, but it didn't have to be the same skills that ninety-nine percent of the people who pick up a guitar think are necessary. "Well, you should be able to play these runs really fast. Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, or bust."
Fred Frith can be so expressive. Or John Cage on prepared piano. There are other ways to play with tradition and kind of bust open traditions.
Lawrence: To me, the postgraduate studies in music were the 'no wave' movement for me—that strand of the punk element moving into and colliding with the art world, as well as the lack of boundary recognition. That's profound in my musical development. And I hear that a lot in what you're saying here.
Stephen: Yeah. I was briefly in a band with Ikue Mori, drummer of DNA, and it was just at the end when she was still playing full kit. That band was so unique and so incredibly skilled, but without any of the classic kind of skills at all. She has sounds that, even just with electronics, are so distinctly her.
Lawrence: Sculpture is something that comes up a lot when I talk with sound artists. It's either as a metaphor or as how they think about what they're doing.
Stephen: I haven't had as many opportunities for installations recently, but a lot of the work that I feel most proud of is site-specific, multi-channel sculptural kinds of conversations with spaces, often unusual spaces, and the connections to sculpture are certainly there, whether it's physical material or the sound as material that can reshape the space.
Lawrence: There was a quote from you that I wanted to ask you about, and it said that you're interested in the porous boundaries between a given sound and its distance from the source. What is that? It implies to me there's a zone.
Stephen: God, I'm trying to remember where I would've said it, and I almost feel like it was an editor making me sound smarter. (laughter)
Lawrence: Well, you have to own it now.
Stephen: Yeah, I will! The one thing that occurs to me is that when you listen to really hear sound in space, it's not just about hearing the thing, but about where it's coming from. There are these great listening exercises by the writer, composer, and teacher R. Murray Schafer. In one, he has someone sit and listen, making note of everything they've heard. And, as you build, there are ones where he says, "Draw it. Draw where you heard that sound."
I mean, I'm aware of a plane going by on my left side, kind of moving, and it's not just an airplane sound, but it's a sound filtered through the city, filtered from distance through time, space, material. Outside my window are a low brick building and a higher brick building, and sound is bouncing off all those surfaces, coming through thick glass windows to me. So it's not just that I hear a plane, but that I hear a plane processed by the city.
I'm probably best known for the residency in the World Trade Center and the recordings I made from the windows of the building, from the ninety-first floor. That was definitely when my ears started to really change, and my thoughts about not just what I was hearing but each element of it and all the pieces together began to change. The building was moving, becoming like a breathing body that was also hearing that plane, or that boat, or those people down on the ground, or church bells, or whatever it was. It's not just that blue is blue. It's like blue through all of these filters.
Lawrence: What was the sort of conceptual framework for that project?
Stephen: I was part of this residency program organized by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the idea was that the artist accepted into the residency would have about six months of free studio space in the World Trade Center, but that it should be people who would take the location to heart—to make work that could be experienced there, but ideally would take advantage of why here, why this, through this experience of this residency.
In some ways, I was copying. I had just read about a project by Maryanne Amacher from like two decades past in an article in The Wire. She was talking about how she had sounds of the New England fisheries brought in by wires and phone lines into her studio, so she could raise her faders and have the fisheries as a sonic element to pull from at any given time.
So my thought was, "I'll be working on these music pieces. I'd like to be able to bring in the sound of the city at any given moment." And I learned that was sort of naive, because the city's sound was always different. It was filtered by the building. It was a building with a really unusual physical structure, but there was also a culture around who came in, who came out, and who was there. We, as artists, were this other funny population. And what I found was that as I tried to integrate it into some of the things I was working on, like a dance score and other projects, the sound itself was the most interesting part.
So the more that I heard outside and through the building, the less I thought I should actually treat it, that I shouldn't add guitars or voices, that the sound itself was giving me more than anything else, and that I shouldn't step on it. Ever since then, I feel that every time I do a field recording, I have to question what the content is and how best to respect it.
It's sort of like our discussion about collaboration—where does it fit? What is its role, and is it speaking enough, or do I feel licensed to change it? With the World Trade Center recordings, I felt like there was nothing I could add to them that wouldn't detract from the best of what I had. A sculptor, Beverly Semmes, came to my studio, and I said, "You know, I'm not a real artist. I have the sound, but I don't know how to make installations, and I'm going to put up pictures and lights." She's just, "No, don't do that. You have something very pure and distinct in the microphones, the windows, the sound, and the experience, something different from what one would have without your intervention. That's enough." It really helped me from kind of muddying the waters, I would say.
Lawrence: Have you been back to the site?
Stephen: Yeah, I've been back. I've never been up into the new tower. When 9/11 happened, my wife and baby daughter at the time were living on Canal, on the West Side Highway. So we were very close, and we experienced the day, the cleanup, the emergency workers coming in and out.
But the work I made—it was late fall 1999—changed because of what happened historically. I feel like I can feel a connection, but I also know that one is not the other. It's interesting to go down to where the memorial is now, and I definitely feel a lot, but it's so crowded and full of so many other people's perspectives and emotions that I probably have never stayed long. Not to discredit what they feel. I just kind of move on, I guess.
Lawrence: It's interesting how you talk about the characteristics of the buildings and all the elements that go into making the sound. What was your naive sense of what the city's sound was supposed to be?
Stephen: I think it's just that it's going to be as if it's one theme. A very important arts patron in Australia once said he was going to send me into the outback to capture the sound of Australia. There's no way to capture that, especially as a visitor. You capture a moment and a resonant moment if you come back with an experience that you can share. That's also a gift. But these things are so complex. The first sound I ever got through the contact mics in the World Trade Center was church bells. As far as I remember, I never heard those sounds again, but it influenced a later project I did.
Anything I ever heard there was different from anything else I ever heard there. Depending on environmental conditions, it could be vastly different, minute to minute, day to day, and season to season, based on winds, real-time events in the city, and other factors. It's just so full of life and variables that there's no one thing.
Lawrence: You seem to treat all of your inputs as collaborators. You speak respectfully about the environment, architecture, landscape, sounds, and people. It's all collaborative.
Stephen: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. There's always an aspect of response that comes into play in collaborating with other musicians, whether it's improvising, so-called composing, or site-specific installations. I mean, no one's ever said to me, "We have this strange tunnel. What do you want to do for it?" without me being able to go to that strange tunnel, feeling something, hearing something in my head, and going, "Now I have a way to speak with it."
I don't think that that's so different than being on stage with Pauline Oliveros and being in a moment and knowing that whatever decisions we're making are based on being together and based on that day, that time. I could go back to that tunnel six months earlier if I could jump back in time, and my ideas might be totally different, but just what I felt, what I experienced in that instance of a site visit or an onstage improvisational collaboration, is unique if you're really paying attention.
Lawrence: There's a real prolific nature to your output. Do you work on multiple projects in parallel, or are you a linear thinker? How do you manage those multiple work streams?
Stephen: I just do. I mean, even as a department chair at a university, most of my colleagues stopped making work, and I would never allow myself to do that. But it is a kind of multitasking, and part of it, because it's collaborative, is sending something out, waiting for something to come back, or making something together.
I just learned to be very economical with the time I've got and to be as focused as I can be on whatever that one thing is. I can be working on five projects, but when I'm in the two hours that I have on a Sunday to work on this music for a dance piece, that's where everything is. Then I step back, and I go, "Oh, but I've got that compilation track with Taylor Dupree to work on," or whatever it is. And then it's just zooming in, zooming out.
Some of the artists I've admired most, I've watched their kind of focus. I think that's one of the things that allows me to be so-called good, and to please myself, is when I've really given every bit of energy I have to a moment with whatever that project is. Then you put it aside, and you come back to it. And if it's really not working, decide whether to trash it or come back in a month or two. But focus is the biggest thing.
Lawrence: I'm curious about the practice of maintaining your ears as listening devices, as tools. They're precious, and they're integral to what you do. Have you had to develop practice around both listening and the physical upkeep of your ears?
Stephen: There's no training other than consciously turning it on. It's like asking a photographer, "Are you always ready to take a picture?" I'm not always ready to do a field recording, but when I am, because of a place, because of equipment, because of opportunity, I just go fully immersed in it and pay as much attention as possible in the moment of listening and recording, and then go back and re-experience it. I think that the more I've done it, the deeper I've gotten.
Very separate from what I do in my sound art world, I've been playing a fretless banjo. I really have to work to capture pitches. You know, moving your finger barely perceptibly is a big difference. And so I will say that that's been helping me. I find myself singing, and I'm a terrible singer, but when I sing at home while I'm washing the dishes, my pitches are way more correct than they ever were. And I think it's because of the fretless.
I'm sixty-one, just by the biology of our bodies, my hearing is no doubt decreasing. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I was hearing The Clash live at the Palladium, pressed into the speakers that were blasting. I'm sure I've done damage to myself, but I just really carefully stay in tune with whatever I've got and the best of what I've got.
Lawrence: I'm going to say that that might have been a pretty decent trade-off, though. The Clash at the Palladium, pressed into the speakers—I'll lose a few months of high-end for that.
Stephen: Oh my God, yeah! It was. It was a pretty remarkable memory, but now being in the studio with Brendan—he is a loud drummer, but I want to take in every moment because I know how lucky I am.
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