ReVIeW 
ReVIeW
SONIC RESIDUES
A day long series of sound installations and concerts,
Linden Gallery, St. Kilda, 21 Dec. 1997
Curated by Garth Paine
Introduction
In the world of the galleries, sound is often paid lip service, when it is acknowledged at all. I have often gone to galleries and had to tell the staff how to operate the equipment in order to even hear the sound works installed in them. The world of equipment is often all too much for curatorial staff trained to think of art as something that sits quietly on a wall.
How refreshing, then, to attend, and be part of an all day event in a gallery devoted to sound, where the nature of sound and of the gallery was carefully attended to, where the equipment all worked, and where one could experience a wide variety of sound events in a congenial, open atmosphere.
"Sonic Residues" was an all day event, consisting of 10 installations, distributed throughout the gallery spaces, and four "hour-long" concerts, of both live and taped sound works, distributed throughout the day. It was organized and curated by Melbourne sound designer and composer Garth Paine, who was assisted on the day by composer Lawrence Harvey, the staff of the Linden Gallery, and the good will of family, friends, and the composers involved.
The main thing that impressed me about the mammoth job of organizing such an event was the care with which Garth conceived of the whole gallery as a sounding entity - in such a way that although there were 10 installations going, and they did sound into each other - none of the mixing of sounds seemed to be obnoxious. The loudness of each installation was kept down, and small, but high quality speakers were used, so that each had its own space where it was predominant, but did not overly intrude on the spaces of the others. As long as one accepted the basic premise that the installations were going to be part of an overall mix, the placement of them in the different rooms of the gallery worked very well. In two rooms, there were even two installations going simultaneously - one on loudspeakers, the other on headphones. This worked very well, allowing for moments of acoustic solitude and concentration in the middle of what was otherwise a very busy environment.
The installations ran throughout the day, except when the live concerts were happening. Linden is a gallery with very resonant acoustics, and in which all the rooms open onto a central corridor. A pin dropped in one gallery can be heard in them all. To combat this, Garth hung black sound absorbing curtains on at least one wall of each gallery. This tamed the bathroom-like reverb of the gallery to a manageable level.
You can jump through this review by selection one of the following links, or read it sequentially
Installations - - - - Concerts
Installations
Gallery 1
In Gallery 1, two works were installed, Michael Whiticker's "Aborigines in Sport," the sound part of a larger multimedia installation currently installed at the Penrith Regional Gallery, and Tim Barrass' "Swarm," a work for both video and sound.
Whiticker's work was installed in the front of the room, by the large bay window looking out onto the garden. One stood facing the garden and heard fragments of the overall piece. These ranged from interviews with the Aboriginal sportspersons in question, to grabs of media reports of events, to some extremely beautiful sounds made by computer treating the voices and reports. The soundscape, originally meant to be heard in the context of a number of visual documents, was here fragmented even further, but as one visited it, again and again, during the day, a sense of its narrative and energy began to accumulate.
Barrass' work was mounted in the rear of the room. A TV monitor on a pedestal at eye level, with an explanatory note below it, and a pair of headphones hanging, invited individual viewing of the work, in which a number of computer generated lines ("flies" in Barrass' terms), flew around the screen, the energy of each line seeming to be reflected in the many lines of the music heard on the headphones. The chaotic equations that produced the visuals were also used to produce the musical lines, which were limited so that they could only play pitches that would produce traditional harmonies. The buzziness of the timbre used, and the matching of energies of both the visuals and sound made this a most attractive installation. In his note on the piece, Barrass said that he would "like to dedicate "Swarm" to Centrelink/CES, for the alarming inaccuracy of thier client data-base." This was the first of a number of installations which used their material in such a way as to make metaphorical or direct social statements.
Hallway
Leaving Gallery 1, one encounted soft and beautiful sounds in the hallway, emanating from loudspeakers mounted on top of the display cabinets, in one of which was mounted a 10 inch metal analog tape reel (now obsolete), and in the other was mounted a much smaller DAT tape (soon to be obsolete).
The music was by Roger Alsop - his endless installation piece "SOMEONE is a moment of transition" in which the voice of Barry Dickins is stretched to enormous extremes and turned into a series of absolutely gorgeous curtains of sound. The slow, almost stately rhythms of timbral change in Alsop's piece emphasized the omnipresent nature of transition, and the placement of the piece, in the hallway, the very place of transition, further accentuated this.
Gallery 1A
In the smaller Gallery 1A, Herbert Jercher's "Box On" was installed. An assemblage consisting of an upright mounted guitar, into which two theremins had been built (an array of cork (note the reference to a swaggie's hat here) knobbed electronic dials arrayed the bottom of the guitar's soundboard), a tiny amplifier, tea chest with two contact miked bows (as in bow and arrow) gaffer taped to it, and a map sat in lonely splendor in the gallery producing some high tones which wheezed away softly until someone came near enough to the guitar to affect the tones. Hands moved near the strings of the guitar affected the sounds of the theremins, the guitar strings being wired to act as antennas for the instrument. Jercher's typical combination of rough hewn bush imagery and technological sophistication was very much in evidence here - an homage to, and an encapsulation of the Aussie bush improvisation ethos which is simultaneously droll and engrossing.
The Project Room
The Project Room, behind Gallery 1A, housed my own (Warren Burt) installation, "Reality Check," where, like Barrass installation, an abstract construction of sound and interaction was used as a metaphor for a political situation. In this installation, entry to, or exit from the room changed the music that was playing, but once inside, the public was helpless to make any changes in the sound. The two small buzzy loudspeakers were also wrapped in barbed wire. Not only was the quality of sound not too good, but you were helpless, and forbidden, to try and make any changes in it. Unlike many interactive installations and games, which try to create a sense of fantasy or personal power in an imaginary world, I tried with this installation to represent a reality: the reality of dealing with the bureaucratic, academic, commercial, or establishment worlds.
Entry to, and exit from these systems may change them, but once inside, they always prove stronger that you. Change from the inside, the myth beloved of reformists everywhere, was here attacked as a meaningless and disempowering sham. Frustration also played a part in this installation. If you entered the room and didn't like what was playing, you left. But your leaving changed all the aspects of the music, and you might like those results. So you would re-enter the room, and your re-entry would again change all aspects of the music. You might like those results as well, but they wouldn't be the results you entered the room to hear. Only the position of the "consultant" - half in and half out of the doorway, had any power, but even there, the power was illusory, because even the consultant can't predict the effects of the changes they're making.
Gallery 3
Across the hallway, in Gallery 3, there were again two installations. Under headphones, in another of Linden's beautiful bay windows, was Robin Whittle's stunning "Spare Luxury" and "Tanglewood Interlude", two tape pieces designed to be heard over headphones. Pretty pieces when heard over loudspeakers, as they were during the concerts, it is only under headphones that the full nature of the sound becomes apparent. It consists of many different strands of sound, each one moving around the listener's head at differing rates. I've heard a lot of this sort of work before, but this is the first piece like this where the incredibly accurate moving of sound in headphone space did not sound like a gimmick, but was a powerfully integrated part of the composition. And the installation in a bay window in a gallery, with comfortable cushions to recline on, seemed to be a perfect way of bringing this sort of essentially private composition into the public sphere.
Emanating from loudspeakers at the other side of the room was music from "Suspended in Amber", a CD of works by Canada-based American composer, Sarah Peebles, in collaboration with several Japanese composers and performers. On the wall hung ink works by Korean calligrapher Chung Gong Ha, between which was placed a documentary photobook on a plinth, containing perfomance photos and descriptions by the Canadian mixed media trio, Cinnamon Sphere, whose members include Sarah Peebles (computer-assisted performance), Nilan Perera (altered electric guitar) and Chung Gong Ha (calligraphy performance).
"Suspended in Amber" was performed by Peebles, Hiromi Yoshida, and Ikuo Kakehashi at Kawasaki's Shukoji temple (along with calligraphy performance by Harumi Kaieda). The sounds of the shoh (Japanese mouth-organ), crickets, percussion, and many sampled sounds slowly and gently filled the room and pervaded the gallery. More than almost any other of the works, this one seemed to become the most "environmental," the most a part of the architecture of the gallery itself, despite its being a "residue" of a different, live, performance.
Broom Closet
Down the hallway, just before exiting out the rear entrance, was perhaps the most effective use of space in the entire event. From behind the door of the broom closet, the voices of a screaming man and woman, involved in a ritualized, angry domestic dispute would occasionally emanate. This was American Erik Belgum's "Bad Marriage Mantra," his formalization of a horrific argument he heard one night thru the walls of a Toronto motel room. Two actors work over a series of formalized ritual obscene insults and verbal attacks, shouting them back and forth at each other, crying them, whispering them, in a never ending performance (actually about an hour, but the CD should be put on replay...). Placed in the broom closet, only the moderately loud to screaming sounds were heard, and the dark suggestions of a domestic violence that the audience was absolutely helpless to change pervaded the gallery and the garden behind the gallery. In fact, at their loudest, the yells could be heard all through the gallery, drawing the viewer (or is that listener?) to the door of the closet to see/hear what was going on.
The Garden
Out in the garden, wonderful Indian food was being catered, and the audience could sit at tables, eat and drink, relax and chat.
Occasionally, very complex and engrossing sounds would emerge from the two large loudspeakers mounted there, live their brief life and then expire back into silence. These were the 50 unique "ANL-folds" of Rumanian-American composer Sever Tipei, and were produced by a computer controlling his DIASS additive synthesis instrument at Illinois' Argonne National Laboratory. "ANL-folds" is a computer program which produces, for each run, a completely unique output. The sounds are complex, lifelike, and like life, are almost completely unpredictable. (The world-view of biologist Stephen Jay Gould or a chaos theorist was most in evidence in these installations - the old deterministic universe (which, I would maintain, is STILL the underlying ethos of the vast bulk of pop music) seemed to be left far behind.) For each performance, Tipei produces a unique tape, each section of which is to be heard only once. In the context of the courtyard, with its fine food and relaxed atmosphere, the sounds worked splendidly.
Activities Room
Moving upstairs, into the Activities Room, the only sonically isolated space in the gallery complex, was Paine's own "Spaces of Entrance and Exit." This installation used a video camera to detect movement in the room (the detection system is called the "Very Nervous System") and used those movements to control a series of piano notes and a collage of samples of architects talking about their ideas of what constitutes a doorway. The room invited exploration, to see which movements, in which places, produced what kinds of sounds. It was most effective when dancer Hellen Sky, herself a veteran of many years of work with interactive technology, moved throughout the space in an impromptu performance. Controlled by a virtuosic mover such as she, the installation really came to life (a fine instrument played by a fine performer will always sound more interesting....), with the musical results having, to my ears, the combination of rhythmic life and harmonic stasis that characterized the 1940's work of John Cage.
Go to a listing of all Installation Pieces Installation List
Go to the detailed Programme notes for the Installations
Concerts
At 12, 2, 4, and 6 PM, the installations were shut down, and the audience moved into Gallery 2 for a series of concerts of live and taped works. This presented the only logistical problem of the day. The ventilation in this Gallery is very bad, and 30 bodies and banks of amplifiers, etc. quickly ate all the oxygen in the small room producing a stifling, airless environment that had more than one eager listener regretably leaving just in order to breathe. By the 4 PM concert, the sound isolating curtains hung in the doorways were abandoned and at least a modicum of oxygen was again circulating.
Despite this, there was a large range of extremely interesting work heard, from the live work of the "On Ice" team (Trish Anderson, Fran Power and Gary McKie), who performed a number of extracts from their multimedia show "On Ice" mostly concerned, in both an ironic and celbratory way, with the relationship of a composer and her computer, and McKie's own work for dancers, sound and video, "Reflections", which had some very attractive sampler work, to a large number of tape pieces, some of which I found engrossing, some less so.
Among the works which tickled my sonic fancy were Ros Bandt's "Are You Really There?", a meditation on the sounds of obsolete technology and the departed; Alexander Mihalic's "Fractals I", a pleasing abstract work; Paul Doornbush's "Structures Luck", a taped battle between a bassoonist and a computer; Philip Samartzis' atmospheric evocation of a chateau in France, "Harimoncourt"; the jolly reworking of sonic detritus ("Analog Errors" and "Digital Errors") by Germany's Klangkrieg; Garth Paine's own "Bell Syntax", which was one of the few pieces of the day whose ending took me by surprise.
There seems to be evolving in tape music, a kind of build up of tension, followed by a fading away sound, that is just as much of a cadential cliche as the old dominant-seventh-to-tonic chord progression is in traditional music. I was very grateful to Garth, then, when in addition to attractive sounds, the piece had an interesting shape as well, eschewing what is already becoming a formula in a fairly new genre.
Except for the oxygen, the listening environment was fairly ideal - people could lie on the floor on cushions, with a few chairs for the spinally challenged, and this seemed to immediately do away with the "concert hall" formality that usually destroys tape music played in a more traditional setting.
The focus in the tape works was on sound, how it changed and how it moved in space, and not on the dynamics of a live performer. This is a very special kind of performance, and one that we rarely get a chance to hear properly. How good then, to have an event that allowed us to hear these many fine works in conditions which allowed them to be fully heard.
Garth Paine's sensitivity to the architectural qualities of sound is a rare asset, and one that should be encouraged. Let's hope that there are many more events like "Sonic Residues" which allow us to hear sound in the sensitive, highlighted way this one did.
Go to a list of pieces programed
go to detailed programme notes Concert 1 , Concert 2, Concert 3 , Concert 4
