Category: Visiting Practitioners

The main focus of Andrew Pierre Hart’s work is the symbiotic relationship between sound and painting. His practice is an ongoing rhythmic research and play of improvised and spontaneous generative processes, through various mediums: sound, video, performance, found object and image, language, photography and installation, and themes of: improvisation, collective memory,  cross-modality, spatialisation, musicality and rhythmology.

A focus of Andrews presentation was built around improvisation and performance. One of these performances, in collaboration with Shabaka Hutchings (of Sons of Kramer, and The Comet Is Coming) was improvised over a interviewed man.

I often find that when paired with music over the top, we start to see the rhythms of everyday speech in a more pronounced way. Some favourite examples of music that include field recorded speech include the piece “Sleep” by the band Godspeed you! Black Emperor, as well as the music of Boards of Canada, who repurpose sound from old VHS tapes. When creating music, I often like to use a VST plugin that streams digital radio right into Ableton Live. This means I can access streamed sounds from across the world. I sometimes use talking based radio stations, and I find it interesting that what the station is talking about seems to change meaning when sounds and music are played underneath (or on top of).

This got me thinking about an album by Jan Jelinek called Zwichen (between). Here is a description of the album from its Bandcamp page.

‘Zwischen brings together twelve sound poetry collages using interview answers by public figures. Each collage consists of the brief moments between the spoken words: silences, pauses for breath and hesitations in which the interviewees utter non-semantic sound particles. These voice collages also control a synthesizer, creating electronic sounds that overlay and merge with the voices to make twelve acousticstructures.’

Lucia H Chung is a Taiwanese artist based in London, UK.

She performs and releases music under the alias ‘en creux’ where the sound creation springs from her fascinations in noise generated via feedback on digital and analogue equipment, and her role as a ‘mediator-performer’ in the multifaceted relationship between the sonic events incurring within the self-regulated system. She also works as a broadcaster and an independent curator at Happened. She has curated and organised residency programmes and music events around the UK and Europe.

Lucia’s presentation talked about her early work and inspirations. She mentions being inspired by the work of Jacob Kirkegaard’s 4 Rooms, a project in which 4 abandoned rooms inside the zone of exclusion in Chernobyl were recorded and played back in the same manner as Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room”(1970) demonstrating the resonances of the room from their own feedback.

Feedback is something that I will most certainly explore further and already experiment with. Most of my experiments have been done with microphone feedback and filtered oscillators.

There is something about the sound of feedback, its piercing resonance, that has always intrigued me. In a musical sense, guitar feedback has been used intentionally by many influential rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed, Robert Fripp. Artists such as Alvin Lucier, Hugh Davies, Steve Reich used feedback in their work.

I also find the location of Chernobyl to be alluring in its unique desolation. I find abandoned places and buildings very aesthetically beautiful when nature reclaims them. This romanticism likely comes from the visual appearance of pillboxes and tank blocks that are dotted around the countryside at home.

There is also the physical alienation of such structures. Monolithic, brutal and utilitarian, they now stand faded, covered in ivy surrounded by seas of stinging nettles. Perhaps less romanticly, a great deal of them seem to become public urinals graffitied with obscenities.

In the future, I wish to explore such structures in their dilapidation and create a work from them.

Richard is an artist with interests in accessibility, inclusion and imperfection and how art and music can intersect these points, remove barriers and make new forms of normal that include rather than exclude.

Using painting, drawing, music and interaction he works with communities and on his own to try and draw these disparate ideas together.

Currently an artist on the Conditions Studio Programme in Croydon. Richard also works for the learning disability arts organisation Heart n Soul as their creative associate and is the founder and director of not-for-profit organisation Constant Flux, and he plays in several punk bands.

During his virtual visit, Richard focused on the work he did with neurodivergent or, the term he prefers, disabled people. He says this is because he sees that these people are disabled by the limits and accessibility (or lack of) of their environments, whereas he sees the term people with disabilities as putting the responsibility on the affected individual.

As well as his visual art has released the book ‘D.I.Y As Privilege: A Manifesto’ published under Rough Trade Books. In this, he writes about his experience with supporting musicians with learning disabilities and being part of the DIY punk scene, re-evaluating his perception of the culture.

Richard works with musicians such as Daniel Wakeford, The Fish Police, Beat Express, Pertti Kurikan Nimipäivät, Electric Fire and more. He helps to organise the events from the and is involved in helping venues make themselves more accessible.

His presentation made me reflect on how little music I have heard from musicians with learning disabilities and makes me think of how I can make my work more responsible when factoring in other audiences, such as warnings before video and audio playback.

Richard left us with 5 key things to think about in creative projects:

• People
• Environment
• Communication
• Belonging
• Sharing

He says to create structures that allow freedom, involve people in decision making from the start and to not focus on the outcome. This supports people to have more agency and control and delevop creativity independently.

I will keep in mind all these things in future group projects.

Åsa Helena Stjerna is a Swedish artist who creates site-specific sound installations, exploring sound’s potential and connection to time, place, as well as human/non-human. As a researcher, she is interested in the transformative ability of sound and what it means to make a difference in the era of Anthropocene and Advanced Capitalism.

MARE BALTICUM

The area of her work that interested me most was based on sonification.

Sonification is the use of non-speech audio to represent information.

I’m conflicted on my opinions of sonification as an art form.

Nicole Raymond is a UK based DJ, turntablist, sound artist, composer, producer, tutor, sound engineer and radio presenter who advocates for diverse representation in the music industry, especially within DJ/Turntablism culture and music production realms, and for musician wellbeing/mental health. She runs/curates events such as “Dub Sirens” and “Melanin”, and in 2020 was a winner of an Oram Award.

Nicole’s presentation was energetic and passionate. She talked about representation in the media and how it is important that representation is diverse, criticizing media for portraying a ‘certain type of black British culture’ as opposed to the diversity that exists in reality.

She talked about the creative process of her latest, album Bashi, and how it came to be in a very natural way. She created the field recordings in rural Turkey with a zoom recorder. These recordings were not created with conceptual intent and her trip to Turkey was one to try and clear her mind. It was only after that the feeling of peace became a central theme.

I asked Nicole the following question:

Do you have a favourite ‘hidden gem’ record that you found while crate digging? What’s your favourite genre to search through?

She responded with the recommendation of an EP called Tusk by KLAUS. She elaborated on the culture of crate digging and how she had recently spent more time searching online for music that physical crate digging.

This is something that interests me as I have little experience in the turntable and DJ culture, but do, however, spend time searching online for music that I haven’t heard before. The EP she recommended, a minimal ambient dubstep-inspired record is great and is available below.

Cedrik Fermont is a composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, independent researcher, concert organiser, curator who operates in the field of noise, electronic and experimental music since 1989. He was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) and currently lives in Berlin.

Cedrik manages his label Syphre, where he distributes electronic music, noise, avant-garde, contemporary classical, electro-acoustic, industrial, experimental, sound art specially from Africa and Asia but not exclusively.

Syrphe tries to establish new connections and exchanges between musicians, promoters, galleries, venues, magazines, radio stations from all over the world and tends to spread above all awareness about Asian and African composers. CDs and other formats are now and then published, lectures, workshops and concerts are also sometimes given in various art centres, universities, museums and venues.

Cedrik wondered why industrial and noise music was dominated by white artists. He began branching out and trying to find people from around the world to contribute to these tape compilations. This was before the internet and it took a long time to get in touch and communicate with people.

When learning about electro-acoustic music it was very franco-central. He used the internet to learn about other artists like Halim El Dabh, whose experiments with tape music (The Expression of Zaar, 1944) are some of the earliest known, predating the work of Pierre Schaeffer.

He found that people from around the world owned albums of western experimental music like Throbbing Gristle but was interested in how they knew this western music but none of us heard their music. Wasn’t distributed in the west, so he began to try and distribute it online.

In turkey, he was kicked out of a venue as the owner and customers didn’t think of the noise and breakcore as music. However, in these scenes, lots of attendants were musicians themselves who wanted to get ideas for their own music.

Cedrik says that through propaganda western media made out that the eastern block completely oppressed music and art. He didn’t believe it so has done work on this topic, documenting the music of the cold war era in eastern (and central) Europe.

In the digital age, accentuated by the conditions of COVID19, online meetings often end abruptly and do not allow for the proper connections that in-person venues allow.

I asked Cedrik the following question:

How do you think the internet changes the concept of ‘scenes’, ‘genre’ and ‘outsider music’ in music?

the Internet allows instant communication and access so much instantly. new genre combinations. Allows new combinations from around the world to exist. no borders. In the past, you had to access music from record stores and sound libraries. Records used to last longer. 6 months is now considered older.

Scenes occur everywhere and everywhen. Dada and Pop Art. Noise music around the world. Reminds me of Brian Eno’s thoughts on the scenius, that we think of individuals as the genius opposed to scenes that form around the thinking of groups, what are the true ‘genius’.

Afterthoughts

Cedrik’s involvement and commitment to his cause of decolonising electronic music is very respectful and his dedication is inspiring.

Sam Auinger is a sound artist and composer, currently living and working in Berlin. His work highlights the acoustic qualities of public urban environments.

In 1989 he founded O+A with Bruce Odland.O+A’s work is based on the perspective of hearing, where sound installations in large public spaces alter the city noise in real-time.

In the work Blue Moon, the sound of the tide at the harbour outside the New York World Financial Centre is harmonised with 3 tuning tubes. Speakers were then used to distribute the sound around the plaza. The speakers doubled up as furniture.

The idea of Blue Moon was to retune the environment to make it more musical so that people could connect to the world around them.

Voices, boats, electrical hums, planes, helicopters, and the tide of the water 

“People thanked us for reminding us there were tides.”