Ivan McEanany

Ivan McEanany is a fictional sound artist, experimental musician, and sound designer based in Chicago, Illinois. Conceived at midnight, on January 1, 1970, he is one of the founding members of the band Eunuch Zepach, and its homonymic twin band, Unix Epoch. When asked about the difference between the two bands, Ivan says “One of them plays louder.” His sound art installations typically involve percussive phase cancellation, producing pulses of unexpected silence in dense urban settings.

Ivan’s notes on TTMAKAMTT:

Museum Waltz:
This piece was recorded on location (without permission) at Chicago’s Museum
of Science of Industry, on Good Friday, 2002. At the time I was working
as a sound designer at the museum. The loops were created in December 2006.
Welcome To McDonalds:
Recorded on location (without permission) near a McDonald’s drive-through,
East Capitol Drive, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October-November, 2006. Loops,
December, 2006.
Things the Mind Already Knows Already Mind the Things – 1 & 2:
For many years, I did sound design work for low-budget and no-budget Chicago
storefront theatre productions, places like the Pataphysical Laboratory.
Doing these shows I amassed a large collection of consumer-grade sound
effects CDs–“Sounds of Nature,” “Sounds of
Horror
,” that kind of thing. Of course, as an audio geek, I
was embarrassed by these SFX collections, and always tried to do my own
original recordings–but often the director would prefer the canned sounds,
with their campy directness–this is what the world was supposed to sound
like, not what it really sounded like. And of course, these cheap CDs were
unlicensed for commercial use–which didn’t really matter, as the typical
Pataphysical Laboratory production in those days was defiantly non-commercial.
When, eventually, a Pataphysical show moved to New York, with a producer
who insisted on clearing all the rights, I had to rebuild the show’s entire
sound design in one weekend, using the museum’s Sound Ideas collection.
Anyway, when iTunes came along, I ripped my old SFX collection into
MP3s, just for reference sounds. By this time, I was refusing to use any
canned sounds for my sound designs, whether consumer grade or fully licensed–it
was part of my ethic as a sound designer. Original field recordings or
nothing. (I was finally getting enough offers for work that I could make
such demands). One day however, on a whim, I played my old SFX playlist
in iTunes–on shuffle. I found it unexpectedly compelling–my mind couldn’t
help but construct narratives to connect the random sounds. I began to
understand what those sometimes campy theater directors had been going
for. I began to play around with looping and layering these canned sounds,
in vaguely palindromic structures, but kept them secret, because, of course,
they were not my “real work.” The quote from Jasper Johns set
these pieces free–I realized that these pieces, like Jasper Johns’s flags
and targets, were made from “things the mind already knew.”
Flipflops at the Fountain:
What can I say about Millenium Park? All that stuff that Auden wrote about
Arcadia–here it is, the post-modern version of peace on earth.

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