The music from Float 17, as it stops briefly under the fly-over, as it makes its way in to the city   (2003)

The music from Float 17, as it stops briefly under the fly-over, as it makes its way in to the city   (2003)

Dubplate (one side of acetate pressed with 13 mins 7 secs of audio),
formica, MDF and ink drawing.
13″ x 13″
5 separate versions

[Part of Design for a Carnival].

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Partly evolved from trying to remember the experience of the exhilarating acoustic reverberations of sound systems playing under concrete flyovers, from Notting Hill Carnivals from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s to the movement of a Mardi Gras brass marching band under a flyover in the New Orleans’ Projects in 1989, The music from Float 17, as it stops briefly under the fly-over, as it makes its way in to the city   (2003) is a drawing, diagram and sound design for this ideal moment (lasting 13 mins 7 seconds) within a future carnival.
A dubplate is an acetate disc traditionally used by studios to test recordings prior to mastering for the subsequent pressing of a vinyl record, but pioneered by reggae sound systems as a way to play exclusive music. The ink drawing on the cover shows a diagram for the mix as well as appearing to be an aerial view of individual participants in a carnival procession passing under a bridge.

Excerpt from: Brian Dillon ‘No Right of Light or Air,’ Annual, Kent Institute of Art and Design, pp.19–34:

4. Fly-over  Cartography and chronology dissolve once more in Design for a Carnival (2003). A work which is a sort of archipelago, a spatial and temporal perplex of objects, images and real or imagined events, it projects itself forward to celebrate a future of which it is also the retrospective evidence. Chodzko conjures a fleeting consort of space and sound: ‘the music for float 17 as it pauses briefly under the fly-over on its way into the city...’. We listen to the ‘live’ recording of an event which has yet to take place, catch a glimpse — through the ‘archaic’ medium of the dub-plate — of a future which seems to have been composed of fragments from the deceased vision of things to come. From the underpass, a post-punk futurism echoes out of time, its melancholy austerity at odds with the image of the carnival’s collective abandon. What kind of party has Chodzko invited us to? A celebration, perhaps, for which joy is a serious undertaking, a methodical business energised by the image of something glittering and out of reach, like the impossible garment never to be sutured together by Chodzko’s ants: minute assistants at some mysterious ceremony, dragging their bright sequins about with unfathomable determination. Once again, something is on the move: plotting, sketching, outlining an imagined place (a future home?) which may yet prove to be an ideal city — floats 1 to 16, perhaps, are already there, riotously invading its placid squares — or a mirage above waste ground, a purely notional place to settle.

5. Forest  Chodzko is seduced by the in-between, by those places which simply will not compose a properly bounded space, but insist on insinuating themselves between borders. Geography is one name for this slippage, history another. But such abstractions miss the specificity of the artist’s intent, something of which is to be discerned in the way Chodzko sketches the sound design of his works. In his notes for the soundtrack of Limbo Land (2001), as on the ‘sleeve’ which accompanies the dub-plate of Design for a Carnival, discrete sounds are rendered as abutting shards and blobs, little lozenges whose edges are as intricately striated as a coastline (always, with Chodzko, these enticing tangles: webs of foliage, bone or fabric). 

The music from Float 17, as it stops briefly under the fly-over, as it makes its way in to the city  connects to a group of works concerned with the possibilities of an auditory harmonising of space and its relationship to chance ( eg: Pounding Systems (2004), The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause (1995), Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire (1999-), Limbo Land (2001), Test Tone for Landscape  (2005), Play Play Play (2011), And the City Grew Quiet… (2011),  O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix [live] (2020), etc).

7 mins 49 secs excerpt, as compressed mp3:

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Related works:

The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause    (1995)
a loose leaf falls between   (2013)
A Plan for the Perfect Night    (1992)
And the City Grew Quiet… (2011)
Ants Choose Position for Sequins – 2 Seconds Interval   (2003)
April – May 2000 Arc Ark   (2010)
Guide for a Parade with Two Masks   (2004)
Plan for a Parade with Two Masks    (2004)
Pattern for a Procession with Two Masks    (2007)
Play Play Play   (2011)
Test Tone for Landscape    (2005)