In selecting a field recording to study on the global soundmap website Radio Aporee, the first recording I happened upon at random turned out to be a significant and poignant one.
The recording was made at the Milk Grotto in Bethlehem, in the West Bank of Palestine. Prominent in the soundscape is the call to prayer, a distant musical underpinning of the human activities that are more foregrounded. Footsteps, indistinct talking in Arabic, and high birdsong feature throughout.
I was immediately struck by the poignancy of this soundscape of normalcy, prior to the recent outbreak of near-total war, and the escalation of violence between Palestine and Israel. In the dispassionate media landscape of today, it’s rare to glimpse or touch truly human moments, and hearing this recording, with its chatter, birdsong and sense of life, really helped remind me of the sanctity of ordinariness that we all so often take for granted. Rarely do we get to truly, honestly and empathetically embed ourselves in another’s life without a perspective, pollution, an authorial voice, a ‘take’ superseding it. Sound, especially field recording like this, has the potential for true empathy in this way. This is the rawest form perhaps of the documentation of human culture around the world, undivided in its attention to the random, uncontrolled events happening in that environment, on that day, in that minute.
I didn’t read the description until after I had listened to the recording multiple times, I think this greater aided my sense of immersion, having to piece together what was happening as an alien, forming my own emotional response. The description provided is as follows:
Milk Grotto St 25, Belem, Israel, Palestine. Nativity Church.
‘The chanting of the mosque is heard in the background and in the foreground a group of Palestinian policemen talking in Arabic. There is a mix of locals and tourists, mostly Christians visiting the Church of the Nativity in Belen, where Jesus Christ is said to have been born. It is a sunny and busy day and you can also hear the voices of the people in the streets and the birds.‘
We discussed between us after lecture the questions surrounding our sound art practices, interviewing each other on what inspires us, what challenges us. I think a point that almost all of us came away agreeing on was our ranging difficulty in verbalising our work. Sound Art is a nebulously-defined discipline, and we all shared our issues explaining our interests and work to the average person. “I make weird stuff with sound but not music”, “it’s sound, lights, lasers, noise, art”. I find “I work with sound but from an artistic perspective” is effective. It’s concise yet vague enough to avoid digging in deep with strangers. Fun!
Another interesting topic that I discussed with a classmate was, ‘what has/will challenge you?’. We talked about how we respond and reflect when encountering a work we unabashedly hate, in our case John Cage’s 4’33. My ultimate realisation being that emotional reaction doesn’t undermine, or deny the possibility of, an interesting analysis or discussion about challenging works. It’s very easy to hate, but digging into reasoning, finding justification for artistic choices is always important for gaining a theoretical frame of reference.
‘What has inspired you so far?’
The boundlessness of how to conceptualise sound art, the way it can arguably be anything.
‘Where are you at with your practice right now?’
Despite the perceived, often debated, delineation often drawn between music and sound art, I’m exploring the combination of popular musical forms with processed field recordings to create immersive sonic environments.
‘What direction are you heading in?’
Away from utilising sound as performative political violence. Moving toward a potential exploration of romanticism’s place in contemporary art.
‘What have been/will be the challenges?’
Becoming assured with the format difference in presenting sound artworks and fine artworks, gaining more confidence in producing a more concrete foundational, conceptual descriptor for my work that I can draw from when in a crit. It has been challenging pivoting towards the necessity of having something to say about a work; the expectation of reaching beyond the self.
As I am interested in genre fiction as a legitimate, inclusive platform for art, I chose to sonically analyse the closing sequence from season 5, episode 7 of The Expanse, ‘Oyedeng’. The Expanse is a science fiction show about the spiralling consequences of human colonisation of the solar system in the near-future.
Some context: Held captive by her former romantic partner and perpetrator of the largest terror attack in history, our main character Naomi escapes to another ship by faking suicide, traveling across the vacuum of space without a spacesuit, just an injection of hyper-oxygenated blood to help her stay conscious without breathing.
Tense, low-frequency throbbing transitions into tragic, string-heavy music as the scene climbs towards Naomi’s jump. This very heightened, manipulative non-diegetic score misdirects the viewer into thinking she could actually die. In a sense it’s empathetic, because it’s acknowledging and responding to the genuine pain that brings her to this risky plan, but there’s a sleight of hand in how it emotionally tricks the viewer. The intense score then sets up the tonal tipping point between initial emotive reaction, and realisation of the stakes of her action, emphasised by a period of silence.
The silence not only underscores Naomi’s vulnerability in the hard vacuum without a suit, where sound does not travel, but also focuses the viewer’s anticipation as they will her on. Breathlessly, like her. The silence suspends the action, artificially extending her motion, adding a sense of the improbability of her survival. Functionally, it could be considered diegetic. Famously, sci-fi rarely holds true to the silence of space, as extended silence actually kills tension. A non-diegetic, rising harsh noise illustrates the pain as her blood vessels burst and skin burns on the sunward side of her face, in a close up.
The deadened impact sound effects as she hits the other ship, totally without reverb or ambience create a feeling of desperation compared with the stakes of the life or death situation. For me, they are the most sonically effective part of the sequence; their abruptness and smallness undercuts our expectation for a ‘big moment’, making the scene feel more dangerous by upholding the audiovisual illusion and finding a place for stark realism. Finally, the non-diegetic, empathetic score softly returns, almost acting as the breath of relief.
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen is an ever-evolving electronic, concrete collage of national anthems from around the world, interspersed with short-wave broadcast noise, tape manipulation and electronic effects. Swarming, sped-up music sharply pans across the stereo field. Familiar melodies swim to the surface. Existing initially in 1966 as exclusively a tape piece, it then progressed to include 4 soloist musicians and by 1969 a ‘Third Region’ was added, where an orchestra played alongside the tape.
WDR Electronic Music Studio during the recording of Hymnen, Cologne
Inherently, the anthems ‘sampled’ by Stockhausen provide a source-bonded experience. Recognising certain ubiquitous melodies like the Russian anthem in spite of their manipulation is part of the experience. I almost imagine it was, in the late 1960s, what aliens would have heard listening to Earth: A chaotic, all-noise-at-once-from-everywhere compilation of international chatter. There’s a ‘satellite’s eye view’ quality, an overhead-ness I feel when listening to this piece. It’s kitchen sink electroacoustic music.
Excerpt of Hymen‘s score, demonstrating the interaction of the tape and orchestral parts
The way Stockhausen describes the piece (1973) is very visceral, revealing his gestural approach to its creation; ‘after traversing nine columns of sound… it then swoops down and becomes recognisable as a human cry before further developing into bird calls – marsh ducks quacking – and human yelling, right up to the deep black recollection of the Marseillaise at one eighth of its speed.’ (p. 59)
As much as Hymnen involves the world’s national anthems, so too does the sound itself have a roaming, constantly moving world of its own in Stockhausen’s phrasing here. He lends a synaesthesia to the relationships between each sampled sound, and the transitions to travel between them. Compositionally, Hymnen exists as a network, a thematic portrait of the complex international, and interpersonal relations across the world.
Stockhausen conducting a rehearsal of Hymnen with the South German Radio orchestra, 1973
Stockhausen, K. H. (1973) ‘Stockhausen’s notes on the works’ in B. Hopkins (ed.) Stockhausen: Life and Work. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 59
Longplayer is an aspirational sound art piece intended to last a millennium from its inception in 2000. A thousand year sequence of six singing bowl recordings are algorithmically mapped and replayed through a speaker system into the loft of the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse in London.
Conceptually, Longplayer is about hope for the future; reflective and concerned with its own survival in our world, destined to change beyond contemporary recognition or understanding. Like site-specific installations or kinetic works, Longplayer requires constant maintenance, and is therefore a generational asset in trust who are entrusted with its future. To me, it felt reflective of our own mortality. The objects in our lives that will outlive us, contextually changing without us to explain their value or meaning. Trusting the next generation with either taking care of them, or making their own decisions with what to do with our debris.
A diagram that demonstrates how Longplayer functions
Being sound, I appreciate that Longplayer can be accessed online from anywhere. Apart from streaming media, visual arts are largely confined to the gallery space, locked down. Steve Connor (2005, p.48) believes that ‘this power of sealing or marooning things in their visibility and this allergy to things that spread that makes art galleries so horribly fatiguing and inhuman’. If Longplayer exists to reach into the future, it concerns all of us, it’s designed to spread and be sonically disseminated. In this way, it is distinctly countering the traditional perceptions of space, as visual arts would occupy it. As beautiful a space as the Trinity Buoy Lighthouse is to house the guts of the piece, the acknowledgment of how all the infrastructure, the technology supporting the piece is temporary is almost more poignant to me. It’s interesting how Finer created a work that has to capably exist independent of a physical element, or be compatible with speculative future technology. It is successful in potentially embodying the purest definition of a sound artwork that I’ve seen; the sound itself and the concept being the only common threads in what I presume to be the many iterations and locations the piece will go through on its journey.
I am often challenged by works where the conceptual idea is arguably more compelling than the actual sound itself. While taking in the intention and understanding how and why Longplayer exists, I found myself at times completely ignoring the ever-present sound. By its very nature, it resides in the background, but I appreciate the aspirational qualities of Longplayer.
In many ways I was reminded of NASA’s Voyager probes, and the famous golden records they contained, intended as humanity’s introductory emissary to extraterrestrial life through sound and image. Both the Voyager probes and Longplayer are aural, sensory-forward summations of our contemporary life, reaching out into a future none living now will see.
The bowls themselves, much like Voyager’s records, engraved with mysterious, near-absurdist donor names and phrases, act as both instruments for live performances of Longplayer and future archaeological finds. The anachronistic meld of the tactile, ancient instrument and futuristic, technological transience is an exciting, successfully multi-faceted contrast.
A bowl and its inscription, provided by a donor to the project
Connor, S. A talk given in the series Bodily Knowledges: Challenging Ocularcentricity at Tate Modern, 21 February 2003. It has been published in FO A RM, 4 (2005), 48-57.
‘With such an enlarged acoustic mirror, sound may figure as an increasingly relevant and important category to offer the self a new set of codes by which to operate, as a medium intrinsically communicational and heterogeneous, and by which to negotiate and utilize the increasingly animate and telepresent world, for sound embeds itself in the creation of meanings, while remaining elusive to their significations.’
Referenced version:
LaBelle posits (2006, p.16) that sound art’s relevance is linked to its diverse communicate properties, both for the self and the world, and its many shades of meaning: ‘sound may figure as an increasingly relevant and important category to offer the self a new set of codes by which to operate, as a medium intrinsically communicational and heterogeneous… for sound embeds itself in the creation of meanings, while remaining elusive to their significations.’
LaBelle, 2006. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Korean artist Nam June Paik’s intersecting practice of experimental tape recorder composition, performance and post-modern philosophy was directly informed by ‘his friendships with composer John Cage, Fluxus founder George Maciunas, and Joseph Beuys’ (Hanhardt, pp. 21)[1] As part of the Fluxus collective, Paik helped usher in their radically alternative, entirely new approach to art making and practices.
Paik and Sylvano Bussotti pictured behind a prepared piano during a performance of Hommage à John Cage, Köln, 1959[5]
His 1960 piece, Etude for Piano is a tape collage that was staged in Gallerie 22, Düsseldorf, in combination with live performance art. Assertive, contortionist interpolations or samples of western classical standards like Beethoven’s ‘5th Symphony in C Minor’ burst in and out of view, intercut with wailing and cries, both those of the artist’s and ‘twenty distressed virgins'[2], power tools and in the ultimate finale, Paik destroying the piano itself. It’s a jagged, abrasive composition, and entirely post-modern in its construction and audience interaction.
As John G. Hanhardt states, ‘Paik’s interest in performance… reflected his desire to emancipate the viewer from the tyranny of one-way communication. He sought to create a community of shared expression that could alter the way art is consumed’ (Hanhardt, pp. 21)[1]
Like the name Fluxus suggests, the collective shared a fundamentally fluid and indeterminate artistic process. Despite Maciunas’ manifestos, not adhering to a form, style, or even a group, was an intrinsic aspect of the Fluxus collective, and by extension, Paik’s work in this era. Paik’s collage-like approach to the piece demonstrates how the post-modern ‘impossibility of control… became the ultimate incentive for Paik’s art and the foundation for… electronic music. In his view, electronic music exhibited a “fixed, determined tendency both in its serial compositional method and in its ontological form (that of tape recordings destined for repetition).”‘ (Ammer, pp. 70)[3]
Highly collaborative and porous in sharing influence, ‘the most important artists to Paik were Joseph Beuys in Germany, whom he met early on and who took an axe to the “prepared pianos” in Paik’s seminal 1963 exhibition, and John Cage, whom he also met in Germany, in the late 1950s.’ (Hanhardt, pp.43)[1]. Etude for Piano itself was dedicated to John Cage, “Hommage à John Cage, Music for Tapes and Piano“.
A key tenet of postmodernist theory is the intentional destabilisation of epistemic meaning and certainty, a disharmonic acknowledgement of the fragmentary nature of life in the modern (or now postmodern) world. The fragmentary, wildly composed work of Nam June Paik closely aligns with the ethos of postmodernist thought.
Learning about Paik’s, and Fluxus’, work during this era was both interesting and challenging. The core philosophy of postmodern thought is a deliberately upending of the perceived forward progression of society; a challenge to the assumption that ‘we’ll all be ok and we’ll never stop improving’. The uncertain worlds of the late 1950s and early 1960s and today have a lot in common. We could either turn one way, into abject nightmarish chaos, or course correct and create a new way to live, marginally freer of generational debts and violence. To me, Fluxus is a deliberately ill-defined acceptance, and response to, this possibility of change. This ill-definition makes it difficult for me to draw connection between the raw melting pot of a performance with any deliberate thematic elements, unless, of course, the chaos itself acts as the postmodern response. Fluxus as a self-referential framework to support Paik’s work feels like a very cross-pollinated group; Etude for Piano being informed almost more by Paik’s own experience within that collective, than a direct impetus. It’s hard to say, it’s an elusive work. I’m torn by Fluxus and this work, it’s evasion of direct meaning, but I admire the brazen insanity of the performance. It’s a dynamic combination of multiple rounds of diverse movements. Its innervated unpredictability, the surprising, confrontational audience participation is what excites me.
As Paik himself stated, ‘the beauty of moving theatre lies in this “surprise a priori,” because almost all the audience in uninvited, not knowing what it is, why it is, who is the composer, the player, organizer – or better speaking – organizer, composer, player.’ (Paik, unpaginated)[4] The chaos theatre of Etude for Piano, and its revolving number of collaborators, contributors and iterations in the early 1960s, brings Paik and the Fluxus movement into idealogical alignment with postmodern theory’s fragmentary worldview.
Finding documentation of these elusive performances was not easy. The report of one piece containing ‘the cries of twenty distressed virgins’ disturbed me. When the piece is abject chaos, I find myself doubting if Paik had any sensitive reasoning behind this inclusion, and was just appropriating pain; shearing off its weight and meaning to exist as just another shocking noise among many in his destructive, masculine performance. This aspect of noise and sound art troubles me: The potential for, predominantly male, artists to exploit real-world horrors, stripping them of context and using them as cheapened Halloween sonic props in their egoist stage work. Of course, I could be wrong. The documentation is limited. Artists have always explored subjects of death, murder and sexual violence. But in the midst of his unfocused-on-purpose creation, insane volleys of poetry, tape collage, Fluxus peer worship, breaking things, the cries of distressed virgins, Paik places himself as the centre. It raises questions about how he sourced those sounds. Are they real? Did he survey people, elicit these sounds from them? Or, most likely, did he create them himself, as creepy roleplay? Every possibility is disturbing. If they’re real, he’s silenced the victims by turning their pain into noise for his art project. If they’re performed, he’s worn their skin, stolen their experiences. All for a minor cameo in an avant-garde variety act, untethered to any other point. The omnipotence of the artist is as much a responsibility as it is a freedom.
Hanhardt, J. G. (2015) Nam June Paik: The Late Style. Hong Kong: Gagosian Hong Kong, pp. 21
Ammer, M. (2009)’In engineering there is always the other – The Other’, Nam June Paik: Exposition of Music Electronic Television (Revisited). Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, pp. 70
Paik, N. J. (1974) ‘Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television’ Nam June Paik: Global Groove 2004, ed. John G. Hanhardt and Caitlin Jones New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2004, unpaginated. Originally published in Nam June Paik Videa ‘n’ Videology 1959-1973, ed. Judson Rosebush, exh. cat. Syracuse: Everson Museum of Art, 1974
Photo by Manfred Leve, sourced from https://ggc.ggcf.kr/en/p/5ada1be96275b54b4591e0d8
Luigi Russolo’s variety of acoustic noise-generating instruments called Intonarumori performed entirely unique compositions, specially written by Russolo between 1910 and 1930. They were so unique that, after the originals were destroyed or lost, highly studious reconstructions were created, painstakingly. What I find interesting about Russolo’s work, and the intricate philosophy that permeated it, is how it acts almost as a bridge between Romantic occultist theory and Italian Futurist modernity of the era. François Escal, as paraphrased by Luciano Chessa posited that ,’in the development of the art of noises Russolo’s aural frame of reference first shifted from the Nature to the Real… the meeting place of noises from nature and those produced, directly or indirectly as a result of human industry, by machines’ (Chessa, 2012, p.137). This intersection of a contemporary understanding of what constituted the ‘natural world’ and the oncoming, ever-increasingly relevant study and application of noise in art is extremely prescient, and places Russolo as a man ahead of his time. It’s very exciting to read, as this perspective really informs my own practices and experiments, as not ‘imitative of life, but rather through a fantastic combination of these varied tones”: in between the noises and the art of noises there is the mediation of the artist as full, inspired subject’ (Escal, 1975, p.92f). Russolo believed the interaction of raw noise generated by the mechanisms inside the Intonarumori was sculpted and shaped by the artist in an act of near-alchemy; the fusion of natural energy and mechanics to create sound art.
Luciano Chessa performing Music for 16 Noise Intoners, 2009Luigi Russolo with his assistant Ugo Piatti and the Intonarumori, 1913
In Russolo’s Futurist manifesto The Art of Noise (1913), he preempts electronics as an emergent technology that would require the human ear, and the way we hear sound, to evolve. I am inspired by his blurring of the definition of ‘man-made’ as a concept; how many layers of chaos and unobstructed interference can render the designation of man-made sound obsolete, or at the very least obscured? In my own work, I am deeply interested in embracing the unpredictable chaos magick in the interaction between so-called nature and technology. They ways they relationally interplay with each other. Informed by Russolo’s philosophies, this is a vein I want to mine more.
Chessa. L. (2012) Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.137
Escal, F. (1975) ‘Le futurisme et la musique’, Europe 53, pp.92f
I chose four very inter-related keywords that resonate with my practice as an artist:
Sense of Place: I find it grounding to root my own works in an earthen sense of place, when so much art culture seems to be terminally pivoting toward online spaces and solely conceptual beginnings. A real-world context to an artwork can provide a bedrock to build referential and connective meaning upon.
Atmosphere: Relationally connected to a sense of place; using less-than-predictable technology and real elements drawn from the landscape to inform and summon atmospheric reflections of external and internal environments.
Abstract Narrative: Providing room for the listener’s own breath in my work, while balancing a narrative with forward progression is important to me. Moving through phases with intentionality and abstracted purpose allow the lister to engage and follow along. I don’t seek to push people away.
Elemental: My work is reflective of the environment in which it was made for. If I could compose everything out on a bald mountain peak, then I would. I intend for my art to appear raw, elemental and weather-beaten. I find the integrative, cross-pollinating of music combined with natural sound elements to contextualise the piece.
I am a multi-disciplinary artist making story across a variety of practices, where the texture and details invoke narratives and worlds. In the relentlessly online, rapidly evolving world that we’ve somehow found ourselves on, I find a reality in grounding my art in an earthen sense of geographic place. Glimpsing the ephemeral through the literal. Charcoal on the dreamed cave wall. Bringing them together and making patient, textural and wuthering pieces that nebulously interweave field recording and music. Through processes of earthy tape recording, minimalist digital tracking and real-world field recording, I see the romance in choice of technology and environment I shape my art with. Equally informed by David Lynch soundscapes and traditional Korean Gugak, as I am by black metal and Enya, I am interested in manipulating sound to shepherd an audience into an immersive, hazily-curated world, where the chaos of subjective response is embraced. In the past, I have often used sound art as a compliment to other media; filling the gallery space with a collage, effectively soundtracking painted works, or pairing atmospheric video with personal, intimate music. That foggy place where traditional formatting and packaging of art forms start to blur is exciting to me. What separates audio drama from opera, or music video from installation? Alongside visual elements I can’t help but feel that sound takes on an unavoidable, detectable, intentionality. That’s desirable in many ways, but I’m curious to see what quiet ambiguities sound art holds when we let it do the talking, instead of playing wingman or usher to media perceived to carry more ordained ‘importance’.
