Organised Sound vol.14 No 1 [review]

Organised Sound
vol.14 No 1, 122 pages, April 2009
Cambridge University Press, UK [+]

THE COLOR PURPLE

Thanks to a variety of contributors, this issue of Organised Sound usefully articulates several definitions of sound art, principally the German Klangkunst vs the US art gallery assumption, the former focusing on the sculptural dimension and site specific, architecture related installations, while the latter deals with more aesthetic and psychological aspects. In their article, Sweden sound artists Andreas Engström & Åsa Stjerna [+] acknowledges the importance of a proper definition that would ensure a wider recognition and survival of the practice as a genre (after Barbara Barthelmes, 1999). Despite Germany’s credentials in the field (a dedicated publisher like Kehrer Verlag; the Singuhr-Hörgaleri, a Berlin art gallery devoted to sound art only [+]; various regular columns in art magazines), the 2 authors note the lack of awareness of German studies in English writings on sound art. They particularly point towards Alan Licht, whose ‘very strong North-American focus’ they consider a major flaw (Engström & Stjerna, p15). Moreover, ‘the way the term sound art is handled in English texts is often very vague, to the point of being useless’ (Engström & Stjerna, p17).

THE CACOPHONY OF SILENCE

According to Aden Evens (2005), quoted by Christoph Cox (p21), all sounds stem from background ambient noise, what Evens calls the ‘cacophony of silence’. Cox mentions recent trends in sound art, making background noise and silence the prime materials for artists like Christina Kubisch, Jacob Kirkegaard, or Francisco Lopez. In 1966, Abraham Moles (Cox, p20) defined music as stemming from a background of noise, with no real difference between music and noise, save for a special quality: noise is an unwanted signal, one ‘the sender does not want to transmit’ (p20).

One of the missions of the sound artist would be to deal with sound’s potentialities, to reveal apparent and unapparent sounds (Alan Licht, p7), what Cox calls the latency of sound, drawing a parallel with Leibnitz’s concept of latency of memory: all memories are not apparent all the time, they pop up as event-triggered phenomena. But all memories are virtually available in one individual’s memory. Similarly, silence is potentially sonorous, provided the right amount of amplification or the right way to listen. In this context, it is interesting to consider the humble tape loop (remember?)  as a ‘close study of sound… a frozen visual image’ (Licht, p4) and sound art as magnifying silence or noise like a magnifying glass (funnily, the French word for magnifying glass is ‘loupe’, pronounced ‘loop’). This close attention to sound was called for by Pierre Schaeffer, several authors note, with his ‘écoute réduite’ concept. Reduced listening is the intention to listen only to the sound object, writes Joanna Demers [+] (p41). ‘Cette intention de n’écouter que l’objet sonore, nous l’appelons l’écoute réduite’, P. Schaeffer in Traité Des Objets Musicaux, 1966 (Demers, p41). Sound art itself might resort to this special quality of listening.

THE ART GALLERY ASSUMPTION

Brasilian sound artist Lilian Campesato notes the specific modalities of sound art (Campesato, p36), distinct from music or cinema: 1) absence of linear temporal discourse; 2) referentiality or site-specific images and concepts; 3) interaction between audience, site and time. Most contributors to this issue of Organised Sound seem to agree more or less with these modalities. In accordance with 2), Claudia Tittel [+] gives several examples of sonification of specific sites with related sounds (Christina Kubisch, Bill Fontana, Bernhard Leitner). Her conclusion is that ‘sound art deals with sonification and the artistic treatment of features in our surroundings’ (Tittel, p64). She goes as far as assimilating sound art to installation art (p58), providing the following chronology. 1966: the first installation (Dan Flavin); 1967: the first sound installation (Max Neuhaus); 1968: Land Art (pp58-9). Similarly, several other writers propose Minimalism, Land Art or Situationism as influences to sound art. But, as far as I know, these artists were actually rather disillusioned with the art gallery commodification and sought to escape from the white cubes. If Sound Art first appeared in an Art Gallery, as several authors imply, it was because the art dealer thought the idea marketable, for an art dealer would not put up a show without a sales potential. There’s nothing wrong with this, but are we seriously to let art merchants decide what sound art is and has to be, and to follow their choices? Attributing the birth of sound art to Max Neuhaus (or others in NY in the 1980s, like in the ridiculous Wikipedia article) is at odds with my own information. According to Margaret Fisher in her book ‘Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas’ p.67 (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002), the first occurrence of Sound Art is due to German composer and film maker Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941). After the completion of his 1928 sound film ‘Deutscher Rundfunk’, a survey of several local radio stations in Germany, Ruttmann wrote that ‘sound was a new kind of art’. Ruttmann then went on to conceive ‘Weekend’, a sound piece for radio realised on film stock and including urban environmental sounds (completed 1930). Sound art is clearly born out of these radio experiments.

THE FINAL SONIC ASSAULT

Further ideas would deserve to be noticed: Dani Iosafat’s psychosonography concept, inspired by the Situationists’ psychogeography or sonic dérive, is interesting in the context of field recordings – Iosafat defines his practice [+] as reconstructing the experienced reality, eventually using added musical instruments to enhance the experience ; Georg Klein’s site specific social-sound installations set up little corners of disjunction and irony in the urban landscape [+] ; regarding disjunction, Alan Licht writes: ‘The roots of sound art lie in the disjunction of sound and image afforded by the inventions of the telephone and audio recording’ (Licht, p4). So why not assume sound art was created the same day as the telephone (Bell, 1876)?

Sound and radio artist Virginia Madsen [+] introduces her research and ensuing ‘Cantata of Fire’ radio opera, inspired by the 1993 FBI assault on the Davidians sect’s headquarters in Waco, Texas. The last day, the FBI launched a famous ‘sonic assault’ on the inhabitants, using a various mix of ‘exotic music, sound effects and harsh light’ (Madsen, p89). Here’s the playlist as reconstituted by Madsen:  Tibetan monks in prayer, dentist drill, cries of slaughtered rabbits, babies wailing, a phone left ringing off the hook (with added distortion), The Carpenters. Would the Davidians really go saying ‘there is no real difference between music and noise’ (see The Cacophony of Silence above)?

And what would be your own sonic assault playlist?

‘Varieties of Audio Mimesis’ book review

Allen S. Weiss
Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape
Errant Bodies Press, Los Angeles, 2008

I knew Allen S. Weiss from his penetrating book ‘Phantasmatic Radio’, Duke University Press, 1995, an overview of the extremes of phonetics in art and disembodied language (Artaud, Novarina, Whitehead, Migone) that the author calls onomatopeia. Weiss wrote nearly 40 books on such diverse topics as acousmatic theater, experimental radio, French literature or French gastronomy (on the latter, see this article for Cabinet magazine).

‘Varieties of Audio Mimesis’ offers a typology of imitation strategies in music, bringing new examples to the old debate of music being abstract or representational (p11). The author’s definition of Mimesis is imitation and creation (p37), whereas the classical definition, according to Aristotle, is basically imitation of life in art. The author mentions Ligeti’s composition for organ ‘Harmonics’, 1967, as imitating electronics, which pushes the mimesis definition a bit too far (p69).

Weiss notes the gardens multiple correspondences with the other arts: dance, theater, mathematics, architecture, perspective,… (p12) and he considers Gardening the 17th century’s gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of the different contemporary art forms. Weiss attributes a different gesamtkunstwerk to each century (p12):

• 16th = opera
• 17th = gardens
• 18th = encyclopedia
• 19th = Wagner and novels
• 20th = cinema and multimedia
• 21st = virtual reality

‘Speech is musical’ (p31) and what follows is an overview of linguistics’ imitation strategies, with various examples of phonemes imitating nature  from the writings of Jakobson, Rimbaud and Genette. According to Bachelard: ‘It is by imitating that we invent’ (p33). Hence, after Busoni, nature’s sounds are considered a source for expanding musical possibilities (p10).

Based on examples from Gregoy Whitehead or Scott Konzelmann’s 1997 Dry Hole,  Weiss examines unwanted noise and precarious elements such as natural reverb, technical recording errors, aleatory or static, as constitutive of many sound works, not only noise music (pp60-63). He tends to favor analogous techniques as more prone to ‘happy accidents’ than digital, and praises ’serendipity’ in audio creation (p63). Weiss stresses the key role of glissando technique in avantgarde music’s development, with examples from Edgar Varèse’s Amériques, Michael Snow’s Wavelength and Xenakis (pp70-75). For instance, an orchestra of sirens was apparently devised by mathematician Henri A. Naber in 1903 (note 122, p106). Interesting mention of the Futurists’ Intonarumori as instruments for communicating with the dead, according to Luciano Chessa’s book ‘Luigi Russolo and the Occult’, 2004 (p80).

As much as I enjoyed the examples above, I wasn’t convinced by the 8 categories created by Weiss (p44) to describe all existing sound works, based on the following musical styles: concrete, notated, hyperreal, stylized, evocative or ambient, with any combinations possible. These are self-limiting, arbitrary and not very useful tools and, besides, Weiss aknowledges their permeability. The all concept looks like a mere frame to structure his book. A style-based approach of music would be rather superficial compared to, say: structure, extra-musical elements or performance properties investigation. Anyway, this is a substantial if short book from a fine publisher (see also the Radio Territories book review).

Radio Territories [book review]

Published by Errant Bodies Press, Los Angeles/Copenhagen, 2007

A gathering of international interactive radio activists, Radio Territories was first a network of radiophonic events. The ensuing book – including some of the event’s protagonists, is a collection of essays dealing with contemporary ways to get out of the obsolete sender/receiver routine and how the listener is nowadays increasingly involved in what is being webcasted – the listener’s enpowerment taking place by the sheer power of interactivity. Editors EG Jensen and Brandon LaBelle champions independent producers in an ocean of state funded, corporate radio networks, assuming advanced technology provides producers/artists with independence. Hence articles on pirate radios, public FM performances (by the likes of neuroTransmitter, for instance), interactive online streaming, etc. The book gives radio art a fresh and lively account and makes you wanna point your antennas towards new emitters. What follows is merely a comment on the essays I enjoyed most.

MB Rasmussen’s essay is a political overview of Radio Alice, a marxist radio station in Italy. James Sey quotes Tesla, Orson Welles and Freud in the course of his essay on radio as part of a global wavelength. Steve Goodman’s is a lively description of a London pirate radio and air piracy in the age of mp3. Sabine Breitsameter focuses on webcasting as opposed to broadcasting. In her overview of the Riga’s re-lab.net project, she quotes Max Neuhaus’ Public Supply actions (early 1970s) as precursor of network installations, as well as Hans Flesh’s ‘Zauberei auf dem Sender’ (in a Frankfurt 1924 radio hörspiel), featuring ‘…a mysterious sonic disturbance. Instead of the Blue Danube waltz that has been planned for the show, listeners were served a concoction of noises, music and human voices’ (p 60). Ellen Waterman evaluates the place of women in radio art in general and in Canada in particular, based on the contents of several key essays (including ‘Wireless Imagination’, 1992, ed by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, or Douglas Kahn’s ‘Radio Rethink: Art, Sound and Transmission‘, 1994). Her article echoes a like minded text in Wireless Imagination. Sophie Gosselin, aka apo33, describes the experiments of their workshop in Nantes (France) connecting several remote buildings together via microphones and electronic processing, the local, ambient sound being aired throughout the city and played in another building. Bertold Brecht’s essay is quoted several times in the book, as in Erik Granly Jensen’s essay. Brecht: ‘[Radio] must be transformed from a distribution apparatus to a communication apparatus’ (p158). Jensen also quotes Walter Benjamin’s play for children ‘The Railway Disaster of the Firth of Tay’ (1930s) to aknowledge Benjamin’s parallel between railway system and broadcasting system (p159). According to Benjamin, the advent of radio broadcast is due to state propaganda needs. Jensen analyses Brecht and Benjamin’s relation to radio and how it relates to contemporary radio experiments like LIGNA’s happening in a railway station. Douglas Kahn is no doubt a talented writer, his text ripe with beautiful imagery and poetic writing. ‘Radio of the spheres’ introduce a short history of electromagnetic sounds starting as early as ancient Greece. Kahn quotes from cosmology, philosophy or the ear’s physiology. I loved the presence of Erik Satie’s cephalophones (imaginary instruments) from Ornella Volta’s book A Mammal Notebook, UK, 1996. Other supernatural sounds in this review are the black holes’ sound waves or the ‘Sferics’, electromagnetic waves related to solar winds (p224-225).