Combine the melodic charm of the piano with the raw elements of percussion, and you have the prepared piano. It’s a musical universe filled with metallic rattles, buzzing bell-like tones and dulled acoustics that inventive Brisbane-based composer and pianist Erik Griswold has been exploring for decades. In his 2006 long-form piano work Wallpaper Music, Griswold ‘radically retunes’ the traditional piano by inserting everyday objects such as screws, bolts and strips of rubber between the strings of the piano. This physically demanding performance of apparent perpetual motion, with hidden melodies and richly layered percussive timbres, turned Bendigo’s Old Fire Station into a hypnotic space.
In 1940, American composer John Cage was commissioned to write accompaniment for an African themed dance piece. The work’s small performance venue was impractical for a percussion ensemble, so Cage created the prepared piano as a substitute. By preparing the piano the notes lose their ‘pure’ identifiable pitch and instead take on a metallic, dull or wooden quality akin to that of percussion instruments.
Cage believed the foundations of music to be sound and silence, with the only thing common to both being duration. As a result he felt rhythm was more important than melody and harmony, making prepared piano—with its added percussive focus—the perfect medium for combining all three. Griswold explores this notion in Wallpaper Music, a continuous 60-minute piece with minimal melodic and dynamic variation that ultimately allows the audience to focus on the relationship between percussive effects and rhythmic structure.
The sheer physicality of the performance was impressive as Griswold played an unbroken flow of notes with rippling fluidity. His effortless dexterity in navigating the full range of the keyboard added a visual element to an already engaging performance. Bold forward momentum and a simultaneous sense of stillness seemed to turn in an infinite loop as Griswold, often swaying in slow circles, balanced relentless motoric figures with delicate emerging melodies. His refusal of dynamic accentuation in a work already without definable rhythmic metre created the perception of a circular, almost minimalist, development.
A glimpse inside the piano revealed a sight rarely seen: shiny screws and small squares of folded cardboard carefully wedged between strings, strips of rubber woven across an octave, and even gaffer tape stretched over some lower strings. Griswold had also locked down selected white keys in the bottom two octaves by squeezing slivers of cardboard between each key and the vertical piano front, so as to avoid sounding those pitches when he played clustered notes with his palm. In a way the work is illustrative of wallpaper, with its repetitive patterns and intense consistency. However this performance was enveloping, driven and much more vibrant than the unobtrusive two-dimensionality we commonly associate with ‘wallpaper music.’
2015 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Erik Griswold, Wallpaper Music, The Old Fire Station, Bendigo, 5 Sept
This review initially appeared on Partial Durations, the new music blog produced by Matthew Lorenzon with the support of RealTime. Lorenzon and Keith Gallasch were commissioned to conduct a review-writing workshop as part of BIFEM 2015 for five emerging reviewers.
Founding Amplified Elephants member Kathryn Sutherland demonstrates the RESONANCE table for the audience after the concert
photo by Marty Williams
Founding Amplified Elephants member Kathryn Sutherland demonstrates the RESONANCE table for the audience after the concert
The lights are dimmed already, giving this small but regal room in Bendigo’s Capital Theatre a warm, apricot hue. The dull glow offsets two veiled television-sized monitors placed on a ledge above the five black-clad performers. We sit around what looks like an overhead projector: a large horizontal screen with an optical lens perched on a stem above it.
These performers are the Amplified Elephants, a sound art group based in Footscray whose members live with intellectual disability. Formed in 2006 as an offshoot of the sonic art collective The Click Clack Project, they have created a diverse range of projects using experimental techniques to evoke soundscapes and make performance art from new technologies, prepared traditional instruments and found objects.
This debut of their latest work, Select Naturalis, showcases a remarkable new piece of technology developed by Jonathan Duckworth in the CiART program at RMIT. The room’s central piece of equipment is in fact a large digital touchscreen tablet: images appearing on its surface are captured by the camera lodged above, and displayed in real time on the room’s two monitors. In developing the performance, the Elephants programmed a range of acoustic and digital sounds into the tablet’s software. They trigger these sounds in performance through tactile engagement with the interface.
Guided by Artistic Director James Hullick’s gentle prompts, performers improvise short solo sets. The piece builds in the first movement with Jay Euesden’s concentrated, space-activating pokes and Teagan Connors’ broad, multi-fingered glides. In the second movement, following an extended drone, Kathryn Sutherland masterfully drives the piece to peak intensity. We hear squelching, screechy and swampy sounds; an array of tropical bird-calls; excited human hollering; and a medley of straw-sucking and blowing. With one or two measured looks, Robin McGrath invites the audience to engage on a more personal level with this act of the creation.
The ensemble place and adjust hand-sized coloured blocks on the screen, which triggers trippy tie-die swirls and graphics evoking a cell nucleus and its spinning electrons. Upon tapping, the electrons shoot along lines extending mandala-like from the base of each block to synapse with the lines generated by others.
The cellular representation here, in the tablet’s graphics, thematically coheres with the piece’s other key symbols: the title, referencing Charles Darwin’s notion of natural selection; the male voiceover which challenges those readings of Darwin which promote the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’ over other less reductive understandings of how humans have evolved; and the pre-recorded backing track, which forms a foundation for the semi-improvised performances. A striking example of this backing track’s effect occurs in the piece’s opening moments. Before there’s any action, we’re enveloped by a loud and low, dubbed hum from the surround sound system. It holds a tightly looped rhythm, as if an old computer program scrolling through endless options. Or, more ominously, is stuck on one option. Either way, no selection is made.
This symbolic system suggests that while genealogical science might be undeniable, we should not let it limit the infinite ways we can practice art. Perhaps more importantly, it suggests that our continued evolution, including our ability to adapt to conditions like climate change, depends on acknowledging biological capacities we may already have developed, but ignored. It’s a perspective which links this performance text closely to the raison d’etre of the group performing it. If the Elephants, as bearers of intellectual disability, are the ‘elephants in the room,’ their amplification of that position represents their way forward, which is actually a way in. As the voiceover says, ‘meta-listening,’ a biological feature perhaps developed by our distant ancestors, involves just such a process of shining awareness on the functional, and the willingly unseen or unheard. Select Naturalis seeks to metaphorise that awareness and, it seems, achieve real social affect: community, inclusion, technological progress and ever-better names for things.
The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, The Amplified Elephants, Select Naturalis, Bendigo Bank Theatre, 5 Sept
This review initially appeared on the new music blog Partial Durations, a Matthew Lorenzon-RealTime project. Lorenzon and Keith Gallasch were commissioned to conduct a review-writing workshop as part of BIFEM 2015 for five emerging reviewers.
‘Did he know he was going to make this piece crazy?’ A child’s voice comes through my ear-piece over the sounds of the Argonaut Quartet performing Christophe Bertrand’s Quatuor No.1. The ear-piece and radio are part of Soundtracks, an art intervention by St Martins Youth Arts Centre providing live commentary to Bertrand’s music by young artists between the ages of eight and twelve. Bassi, Satchmo and Anh are my commentators and they guide me through the quartet, much like a DVD commentary (though less intrusive).
Before the quartet commences, the children explain that they know three things about Quatuor No.1: that it was written by Christophe Bertrand, that Bertrand died by suicide at the age of 29 and that there were originally nine movements, but two have been lost. The knowledge of Bertrand’s suicide, a heavy and complex topic for such young children, obviously colours their interpretation.
The images they use to describe the music are highly evocative: the pizzicato of the first movement is the ‘pitter patter of rain’ and as it intensifies it prompts a story of being caught in an out-of-the-blue hail storm. The ending of the movement is compared to a snowball rolling downhill that seems like ‘it’s going to explode or collapse, but when it gets to the bottom it just sits there’. The fourth movement, full of droning strings and pitch slides, sounds like ‘wolves howling’ at the edge of a cold, dark forest, and the slow glissandos and microtonal shifts in the sixth movement are ‘like a baby crying’. The music of the melancholy fifth movement sounds like it ‘keeps reaching and falling down’.
Interspersed with these responses to the music, the children tell me the questions they would like to ask the composer, such as: ‘What was his first memory of a connection to music?’ as they try to put together ‘the pieces of the puzzle that would help us understand him’. In answer to the question ‘what does it mean?’ they sadly conclude, ‘we can only guess’.
There are also lighter moments. The actions of the players in the dance-like second movement resemble ‘yanking a tooth out’ and Judith Hamann’s cello technique in the third inspires a story of whisking cream to have with strawberries. Members of the quartet are compared to wound up ‘mechanical toys nodding their heads and moving their arms’. The children’s observations of the music are remarkably astute, drawn from their own experiences. Independently moving parts are compared to students packing up their bags at the end of a day at school, some are faster and some slower, some have more things to pack up, some have less.
As the drama of the music builds to its climax in the final movement, static fuzzes through my earpiece and I only catch the words ‘storm brewing’ and ‘really wild’. The end of the quartet fades away slowly, ‘like dust blown off a surface, leaving nothing’.
The concert had begun with Kimmo Kuokkala’s Kirvis, a work of bouncing bows, scratchy rustlings, ending on a pure crystalline high note.
The world premiere of New Zealander Dylan Lardelli’s Mapping, an inlay follows the Bertrand, and gradually unfolds like a landscape coming into view, recorded in precise detailed lines. The meditative sound world is made up of gentle dissonance, dull hisses, papery harmonics and warbling strings.
4x4x4 finishes with Stefano Gervasoni’s Six lettres à l’obscurité (und zwei Nachrichten) or Six Letters to Obscurity (and Two Stories). The obscure letters, one for each movement, spell the name Claire (the deliberate irony is that this also means ‘clear’ in French). The story movements are inserted after the letters ‘l’ and ‘i’. The music swings from atmospheric noises to upbeat folky passages and the movement ‘r’ stands for ricecar, Gervasoni quoting Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Recercar chromatico post il Credo for organ in an arrangement where the edges are frayed with distorted timbres and shrieks.
The Bertrand quartet with art intervention from St Martins was certainly the most affecting work on the program. While the commentary distracted from full immersion in the Argonaut Quartet’s performance, it did provide a fascinating insight into the response of children to music. Wise and empathetic, the commentators coloured my own response to Bertrand’s quartet, and added layers of meaning and depth to the experience. That said, the sudden (if altered) tonality of Frescobaldi’s ricecar in the Gervasoni provoked an unexpectedly powerful frisson, coming at the end of a weekend full of exploratory music.
The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Argonaut String Quartet, 4x4x4, Bendigo Bank Theatre, 6 Sep
This review initially appeared on the new music blog Partial Durations, a Matthew Lorenzon-RealTime project. Lorenzon and Keith Gallasch were commissioned to conduct a review-writing workshop as part of BIFEM 2015 for five emerging reviewers.
Fabienne Séveillac performs The Exhausted with soundinitiative
photo by Marty Williams
Fabienne Séveillac performs The Exhausted with soundinitiative
“Exhausted is so much more than tired” begins Gilles Deleuze’s essay on Samuel Beckett (“The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann, 1995). Tiredness assumes there is more to be done; the exhausted has consumed, expended, or used up all possibilities. Everybody has experienced the former, whereas the latter is the stuff of mathematical definitions. Beckett combines the two. One can exhaust the possible combinations of objects in a series, just as Beckett permutes series of socks, stones and physical movements in his plays and novels. “Beckett’s great contribution to logic,” Deleuze writes, “is to display that exhaustion (exhaustivity) does not occur without a certain physiological exhaustion.”
Bernhard Lang’s The Exhausted is a music theatre piece co-commissioned by the young Parisian ensemble soundinitiative for their debut at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music. Seated expectantly in the Capital Theatre, the audience was initially treated to only a momentary glimpse of the charismatic ensemble. The players wandered on stage, set up their instruments, and promptly exited. The next five minutes saw a constant flow of musicians entering and exiting the stage like waves lapping on the shore. The choreography by Benjamin Vandewalle made the most of the musicians’ natural and untutored movements. These were not actors and dancers striding purposefully on stage, but cellists and flautists repeating the gestural repertoire of the concert hall. The ensemble would stand, sit, slouch, or freeze with the simplicity proper to Beckett’s stage directions. The mezzo-soprano Fabienne Séveillac was no exception, though no other performer was called upon to sing vintage Deleuze upside-down beneath a table.
There is often a tenuous link between compositions and the philosophical texts upon which they are based. It is therefore wonderful to hear a composer developing his work so thoroughly from a single text. Objects on stage including a desk and a grey tape player are drawn directly from Deleuze’s essay. Beethoven’s Ghost Trio and Schubert’s Nacht und Träume feature in Beckett and Deleuze, though the pieces are cleverly introduced not underneath their description in the essay, but under Deleuze’s discussion of Beckett’s play Quad: “Four possible solos all given. Six possible duos all given (two twice). Four possible trios all given twice.”
Despite drawing heavily on Deleuze’s text, Lang has resisted the temptation to interpret Deleuze’s essay literally. He seeks the same nomadic movement of thought from Deleuze’s essay that Deleuze sought in reading Beckett. With all Deleuze’s talk of combinatory mathematics, it would be tempting to write a serial piece or engage in some other form of musical permutation, especially with such direct invitations as Deleuze’s phrase “Watt is the great serial novel.” While there may have been serial moments in the piece, the work seems to build upon the composer’s earlier Deleuze-inspired pieces by looping musical fragments, especially the jazz-inflected grooves of Lang’s student years. The piece, at least on one naïve hearing, plays to the tiredness inherent in repetition while referring obliquely to exhaustion’s formal properties.
Why repetition? A combinatorial sequence repeats the same elements in different ways, but Lang’s repetition is more static. A reader of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition will recognise that repetition is only possible because of the infinitesimal difference between each iteration. This difference may provide a path past exhaustion. The audience and the performers may realise that there really are tangential possibilities hiding within each musical fragment beyond its combination with others. But repetition is also fatiguing and there is always the possibility that tiredness will win out before exhausted repetition opens a window onto the new.
The Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, soundinitiative, Bernhard Lang, The Exhausted, The Capital Theatre
4 Sept
This review initially appeared on the new music blog Partial Durations, a Matthew Lorenzon-RealTime project. Lorenzon and Keith Gallasch were commissioned to conduct a review-writing workshop as part of BIFEM 2015 for five emerging reviewers.
A thread running through the festival weekend was the artistic and philosophical challenges facing composers and listeners when images and sound cohabit a performance. A panel at a Composer Colloquium had discussed this earlier in the day and it was a recurring theme in those quick and energised exchanges you have right after a concert, whispered between pieces, walking to the next venue or waiting for your coffee or wine.
Tonight, I had no idea what would unfold, had never heard Finland’s Defunensemble before and knew none of the composers or works. In contrast to many other performances over the weekend, this All Finnish concert made no use of projected images. But, like the single letters, words and sentences of a novel that unfurl and re-form to become lives and your own experiences, the performance was one of the most rich and visually potent I’ve attended. This was international exploratory music, and tonight Defunensemble nailed it.
Juhani Nuorvala’s Ruoikkohuhuilu (2014) begins with Hanna Kinnunen (alto flute) appearing in aquamarine colours out of a dark and gentle crest of pre-recorded sound designed by Anders Pohjola and Timo Kurkikangas (electronics). The flute outlines the open building blocks of chords as if glimpsed through cloud, before descending as a sallow Nordic counterpart. The crescents become glassy and shafts of whole tones are harvested, before drifting away again into the light. It stings a little as you get close, but like the tide Kinnunen returns from whence she came. This was a breathtaking and gentle prologue that kept itself just far enough away from becoming ambience.
In Ville Raasakka’s Erinnerung (2010), the harp (Lily-Marlene Puusepp), clarinet/bass clarinet (Mikko Raasakka), cello (Markus Hohti) and piano (Emil Holmström) join the flute and electro-acousticians. The players wore headphones for audio synchronisation which allowed them to take part in an extravagant internalised reminiscence. An entire lifetime is recalled in a quick succession of darting textures and contradictions. Beginning with a cubist burst of repeated tones, relationships begin to form only to disintegrate. Harp sides with reinforced piano, but then piano switches to join flute, so harp teams up with cello, while the breath of the bass clarinet intermingles with high piano and cello grinds to a stop. More solid structures build now, but these teeter and need recalibrating. Characters become more mature and the conversation less pushy; three is no longer a crowd. But the tensions of earlier times are not forgotten altogether with the clarinet’s air and cello’s scratch silenced by close-voiced piano repetitions. Hang on, was that an entire life or just one weekend?
The relativity and ambiguity of time are further explored in Perttu Haapanen’s Doll Garden (2013) for the same instrumentalists as in the previous work. The acoustic musicians at first represent the thoughts and gaps between the spelling out of the track, which is triggered via the flautist’s foot pedal. The individual keystrokes of a typewriter start off well, but hesitations and corrections increase as the paper gets wound backwards and ackspacebackspacebar and spa ace bar, leeeetterskeyyyyyyyyystart arts___ _xxxxxx xxxrepeating. With paper tearing loose and the platen cogs giving way, we enter a slow dance as the bell at each carriage end carries us round the room. When we open our eyes again, life’s become a high-speed connection and it’s oftentimes turbulent and too fast for our thoughts to keep up. We try to recall and recapture a time when sounds lived on vinyl and the words of a book carried a particular smell. But despite using a QWERTY keyboard to talk to a computer, it’s not the same machine. The bass clarinet and flute hang in the air and I’m wondering what the pact is between artificial intelligence and vintage technology.
For Niilo Tarnanen’s Kään (2014) the group pares back to harp, bass clarinet and piano, though with a new microphone position to pick up subtle piano transmissions. The ambient track begins with static prior to both harp and the low register of the inside of the piano producing pings of sound along the copper wire wrappings of the low strings. I’m deep inside circuits and I feel currents flowing hither and thither; the bass clarinet emits a few sinewy charges and there is a strange order to the random spreadings and impulses. Being so close to the components makes it hard to navigate, but I feel we are approaching a nerve centre of sorts. The switches and plucks and battery stings to the tongue are synapses to other worlds. Towards the end we sense a twisting of some giant undersea cable and catch a fleeting glimpse of the meniscus above.
The full ensemble returns for the final work in the program—Feed (2013) by Sami Klemola, who joins the group on guitar. He checks his signal through a massive Marshall amplifier; this cheeky response lets the audience know straightaway that we are in for a feast. Of everything I heard over the weekend, this piece was one of the few that showed how freedom and spontaneity can lend a work a burst of creative expression. An organised structure and well controlled timings allowed the players a permissiveness that sent shivers through the audience. The guitarist as ringleader teases and incites the others to join him. The rapid and chaotic improvisation of the opening gives way to a shock unison that morphs into a cluster and snaps off again. Squelching downbeats from the band accompany an extraordinary trade-off between guitar amp buzz and flute air. After five shots, the anarchistic figures begin again but even thicker and darker than before. After this subsides we arrive at the highlight of the work. On cue, the players launch into rhythmic unison three-note figures over and over with pauses between each set. To my ear these are not fixed notes but “any pitches”. In the gaps, guitar fills are the pinpricks of sound produced behind the pickup. As the three-note figures continue—together but always shifting in frequency and pitch—they turn into background to the guitar which now evolves into a full blown exploration of phased hisses, buzzes and scratchings.
As the final “free” section of Feed restarts, I ‘see’ it through a different lens. Like traffic from afar it seems an impenetrable wall of noise, but up close it is hundreds and thousands of tiny and equally valid movements and transactions. Even when sirens wail, each goes about its own business, all but trying to hold onto a delicate and fleeting farewell. So drew the 2015 Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music to a close. Defunensemble’s All Finnish was a textbook example of what makes a spellbinding concert. This team gave us discernible structural signposts, pieces with cogent emotional intent, huge spectrums of sonic variation, lively and committed playing and a flawless sound design.
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, Defunensemble, All Finnish, Ulumbarra Theatre, 6 Sept
This review initially appeared on the new music blog Partial Durations, a Matthew Lorenzon-RealTime project. Lorenzon and Keith Gallasch were commissioned to conduct a review-writing workshop as part of BIFEM 2015 for five emerging reviewers.
The Argonaut Ensemble perform Boulez’s Sur Incises
photo by Marty Williams
The Argonaut Ensemble perform Boulez’s Sur Incises
The stage layout for Argonaut ensemble’s performance of Boulez’s Sur Incises sculpts an image of the sound world to come. Three pianos at the front of the stage are shadowed by three harps—extensions of their resonant strings. Behind, three batteries of tuned percussion give physical form to that ringing resonance that hovers above the music. The lush garden of sounds Argonaut ensemble evoke in their performance of the 1998 work reflects with purity Boulez’s orchestration and texture. The eclectic instrumentation may limit performances of the work, but the collection of timbres allows for a distinctive fluidity between instruments, with harps and vibraphones becoming extensions of the piano.
Conductor Eric Dudley and the ensemble were clearly aware of the importance of decay throughout the work, and exploited this thematically. This is epitomised in the final moment of the concert, when Dudley holds the audience in silence until well after the last note dies out. There’s an ethereal harmony heard in the resonance of three separate chords ending each pianist’s run. The ringing tones of vibraphones, crotales and steel drums hang in the air in moments between dense activity. Boulez’s orchestration disguises the attack of one instrument in the decay of others, blurring the distinction between instruments. Dense piano clusters reduce to reveal a gentle harp melody or crotales take over to continue an ascending passage as a pianist reaches the top end of his range.
Alternation between precisely timed rhythmic passages and aleatoric gestures are a defining feature of the piece. At times, the music lingers in one mindset for a while, as in the fast, strict toccata of the first movement. The musicians in this performance perfected both technical rhythms and interpreted grace notes—unmeasured notes which allow for flexibility. On the latter, the conductor signals only a starting point after which each performer decides the timing of the notes, creating a gentle falling away of sound. The smooth contour of the work was not lost in these parts, a credit to the ensemble’s ability to give expression without hesitation while maintaining coherency.
The performers were not only individually virtuosic, but worked well as an ensemble. Moulding the individuality of their playing, the three pianists often worked to create the same kind of timbre, even at times sounding as one instrument. There was also a sense of timbral continuity between different instruments, with the pianists gently caressing the keys to evoke the sound of harp glissandi or playing low rhythmic passages to imitate marimba.
The ensemble lost no expressivity in this accurate performance of a technically demanding piece. The natural cohesion between conductor and all ensemble members was felt by the audience. A well-rehearsed and knowledgeable ensemble held together a piece that relies on moments of chance indistinguishable from strictly notated passages. Argonaut’s interpretation of ‘Sur Incises’ was a highlight of the festival.
Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, The Argonaut Ensemble, Pierre Boulez, Sur Incises, The Capital Theatre, 5 Sept
This review initially appeared on Partial Durations, the new music blog produced by Matthew Lorenzon with the support of RealTime. Lorenzon and Keith Gallasch were commissioned to conduct a review-writing workshop as part of BIFEM 2015 for five emerging reviewers.
Glasgow is blessed with Sonica, an ever-growing international sonic arts festival that features UK and international artists, including this year Indonesian sound and installation artist Jompet Kuswidananto who will present Order and After in the Ladies Pool of Glasgow’s 18th century Govanhill Baths. As is increasingly common, sound art rarely stands alone; instead its relationships with light, the moving image, biological systems, electromagnetic fields, various digital platforms, non-musical performance and installation are being vigorously explored.
Sonica is presented by Cryptic, a Glasgow based production house that offers performances that fuse music, sonic art and multi-media. Launched in Glasgow in November 2012, Sonica has toured to Brazil, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Sweden and across the UK. Its 2015 festival features 30 international artists from five continents and 120 events and performances.
Featured artists include Australia’s Robin Fox with Fluorophone which “creates a kaleidoscopic sound world” in response to compositions by Richard Barrett, Juliana Hodkinson, Simon Løffler, Damien Ricketson, Eugene Ughetti and Fox himself: “Analogue and digital fluorescent lights, the naked flame, strobe lights and DMX controlled LEDs are combined with percussion to create a program in which the music and lighting design are one and the same” (press release).
Fox and Speak Percussion come together again on Transducer, “an electro-acoustic spatialised performance work, testing the limits of the microphone as an expressive musical object.” Matthew Lorenzon reviewed an early version of the work at the 2013 Totally Huge New Music Festival.
Quebec’s Herman Kolgen, a maker of unusual video/sound works (like the sensual and visceral Inject), will present LINK.C his “elliptical representation of urban areas, based on String Quartet No. 2 by Philip Glass,” alongside his acclaimed works AfterShock and Seismik. The 1927 William A Wellman silent aviation action film Wings has been set to an electronic score by Belgian composer Eric Sleichim, “interlaced with fragments and quotations from 20th century repertoire for percussion including Xenakis, Stockhausen, Reich, Cage and Wolfe.” The score will be performed live by Sleichim and Belgian percussionists Bl!ndman. Irish composer David Fennessy’s Caruso (Gold is the sweat of the sun), responds to Werner Herzog’s diaries of the making of the film Fitzcarraldo: “Scored for four samplers, the music is almost completely made up of tiny extracts from gramophone recordings made by the tenor Enrico Caruso between 1903 and 1908, and electric guitar.” For the public, there’ll be free access to the Glasgow Science Centre for Helmholtz by Wintour’s Leap (UK), an interactive installation using tiny LED lights—each with its own microphone—that interactively visualize sounds with waves of light as the audience whispers, speaks or claps.
Jompet, Order and After
Jompet Kuswidananta’s works are striking visual and aural creations, often large, immersive installations featuring at their centre a company of military figures, Lombok Abang (‘red chili’ because of their costumes). These are palace guards of the pre-Indonesian Sultanate. Their outfits, a mix of Indonesian and European, are partly intact but the guards’ bodies have disappeared, as if they are form without content—just hats, boots, maybe a tunic, a gun, drums and Javanese kris daggers. Some guards are also mechanised, striking their drums with a Javanese rhythm, adding to the overall ghostly effect which is reinforced by sudden, loud, sharp beats.
Jompet sees this cultural mix as a sign of Indonesian adaptability, although he admits that much has been lost to colonialism and modernity, as seen in the ambiguous images in his accompanying video works, such as a man performing a traditional dance amid 19th century sugar milling machines.
Jompet’s guard motif first came to prominence as Java’s Machine: Phantasmagoria at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008. In the monumental Grand Parade (2014-15) the soldiers are joined by a line of horseless saddles bearing weapons and musical instruments, a tightknit row of motorbikes and much else— a demonstration comprising the heads of hooded figures with dangling loudhailers or large automated hands that almost clap. In an email exchange RealTime asked Jompet about the sources of both images and sounds in his installations.
The aural and visual sense of the parade in your work is very powerful—does it belong to the past or the present?
For the past several years I have been working based on my reading on the Indonesian history of cultural and social transformation, especially in Java. I collect many different kinds of clues, artifacts and evidence of how the transition has been carried on in poetry, folklore, folksongs, community performance, rituals etc. I have been inspired very much by the street parade culture of the royal army, communities, demonstrators and mobs. Through this form I share my reading on Indonesian cultural complexity.
Order and After is about the period known as Reformasi, after the fall of Suharto in 1998 with its new democratic freedoms and many competing forces—appearing as different kinds of parades in your work. You’ve spoken in interviews of the transient and fluid nature of Indonesian culture which you capture in the visual elements of your installations. Is that sense in the sound too?
I use various types of sounds, from abstract to narrative ones—folksongs, folklore and interviews. I also transform those materials into abstract soundscapes to create a dramatic mood. Sound for me has the power to deliver a certain imagining and I think the ambience in my works is created by the sound I make.
How important is the drumbeat for your musical conception?
It’s in street parades where it is useful for democratic mass/crowd mobilization but also as a tool of order.
You said in an interview, “Sound is the most contemplative work I make.”
Mostly, I create the soundscape after I finish the installation and all the technical work. It allows me sometimes to see my work from a distance, physically and conceptually, offering me another journey—to go beyond what I share through my installation.
You’ve spoken of an awareness in you of a fundamental sense of instability in Indonesian culture—of yourself as discrete from others and Java from the rest of the world. Are you hoping with your work to ease that feeling or simply to get fellow Indonesians to acknowledge it?
My work is my reading tool to understand my reality. I’d like to share my reading with anyone, not only Indonesians, who feel connected with my reality.
Jompet Kuswidananto, Order and After, Govanhill Baths, FREE, 12-8pm, 29 Oct-8 Nov; Sonica 2015, Glasgow, 29 0ct-Nov 8
Video still from work-in-progress, Zoe Scoglio, Iceland artist residency, 2015
courtesy the artist
Video still from work-in-progress, Zoe Scoglio, Iceland artist residency, 2015
Stretching from abiogenesis to the Anthropocene Age, Zoe Scoglio’s purview reaches across deep time and space and draws in ideas from the geological to the ceremonial. Running parallel to an obsession with the mineral, the human and the mysteries in-between is a gamut of formal interests: flatness and depth, synaesthetic effects and how juxtaposed forms can provoke new responses to the world as a whole.
Shifting Ground
Scoglio’s recent major focus has been her Shifting Ground (Melbourne, 2012; London and Glasgow, 2014), a performed work for small audience that utilises video projections, the performer’s body, rocks, ritual, deeply resonating sound, a layer of salt on a table and some unique ‘geological’ headwear. In Shifting Ground, says Scoglio, “I animate the rocks through light, sound and gestural choreographies. I use them as instruments; use composed and vocal sonic vibrations to move them and create cymatic patterns in the salt.”
Created with sound artist Nigel Brown and interaction designer Chris Heywood, Shifting Ground both conflates and consummates the human and the geological. Scoglio says she is fascinated by our human relationship to the geological earth, often referring to abiogenesis in her works – “the process of biological life forming from non-living matter.” Seeing this phenomenon as evolutionary, Scoglio considers “rocks as our ancestors and us humans as their direct descendants.”
MASS
Scaling up dramatically from the intimate ritual of Shifting Ground, Scoglio’s most recent work MASS (2015) utilised Melbourne’s Calder Park motor racing circuit to enact a participatory full moon ceremony centring on “car bodies, planetary bodies and human bodies” [reviewed in RT129]. Held at twilight, moon ascending behind mauve and apricot clouds, MASS was “part drive-in, part-guided-walk; a car-gazing ceremony that illuminates the geological origins of the human, vehicular and celestial.”
MASS was created “in response to this proposed era of the Anthropocene”—the age in which climate change and human environmental destruction are delivering tangible impacts on the planet itself.
“I feel we need to create new cultural narratives that tell the story of our collective geological origins, of the interconnected nature of all things. Narratives that dissolve the borders between human and non-human, animate and inanimate worlds and that help us stop thinking of ourselves as atomised individuals but as societies and communities with global responsibilities.
“For a while now I’ve been interested in finding a human-made geological site to create a live work,” says Scoglio. Calder Park Raceway’s “giant man-made mountains, lone palm trees and massive pylons looking out over a horizon are very evocative…” MASS utilised Calder Park’s Motocross track. “It feels very post-apocalyptic, a world between worlds, a small example of a man-made mountain, of anthropogenic geological activity.”
In Scoglio’s installation and video works—a copious complement to her performance works of the past few years—her explorations of the human–planet relationship are amplified by formal experimentation.
“My recent video works often reference screen culture, the act of looking and framing, the way video is flat and that depth is forced; or the way a two-dimensional moving image can be restaged in a three-dimensional environment and talk to an understanding of deep time and deep space.”
Zoe Scoglio, Water Falls & Other Features
photo courtesy the artist
Zoe Scoglio, Water Falls & Other Features
Water Falls and Other Features
Water Falls and Other Features, her installation as part of The New Vanguard exhibition at this year’s Gertrude Street Projection Festival, juxtaposed sharp graphic forms, video of flowing water, a bubbling, rumbling soundscape and a display of plastic mineral water bottles. Housed in a tiny room at Seventh Gallery, the work held both the natural and the ‘designed’ and geometry and geology in odd, incalculable tensions, creating an almost counter-intuitively harmonious play of sound, colour and light.
“For Water Falls I was curious about the points between order and chaos, the natural and man-made, the controlled and uncontrollable, what is understood and that which is beyond our understanding. I was interested in notions of value and permanence… Part-shrine, part archaeological display, the work questioned how the objects and structures from our contemporary life will become the artefacts and ruins of tomorrow.”
Scoglio is interested in ‘synaesthetic aesthetics’ or deceptions in which video can become sculptural, sound can be physical and so on.
“My interest in finding crossovers between worlds and mediums is both a thematic and formal enquiry. This is to play with our sensory and mental perceptions and assumptions about the world we live in. It points to the world as a hybridised and interconnected set of materials and actions.
“I have a tendency to get lured in by the possibilities of trickery that can be created through the application of simple scientific principles and video magic, which can remind us both about our limitations of perception and the core rules of physics that govern our planet.”
Other creations
Zoe Scoglio’s many recent video and installation works include, in addition to Water Falls…, a series for the 2012 Melbourne Festival’s Place of Assembly; her Human Sundial project; Ungardened Horizons (with Liz Dunn and Rebecca Jensen) for Brisbane’s 2015 Underbelly Festival; and Inter-radiessence (with Cait Foran) in 2012. Scoglio found time to travel overseas during 2013, including the taking up of artist residencies in Turkey and, notably, Iceland where the geology is dramatic and humans represent a relatively recent incursion.
still from screen-based work, Land Forms, 2015
image courtesy the artist
still from screen-based work, Land Forms, 2015
“While driving and hiking through [Iceland] I was surprised at how much I felt a non-human presence. Iceland has only been inhabited since around 900AD. It struck me how much I could sense that humans were still relatively new to this place… That’s where elves come in I guess. The hidden people. I was interested by the still-often-unspoken but commonly held belief in hidden creatures and the importance of planning around these invisible beings when creating new roads and infrastructure in the natural landscape.”
At MASS, as a couple of hundred of us stood in formation halfway up the outer rim of the Calder Park Raceway embankment; we were anything but ‘invisible beings.’ Part of Scoglio’s “mass choreography” we stood in perfect alignment with a row of monumental power pylons, sky above, low-flying aircraft shearing the air nearby, highways encircling us, city lights in the distance. Electric flickers sounded uncannily in our headphones; equally uncannily, flocks of twittering birds. We felt the hacked-up dirt under our feet and looked down to our cars, parked perfect as a crop circle in the paddock below. It was as Scoglio had hoped: “a new method of being together.”
Perched high on a bend of the snaking Shoalhaven River, the stunning grounds of Bundanon Trust’s Riversdale site will be the location for SITEWORKS 2015. The annual ‘welcoming of Spring’ gathering will host a range of artists, academics, environmentalists and horticulturalists for a one-day exploration of the theme and/or provocation “the feral amongst us.”
Chief Programs Officer John Baylis (founding member of the Sydney Front, dramaturg, executive producer, former Australia Council Theatre Board Manager and arts advocate) took up the post in 2014 after moving from Sydney. He directs this year’s event, having assembled a diverse set of artists and speakers to deepen the conversation on the ideas and situated realities of the feral.
In our phone conversation Baylis tells me that beside its literal meanings, ‘the feral’ provokes questions about “what is authentic, or inauthentic?” “What should, or shouldn’t be there?” This tension is obviously expressed in the landscape. Bundanon is a “living farm” carpeted with invasive plant species like lantana and fireweed. The external edges of the farm are a visible mausoleum dotted with impressive tabernacles of ‘land managed’ lantana bushes exposed to their bone. Removing lantana, Baylis explains, “can lead to new monocultures,” implying a precarious balance to maintain from both nature’s standpoint and how human beings decide to intervene.
The feral also introduces tension between what is universally “desirable and undesirable,” says Baylis, stretching the theme as a trope for those welcome and not welcome within our borders—not to mention our city limits and affluent neighbourhoods. Notwithstanding where the discussion could go, artists have been given the freedom to respond to the theme in-situ, transplanting themselves into “an inappropriate place” as alien-other (Rakini Devi’s U.F.O. Unidentified Female Object) or “being where they should not be” in the deeper bodily investigations of one’s moving skin (Rosalind Crisp’s Blast scum cull me dead in a body borrowed).
Others will deviantly strip the existing built environment via anti-context strategies: what emerges that is new? (Sarah Breen Lovett and UTS design and architecture students); or animate prehistoric beasts and the wilds of the imagination: what is lurking out there? (Erth’s Dinosaur and Beast). Some will invade with foreign or wayward emergent structures (Alan Schacher collaborating with NIDA stage design students and Amanda Parer with her large illuminated rabbits, cute and pestilent in her sculpture titled Intrude) or project onto derelict white goods for a mini bush-doof-cum-disco with Zender Bender.
The feral has given rise to an incongruent filmic collage of mammals who really do not belong together (directors Jamie and Aspasia Leonarder) and a filmic moment of male mammalians that do—with a fair bit of twisted gladwrap in between (Branch Nebula’s Whelping Box). There is the invitation to temporarily assemble and inhabit a pocket of bush with the bare and exhausted minimum (Brogan Bunt’s Flat Pack Feral) or enter and immerse oneself in the tiny Babylonian sonic spaces of Nigel Helyer (of floating biopod fame, Siteworks 2014) scattered high on the hilly lawn. Beyond the pasture into the plants, Diego Bonetto will lead others on a journey to fossick for the feral. Team Mess will be in ‘radio’ residence, speaking with performers, experts and punters, provoking conversation and gathering up all the discursive bits—performatively so.
When asked about the significance of the annual SITEWORKS for Bundanon’s program, Baylis answers that it is the “fundamental” moment in the calendar when “all the strands come together” in this, their “signature event.” SITEWORKS draws from the unique national artist-in-residence program where many come year after year—a gift from the Boyds: “a gift from artist to artist”. It also connects with the surrounding community of the Shoalhaven area, including the Wodi Wodi people of the Yuin Nation. This year Branch Nebula (Lee Wilson and Mirabelle Wouters) will be working with local community young people in Nowra on a parkour piece to take place in the bush during the event. Fences, concrete facades, lampposts and garbage bins give way to branches, logs and stumps. In the aftermath, Wilson and Wouters will hit the skate park in Nowra to collaborate with local talent. The outreach of the single day event lives on.
Since inception SITEWORKS has been a nexus of artists, scientists, horticulturalists and environmentalists coming together through research, presentation and conversation to address the future of the environment and the human race. This year, in a “non-deliberate shift” from the usual heavy program of star-studded scientists, the feral is calling on the expertise of well-known artistic director of large events: Robyn Archer; Professor Adrian Franklin, sociologist and prolific author of many books on the human, animals and nature; Dr Fiona Probyn Rapsey, specialist on race, species and gender; Richard Goodwin, architect, artist and theorist, known for his parasitic formations and interventions; and Clarence Slockee, a dancer, musician and Mindjingbal man of the Bundgalung tribe who will talk feral plants. The feral too calls out to biologist Tim Low, author of Feral Future and New Nature. These books offer a unique perspective on how invasive and native creatures co-create conservation problems in their antagonism: a collision and collusion well worth considering.
According to Aristotle those who live outside of society must be either a beast or a god. By the time we get to Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s diagnoses of human nature we are no better than beasts, and certainly nowhere near being gods. But we are tidily contracted with clear lines of civility and saved from our “brutish” selves as Lucas Ihlein so clearly “mind maps” with his handmade print The Feral amongst Us (pictured). Whether human, beast, native or invader, whether within society or on the margins, the feral is among us, reviled and celebrated; and in exaggerated measure this coming 26 September.
There’s a compelling array of features, documentaries, shorts and workshops in store at this year’s Sydney Underground Film Festival, which opens tomorrow at Marrickville’s Factory Theatre with Gaspar Noé’s explicit 3D chronicle of a youthful affair, Love (2015). The steadily expanding festival embraces the thought-provoking, experimental, subversive and visceral in a program whose generous scale is all the more impressive given the grassroots nature of the event.
Now in its ninth year, SUFF is one of the city’s longest-running specialist film festivals. Program director Stefan Popescu ascribes SUFF’s endurance, in a funding climate that doesn’t favour small film festivals, to a cultural shift over the past few years that has made Sydney-siders receptive to innovative art forms. “One of the things about our festival that sounds a little nuts but it’s true, is that if we didn’t have the community support, we couldn’t exist, because we don’t really get funding from anyone, so we have to respond to our audience…I think the general populace is becoming more adventurous: wanting to see art, giving performance art a shot, and it’s such a big city, I think [a festival like SUFF] is warranted.”
The festival’s eight masterclasses are part of a move by Popescu and co-director Katherine Berger to make SUFF into a multi-faceted experience. “One of our mandates is about creating community or culture around the experience…so we always try to have it in one location even though it ends up costing us more money that way. It’s good to get filmmakers involved but also educational institutions and fringe/cult film groups, so we try to bring them all together. If we have a ‘mentor’ festival to look up to, it would be something like [Austin, Texas’] SXSW: they’re not just a film festival, they’re a music festival; they have lots of media arts, which is something we would love to get into at some point.”
Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites
This year, two of the 19 feature films showing are Australian-directed: Rupert Glasson’s What Lola Wants, about runaway lovers crossing New Mexico; and the debut feature of Platon Theodoris, Alvin’s Harmonious World of Opposites, in which life takes a surreal turn for a sheltered Japanese translator. Theodoris, whose film premiered at this year’s Revelation Perth International Film Festival, has a comprehensive filmmaking background: “I think he’s gone from doing indie short films to commercials; sometimes he teaches, sometimes he does feature films; they’re all very different. I love directors like that who are jacks of all trades—they’ve run the gamut and learnt a lot. And Alvin’s quite amazing—it’s a gentle film, but it’s very well balanced. I would say it’s one of the best Australian films I’ve seen in a while.” Theodoris will lead one of SUFF’s masterclasses.
Though the directors don’t have a preconceived strategy for selecting SUFF’s documentary program, Popescu acknowledges certain patterns have emerged among the 19 showing this year. He and Berger keep an eye out for intelligent political content, something that’s evident in the pertinent tech-themed docos Deep Web (2015), Alex Winter’s investigation of the internet’s lawless recesses, and Killswitch (2014); Peace Officer (2015), about the increasing militarisation of the American police force; and Stanley Nelson’s eponymous history of the Black Panthers (2015). Documentaries about music (for example Salad Days, 2014, about the punk scene in Washington and Theory of Obscurity, 2015, about experimental art collective The Residents) are well represented, as are those about filmmaking, such as Kung Fu Elliot (2014), chronicling a hapless wannabe martial arts film star, and Raiders!, about friends who spent their childhood creating a shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark (2015). Save for the Canadian-made Kung Fu Elliot these are American documentaries.
Amir Taaki and Alex Winter on set of Deep Web
Courtesy of Deep Web LLC
Amir Taaki and Alex Winter on set of Deep Web
Gaspar Noé’s distinctive style aside, most of SUFF’s experimental content is to be found in the shorts program—especially the LSD Factory session. Popescu, whose PhD is in experimental film, and Berger, an experimental filmmaker, try to program at least one experimental session per festival. “When it comes out in features we get really excited,” Popescu says, “but for the most part, yes, it’s in the shorts. And I guess experimental shorts are easier to fund, easier to produce as one person, filmmaker or cinema artist…We’re learning a lot about defining the ‘cinema situation’ as well, and it’s one of the hardest things to curate, that experimental session, because it’s not a video installation where people can walk in and out.”
SUFF caps off a fine selection of surreal, innovative horror features with its closing night thriller: leading US horror director Eli Roth’s Knock Knock, starring Keanu Reeves. Popescu welcomes Knock Knock’s blurring of genres. “One of our mandates is to ask ourselves, ‘What is the film doing differently? What makes this not just a horror film?’” He hopes the film will generate the “hothouse of debate” achieved by last year’s closing feature, The Canyons (2013), one of the festival’s biggest-selling films. “We want a film that will make people debate what they get out of cinema and this one certainly does that.”
Sydney Underground Film Festival, Factory Theatre, Sydney, 17-20 Sept
