I do not like using pejorative terms when describing avant-garde art. By its nature, it eludes emotive classification. I am secretly, or not so secretly, unfortunately predisposed to neurotic negativity and a certain dismissiveness, which I try my best to disarm. On bad days, hide. Free and experimental jazz has never been a touchstone for me, so hearing Seymour Wright’s squalling strain of it was challenging.
I am deeply sceptical of the same vague keywords that are passed around among artists, whether derived from reading, philosophic influence, institutional survivalism, a telepathic hive mind or Mad Libs. Something our tutor Milo told us collectively that stayed with me, is the concept of ‘sonic signifiers’. More specifically, how sound, whether acousmatic or not, reads utterly differently to each of us. Just as all art does. We cannot presume, as artists, that our intentions will transmit or translate to others. Despite protestations to the contrary, I do believe a visual element provides a significantly more effective shortcut to explanative meaning; sound art has many unique properties, but clarity of meaning is always debatable.
That is why, perhaps reluctantly or awkwardly, the transcriptive element is key. In the institutional realm, we must find the capability to talk about our work cogently and with specificity, while hopefully finding room to poetically stay true to our sensibilities. I cannot believe the balding labels used by Wright, and many others, such as ‘people’, ‘memory’, ‘history’ or ‘space’, have any true descriptive merit. They have been driven into obscurity from overuse. All art is arguably about ‘people’, what unique perspective can Wright convey by reciting a rote list of vaguenesses?
The first two series of works in our gallery tour on Thursday the 18th of April were directly concerned with, and addressed, locality. Specifically the area around Whitechapel, London. Janet Cardiff’s ‘The Missing Voice (Case Study B)’ was illuminating in the way it exploited the headphone paradigm, placing the listener in the real world on a sound walk. Beginning at the Whitechapel Gallery, we were directed through the streets and alleys by Cardiff’s voice, relaying an abstracted noir narrative about a murdered woman, the narrator. Tracing her movements, asides and observations from subjective historical perspectives. It felt like embarking on an adventure, or entering a video game, it was a truly exciting experience, one that demonstrated the great potential of sound art in a way that I had not encountered before. Its tangible connection to a real, ever-moving environment, drawing connections through time, created an eerie documentation of the universality of human moments, contrasted by change.
Andrew Pierre Hart’s exhibition within the Whitechapel Gallery itself, ‘Bio-Data Flows and Other Rhythms – A Local Story’, was concerned with the diaspora living within, and migration to, the Whitechapel area. Primarily exhibiting paintings, the sole noteworthy piece that incorporated a sonic element was ‘Free Writers’; an abstract film comprised of shots of the local area interspersed with freely improvised dance routines. To view the film, the audience sits on a plywood box which had subwoofers built in. In conjunction with the imagery, such as a passing underground train, the vibration through the seat was designed to situate you within Whitechapel’s ‘vibrant rumble and dissonant past’. The composition and execution of the film left me with the sense of it being made hastily; much of the footage was of poor quality and seemingly furtively collected in dark streets and train platforms, from a smartphone. While this could suggest a quotidian reflection of diasporic life in Whitechapel, as an art piece it felt like a pedestrian afterthought. Also, as a carpenter by trade, I was quick to notice the underwhelming filling and sanding on the screw-holes in the plywood seat. Perhaps irrelevant, yet that may have lent in some small part to my personal disengagement I felt, and the sense of a lack of thought being put into the construction and creation of individual elements in the exhibition.
The group watching Andrew Pierre Hart’s ‘Free Writer’
The final exhibition we visited Maria Than’s exhibition at the arebyte Gallery, ‘Homage to Quan Âm’, was a thematically rich, lively and cohesive experience.
Detailing the ideological strains and subsequent resolution of the artist’s Buddhist childhood clashes with the humour and excesses of pop culture, Than tells a thematic narrative of coming to terms with, and embracing, Buddhism and the teachings she received in her youth. I appreciated most the variety of disciplines on display, from video art to animation, 3D renders, virtual reality installations, to physical sculptures, the diversity of material presented was impressive for what was a fairly small space. The most interested of all was a low disk of fine sand, that imagery was projected onto from above. When the sand was manipulated, the program presumably knew the height of the sand, and you were able to move the image in physical space through the sand as an interactive medium. It was a soothing, sensorial centrepiece in a very digital-forward exhibition that felt very considered. I have never seen a piece of art do quite what this piece was able to.
The central sand piece in Maria Than’s exhibition
The application of AI and technology as a symbiotic force for social good is a central concern for Than and her work, and I do not want to say I was disappointed with the broad usage of AI throughout the exhibition, but I did see very immediately recognisable image and video processing techniques that are to be found everywhere. Distorted episodes of The Simpsons and Malcolm in the Middle were enabled by AI effects that are commonplace in the digital realm, and an unavoidable dichotomy exists in the current cultural dialogues surrounding the usage of artificial intelligence. I believe that whatever constitutes the ‘art world’ is more readily accepting of the usage of AI, than many commercial or industrial perspectives. I wonder why? Perhaps artistic application preludes an interrogation of the meaning of agency in creation, where industrial applications feel more intended to deceive. I am still very mixed on AI as a tool for creation, generally falling on the side of disapproval, especially if the resulting processes seem so familiar and accessible, almost desperate for more radical, deep exploitation and exploration, rather than as a creative shortcut.
Still from performance documentation of ‘Tuning in a Vacuum’, performed at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne
Rita Evans’ sculptural sonic artworks and performances were an engaging insight into the bridges between physical art objects, kinetic performance and sound art. Concerned with invention, and the emergent sonic properties of new instruments, Evans’ pieces concerned themselves less with digitally processing or transforming source sound in a reduced listening capacity, but rather directly capturing the acoustic properties of material objects themselves.
The tactility of the sculptural creation of sound was exciting and inspiring. Interestingly, she referenced being inspired by the Sussex Trumpet in the arrangement of the dual players in 2021 performance ‘Tuning in a Vacuum’. As a native of Sussex, this was a piece of history that I was unaware of. The connection of modern art pieces to ancient instruments of the past through ritualist conceptual frameworks is a subject that intrigues me greatly. It’s a fascinating, amusing dichotomy.
What amused me was her apparent hesitancy for her work to be seen as science-fictional, so much that she mentioned it. Aurally and visually, I was distinctly reminded of ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’, and the look of her chosen performers and their attire resembled civilian clothes in Star Trek.
One quote struck me, and I’m paraphrasing, “empathy creates polyrhythms”, which I understood as a cogently-intentioned phrase in relation to the performers’ emotionally reactive playing with each other’s varying pieces, but comprised of the kind of hand-wringing, nonsense language carefully tuned to the sensibilities of the neoliberal arts institutional arena. A groaner. In the Q&A, she admirably talked about not revealing too much, or perhaps digging too deeply into artificially grafting meaning to her work out of demand for one. There are many facets of meaning, and many kinds of it, and a temptation exists to remove yourself from attributing intuition in a time of such penetrative examination of the artistic and political meanings of a creative action.
Bibliography:
Towner Eastbourne Commission: Tuning in a Vacuum – Foundation Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2022) Available at: https://ritaevans.com/portfolio/tuning-in-a-vacuum-towner-eastbourne/
As part of our Global Sonic Cultures lecture series, we studied the troubled and complex term of the ‘borderscape’, and the multitude of meanings and Jacob Kirkegaard’s 2020 piece Membrane was somewhat controversial among the group. What I’m sure was a well-intentioned sonic commentary on political, social and national divisions between the United States and Mexico,
Kirkegaard had placed contact microphones, capturing the vibrational qualities of the wall. It sounded dark and frightening, which unfortunately felt cliched in light of the political and social reputation the border wall holds. There was an uncomfortable sense of the artist as disaster tourist. I am vehemently against the suggestion that artists only work with what they know, yet I wonder what relevant perspective can be brought beyond an exercise in recording technique and revelling in the traumatising severity of the situation, adding or signifying nothing.
‘Border Cantos’ from 2016 by Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo was far more successful. Alongside Misrach’s large photographs, Galindo creates musical instruments from found objects discarded and lost by those making border crossings. ‘Limpia (Cleansing)’ was rich in allusive meaning and subtext; Galindo’s instrument titled ‘Zapatello’, modelled after DaVinci’s ‘il martello a camme’, animated a row of discarded shoes rigged on a hand-cranked rotating machine.
Galindo’s ‘Zapatello’, 2014
As they stamped on the stretched drum skin, the off-centre rhythm rose and fell with the speed of Galindo’s hand-cranking, suggesting anxious running, the pace of the journey. Centred through the rotating shaft were wooden shooting range targets; human silhouettes, with what amounts to a deadly scoreboard on them. A large, sculptural shaker comprised of angular welded spikes rattled with spent shotgun shell casings trailing from the points. It made me think not only of the theme of escape and risk of shooting, but of desert history, the native population displacement caused by atomic testing; the shaker almost impressionistically resembling the demon core of a nuclear weapon, or a great tyre spike. They were shuffling, oddly beautiful performances comprised of items of loss and hostility, enabling effective political and emotive commentary without purely existing as touristic, 1:1 reproductions or documentations of sensitive borderscape politics. Using found objects connects a potentially abstract and complex issue to the desert earth, grounding us in a sense of the unseen life experiences their former owners went through.
Bibliography:
Kirkegaard, J. (2021) ‘Listening to the Heart: Jacob Kirkegaard by Julie Martin’. Interviewed by J. Martin for BOMB Magazine, 5 March. Available at: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2021/03/05/jacob-kirkegaard-interviewed/ (Accessed: 12 May 2024)
Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2016) Border Cantos: Richard Misrach|Guillermo Galindo. Available at: https://www.cartermuseum.org/exhibitions/border-cantos-richard-misrach-guillermo-galindo (Accessed: 12 May 2024).
On Saturday the 30th of March I attended Sunn O)))’s concert at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill in my home county of East Sussex, in advance of writing a sensory ethnography detailing and examining the nature of the experience. I was anxious about the many reports and accounts I had read online about audience members who had sustained hearing damage from a Sunn O))) concert, and so prepared myself accordingly. I wore in-ear plugs and large, 3M ear defenders over the top. I required almost 40dB in reduction to be truly safe, which was intimidating. The concert itself was excoriating in its sustained extremity of volume and spectacle. Vast smoke machine and laser lights worked with the music to create a transportive, mystical atmosphere.
What surprised me the most, something that I had not anticipated at all prior to attending, was that the concert would increasingly relax me as it progressed. The low frequency vibrations had a calming effect, once the initial shock had subsided. It was almost sedative, like a no-contact massage. Experiencing it was something I truly enjoyed, inspired to examine in further detail via a sensory ethnography.
Gathering prospective sources in my research aided me in collating a number of key points or topics I could structurally build my essay around. Based on my knowledge of the band’s dynamics, I selected books from the library that spoke to their core dynamics.
In Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music, I found an essay discussing the contradictory risk of ruining the very organs we use to appreciate music through high volume. The sheer volume of Sunn O)))’s music is perhaps the defining control element in their manipulation of frequency, and stylistically the core of their upending of metal norms.
‘By and large, more or less, generally speaking, most culture does not crip, its consumption or production is not disabling. But pop – and more specifically, rock – seems to have developed a self-negating potential. The irony is indeed profound; it’s heavy. The very discriminating organs that make most possible profession and pleasure in popular music are those under threat of dysfunction by popular music’ (2007, pp. 69)
McKay, G. (2007) ‘To Be Played at Maximum Volume: Rock Music as a Disabling (Deafening) Culture’, in M. Goddard, B. Halligan and N. Spellman (eds) Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. New York: Bloomsbury.
It also felt significant to me to pursue and analyse the psychological effects of the music Sunn O))) are performing, an examination of the internal world would be equally significant and necessary when writing a sonic ethnography. Their music is uniquely glacial in form and pace, but could not perhaps be considered sedative in its excoriating parameters of volume and distortion.
‘A hypothesis often tested is that stimulative music increases physiological responses, while sedative music decreases them… research findings do not unanimously support such a direct relationship between stimulative and sedative music and physiological responses.’ (2011, pp. 179)
Hodges, D.A. and Sebald, D.C. (2011) Music in the Human Experience: An Introduction to Music Psychology. New York: Routledge.
In choosing to study Sunn O))) it would be necessary to draw on sources directly from the band themselves, and to reflect on metal music as a cultural touchstone with which to compare them to. The emotional character and colours that core member Stephen O’Malley attributes to the Sunn O))) concert experience is indispensable in creating an argument within an ethnographic context, and can lead to further interrogation of what power and transcendence mean in the musical space.
‘To me it focuses completely on the power that Metal music is able to access in pure ferocity, energy and even bliss… To me “Into the Pandemonium” provided a certain type of challenging influence which in some ways may be a Rosetta stone “Monoliths & Dimensions” perhaps. Somehow the direction and ambition could be interpreted as 21st century interpretation of that album. Not entirely, but honestly it is there in spirit. I will also tell you this: A Sunn O))) concert is raw power personified and its execution transcends the typical Metal experience people have become accustomed to.’ (O’Malley, pp. 699)
O’Malley, S. and Kristiansen, J. (2011) Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries. Edited by T. G. Warrior. New York: Bazillion Points.
Perceptions of place and identity can be ontologically interrogated and mined for more dimensional, associative meaning through the methodological application of ethnography. Ostensibly following a trail of experiential description, a focused reading of the corporeal, technical, sociological and political circumstances surrounding a sonic artefact. Steven Feld’s (1996, pp. 97) term of ‘acoustemology’ is designed to express and ‘to argue the potential of acoustic knowing, of sounding as a condition of and for knowing, of sonic presence and awareness as potent shaping forces in how people make sense of experiences.’ Listening and sounding within the context of acoustemology can yield surprising, often challenging, results.
In our own brief ethnography, I was drawn to observe the construction site noise in the centre of Elephant and Castle. A busy circuit of traffic roars around the base of the megalithic concrete and steel core of what is to be the new campus site of London College of Communication.
Conceptual, cross-section render of the finished site
The amphitheatrical nature of the Elephant and Castle roundabout engenders a sonically reflective wash of percussive, arrhythmic machine noise and hammering. At that elevation and distance, it’s impossible to determine which sounds are generated by human or machine physicality. On a macro scale, all the audible sound is generated by human labour of some kind, and all the infrastructure that we depend on is a result of the fruits of that sounding. To reach a personally intimate ethnographic analysis would be interesting, zooming in on the blood, sweat and tears that can be overlooked as being base in an art world often sociologically walled-off from those who literally laid the foundations their institutions rest upon.
The ethical and pragmatic concerns large scale firms employing a proportion of foreign labourers and contractors enables the ethnographic exploration of working language and terminology, social pockets and structures existing within transplanted places.
The acoustic properties of construction are far-ranging and internationally variable; the landscapes there are interfacing with, changing or destroying, the people it employs, ensnares or relocates, innumerable factors engender multifarious acoustemological associations and readings. What makes London construction different to Jakarta or Murmansk? What factors separate rural building from chip factory construction?
The Ab Reinhardt quote ‘art is art and everything else is everything else’ annoys me to no end. To me, it alludes to the implicit establishment of art as a separatist staging ground against normalcy. Intentional or not, it plays into the narrow and performative institutional engagement with the outside world and its concerns. Much of the commercial art world is run out of, props up and promotes the continued existence of the elevated, ‘glass palace’ archetype. Does the art world truly reach back down to touch those who put them there?
Bibliography:
Feld, S. (1996) ‘Waterfalls of Song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds) Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 97
Presenting the band and their gestural approach to physically imposing sound, and simultaneous subversion and harnessing of Metal cultural signifiers
Ethnographic description of concert
Thick description of the intensity of the concert experience, safeguarding measures for hearing protection and observations about the music itself and audience behaviour
The physiology of damaging and dangerous decibel levels in extreme music
Encapsulating Sunn O)))’s extended technical approaches to conventions of metal music, namely volume as a tool for sculpting uniquely vibrational low frequencies
Analysis of distortion
Exploring distortion’s role in harmonically enabling frequency manipulation, its elemental qualities in the ritualistic concert setting
Metal cultures as avant-garde source material, Sunn O)))’s lineage from Cage, Xenakis and Stockhausen
Analysing Sunn O))) as avant-garde in relation to Fluxus and electronic progenitors
Subversion of concert experience:
Investigating emotive and visceral conceptual ideas of power in the metal arena and concert archetype, linking back to achieving vibrational frequencies through extreme volume
Sunn O))), Shoshin (初心) Duo tour, photo by Angela Betancourt
‘How does Sunn O)))’s utilisation and shaping of sound frequency and pressure subvert and elaborate on traditional metal culture in the live setting?’
I have always been interested in bridging the perceived gap between high and low art, or between pop art and elevated forms. Generally I find the institutional art world’s insistent labelling distracting, and trivial in the literal sense. But, to have the vernacular understanding to know when form is being experimented with or hybridised, these categorical distinctions have to be acknowledged. I am particularly interested in metal music as the material, carrying element of a dialogue between popular and avant-garde forms.
Sunn O))) is an American experimental metal band, primevally melding fusions of drone, doom and black metal, with shades of contemporary classical, ritual ambient and the avant-garde. I am booked to see the band at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea on the 30th of March. A dead, coastal retiree town is a random spot for this band to show up, and the rust-stained De La Warr Pavilion makes me fear the roof falling in.
I reached this research question after confidently and quickly deciding I wanted to write a sensory ethnography, while oscillating between a number of different subject matters. Before settling on this, I considered writing sensory ethnographies of either a performance of traditional Korean Gugak I saw in Busan, or analysing the nature of the hymn and choral tradition through a carol service I attended at the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavik, Iceland. However, I felt more confident in constructing an effective argument and connecting the core sensory ethnography to a sonic theory or concept.
In the university library I found a book containing an interview with core group member Stephen O’Malley. Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries collates Jon (Metalion) Kristiansen’s Slayer Mag, documenting the waxing and waning of extreme metal in Scandinavia and around the world from the late 1980’s to the early 2010’s. In it, he details his ontological relationship to metal music, how he defines the Sunn O))) concert experience. I am seeking to explore how Sunn O))) renowned extremely high-volume performances harness the sonic colours of distortion and sound pressure to manipulate human frequency, physical tolerance and the conventions of the metal concert experience.
Interview with Stephen O’Malley, Slayer XX, 2010
Bibliography:
Kristiansen, J. (2011) Metalion: The Slayer Mag Diaries. 1st edn. Edited by T. G. Warrior. New York: Bazillion Points Books.
