Yard work

The hustle and bustle of Vietnamese diners on Argyle Street, municipal trucks clamoring through the North Center industrial corridor, skateboards spinning down Logan Boulevard under the interstate: These are just a few of the sounds of life in Chicago.

They’re also the sounds local record label Contraphonic has methodically captured in field recordings for its website as part of a sound map of our city titled A Lot You Got to Holler, under the banner of the Contraphonic Chicago Sound Series (CCSS). An interactive Google map makes it easy to listen in on a city at your fingertips. Label co-owner Ben Schulman explains, “The spirit comes from the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music and Studs Terkel, as far as the aural-history aspect.”

Since spring of ’08, the CCSS has featured local musicians in a companion series dubbed Little Hell, after the former nickname for Goose Island. The first two installments featured meditative musings from local jazz-improv drummer Frank Rosaly and introverted psych-folk combo Pillars and Tongues. But the latest in the series, YArds7-6288—The View from the Back: Impressions on Chicago’s Union Stock Yard, by bassist Nick Macri, may be the most personal yet.

When Contraphonic partner Tim Joyce, who works in Old Town School of Folk Music’s store, approached Macri, the school’s concert marketing manager, the latter jumped at the opportunity. “It fused my favorite things: local history, field recordings and music,” Macri says. “That’s when I had the idea to blow the tape up into a bigger audio project.”

The tape in question is an unearthed cassette recording of a 1987 conversation between Macri and his maternal grandfather, Walter Bregin. As a 16-year-old, Macri conducted the interview as part of a study on the Great Depression for a high-school history class. Before then, Macri knew his grandfather only as a portrait photographer. From 1934 to 1946, Bregin worked in the Union Stock Yard, and on the EP he recalls, with his weathered warble, a time when a bag of tobacco cost three cents and an hour of work in the yards earned you ten times that.

Macri, an Albany Park resident, is known for his work in several local groups, including the Zincs and Heroic Doses (he backed Liz Phair for several dates last year when she revisited Exile in Guyville). In YArds7-6288, he accompanies his late grandfather’s anecdotes by filling in the cracks and crevices with atmospheric textures played on upright bass and tenor guitar, complemented by James Elkington and Charles Rumback on guitar and drums, respectively. Shimmering and blurry like a film flashback, the soundtrack was set to the 22-year-old recording by Mark Greenberg of the Coctails, who engineered the project and overdubbed the ominous background whine by playing actual wine glasses, hovering between tales of rendering animal fat.

YArds7-6288—named for Bregin’s photo-studio phone number, styled in the former convention for Chicago neighborhoods—is the first Little Hell installation to merge instrumental music with an audio narrative. A late-’50s recording of Win Stracke crooning the old regional folk tune “Back of the Yards” opens the work, and an accompanying pdf includes essays from Schulman and Macri, as well as a transcript of the interview.

For Macri, now 38, the experience allowed him to bridge the past and the present: “I was trying to make a personal piece, but at the same time I wanted it to be something that any Chicagoan could relate to.” While Schulman says YArds7-6288 “fit in perfectly with our whole idea of this kind of audio-heritage project,” it went beyond that heritage to become a Macri-family heirloom. “I played it for my mom and dad and a couple aunts,” Macri says. “I haven’t played it for my grandma yet. I was thinking about giving her a copy for Christmas.”

The Contraphonic Chicago Sound Series lives at contraphonic.com/con/ccss.php.

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