"Music is invisible and time-bound. These two qualities alone defy the visual commercial culture that dominates our cities, phones, and values systems. Spending time listening to music can soften us—even metal heads! They’re the sweetest people you’ll ever meet."
Chris Kallmyer, Artist
Guest Feature
This October, DOG presents [E16] Compound Wonders—a series of four live music events focused on our collective relationship to sound, featuring performances from artists exploring acoustic folk, ambient soundscapes, jazzy ensembles, and analog electronica.
On October 26, our second night of the series, we are excited to welcome Chris Kallmyer—a musician who works in art and design. In 2021 he started Furniture Music, a studio that creates sounding home goods and research-based projects for active listeners, architectural applications, and to promote social well-being through sound.
His installations, performances, and publications have been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, STUDIO TeatrGaleria in Warsaw, Fondation Richard in Paris, and the National Gallery of Singapore among other spaces in America and Europe.
Landscape Creative Director Ben Bloom sat down with Kallmyer to talk about his work, the connections between object and sound, and cultivating well-being through listening.
CK: I’m a musician who works in art and design. I have a studio on a farm outside Petaluma, California—a small town where I live with my wife and two daughters. From here I produce artworks for cultural intuitions and new sounding goods for the home—this work between fields has brought me into a community with wonderful people from Commune Design to SFMOMA to Bon Iver.
BB: How did you first get into music?
CK: Growing up outside of Washington DC I was brought into the magnetic and heartfelt punk scene in the city. In DC, I experienced music as something that was contextual—existing in a time and a place for the purpose of effecting social and cultural change. And so I started a band with friends—opening for a handful of bands on Dischord Records and making holy noise. From this time, I remember learning how Fugazi raised awareness and financial support for the Whitman-Walker AIDS Clinic in the early 90’s. This and many other stories shared in that community taught me that music can be a powerful tool to convene and collect people around ideas and action.
BB: Your music is somewhat non-traditional, I know you’re a professionally trained musician so what inspired this switch to more abstract sound?
CK: After music school, I fell into a decade-long collaboration with Mark Allen and his storefront/collective, Machine Project. Machine gave me ample opportunities to experiment with music—taking it outside of the concert hall and into parking garages, coat closets, mountaintops and museums. With Machine, I made a work of amplified sheep for the Walker Art Center. I installed musicians in their fantastic sounding parking garage as an acoustical experiment. I helped make experimental music by babies. Mark and Machine brought me into a bigger world that was generous, social, and most importantly fun! It was transformative and made it hard to go back to playing concerts in a traditional sense.
CK: My work as an artist is informed by a research practice—and this practice is often supported by academic partners. Universities allow me a stretch out in a way that galleries and museums cannot. As an example, I'm currently an artist in residence at Texas A&M University working on a project about the carbon cycle and grazing animals. This project brings together the Art and the Agriculture departments in a new partnership that I call CATTLELAND. Within this context, A&M is helping me to reconstruct and revive a bronze edge method of making bells that could be tuned and installed on herds of grazing animals. The project builds a bridge and provides a diagonal and low-stakes way of artists and agrarians working together across their perceived differences.
BB: Beyond education, do you find music and sound to play a valuable role in other areas like mental health, psychology, etc?
CK: Absolutely—I think music has profound effects on well-being and mental health. Think of this: Music is invisible and timebound. These two qualities alone defy the visual commercial culture that dominates our cities, phones, and values systems. Spending time listening to music can soften us—even metal heads! They’re the sweetest people you’ll ever meet.
And so, I find having a relationship to music, listening, or sound in your daily life is critical to cultivating presence and an attentive heart towards one’s environment—inclusive of your own emotional weather. The better I can listen to myself, the more I can build a positive framework for mental health and emotional regulation. This is one of the reasons I started Furniture Music—as a studio that could focus on home-bound objects that cultivate listening and social well-being.
CK: When I’m working on a new piece (for instance a wind chime) I want it to have a vibe even when it’s not sounding. You might find that the chime is waiting patiently—and notice its stillness—and in that moment you’re attuned and present. You might notice the wood, or the tone of the copper and then the chime might surprise you by sounding—and tune you into the passing breeze, which smells a faint bit like your neighbor’s Marlboros. Are they back to smoking? Tut tut, friend.
The idea that these mediums are all separate doesn’t work for me. I like to dip into sound, music, wood, or metal—whichever is a fertile place to start a dialogue with the audience.
BB: Furniture Music aims to redesign the sounds of home. What sparked the idea that domestic soundscapes need reimagining, and how do you see sound influencing well-being?
CK: This idea was sparked through my museum projects about sound and architecture. Although I was initially interested in acoustics, the work quickly turned to the social and emotional nature of space—the way we can identify with a place and feel at home within it. And so around 2018, the heart of my work turned to the home and I began visioning FM—a studio concerned with the role of sound in the life of the listener. I think sound asks us to move slow—and moving slow is a superpower when everyone else is moving fast. Its good for our heads, our hearts, and our spirits. I think this is where my work lies with Furniture Music.
CK: Of course! Context is everything. My works with these cultural institutions are all a web of sites, people, ideas, and aspirations. You can’t do everything in every project. However, some works like Song Cycle (set in the lobby of Disney Hall, LA) ask something more interesting of me as an artist that a more traditional space might be unable to ask. And so in this work, I repurposed an arrival/departure board with the help of Oat Foundry in Philly to spit out never ending poetry. This piece turned a transitional space (a lobby) into a contemplative space—inviting folks to stop and ponder the evergreen language on the sign. A space is like a partner and is generous to share historical, social, emotional, political, and economic frameworks if you listen.
BB: Let’s close it out with a fun on, what’s your desert island album?
CK: The Ultimate Furniture Music: Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green!