ER. Can you talk about the origins of the Vancouver Soundscape Project – how it came about, and your own involvement.

HW. The World Soundcape Project (WSP) was a research project, initiated by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University in the late 60s and remained under his direction until the late seventies. When I joined the project in 1973, the group (then consisting of R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, Peter Huse, Howard Broomfield, Bruce Davies and myself) were working on the document entitled The Vancouver Soundscape, published shortly after as 2 LPs and a book. It was probably one of the first attempts to conduct a comprehensive study of an entire urban soundscape.

ER. And what were the backgrounds of those mentioned above?

HW. Most of us were composers and musicians. At that time the composer was perceived not only as the acoustic designer of musical sound in a composition, but also and most importantly as an acoustic designer of daily life. As a result we studied the many aspects of sound and applied it to real life situations. Rather than staying marginalized by producing inaccessible and abstract art music to small exclusive audiences, we thought of the composer as a valuable contributor towards dealing with issues of soundscape. Composers could become the socially conscious, sonic architects or acoustic designers of our cities, buildings, and villages. It was precisely this—the vision of the artist/composer as a crafts person, as someone trained in all disciplines of sound, and as someone entirely connected to and useful in the real working world—that attracted me to the World Soundscape Project. And Schafer’s vision went further:

An equivalent revolution is now called for among the various fields of sonic studies. The revolution will consist of a unification of those disciplines concerned with the science of sound and those concerned with the art of sound. The result will be the development of the interdisciplines acoustic ecology and acoustic design*.

In other words, not only did we as composers familiarize ourselves with the various scientific aspects of sound, but we also saw it as our task to bring together the various professions that were already dealing with acoustics, sound and noise.

ER. Do you think you’ve achieved this amalgamation of disciplines and professions?

HW. To date, more than 35 years later this vision of the various fields of sonic studies working together that Schafer presents in the above quote seems to be taking root finally and slowly. Like the original members of the WSP, most people who initially felt a natural attraction to the field of soundscape studies or acoustic ecology have been composers, musicians, radio artists, and so on. The odd architect, geographer, town planner, psychologist, acoustical engineer, audiologist and others have indeed become involved. But these used to be exceptions, scholars and professionals who have dared to break the boundaries of their own specialization and wanted to move towards a more interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary approach to sound. But in recent years more and more researchers, scientists and professionals have been embracing concepts of acoustic ecology in their studies on sound and acoustics across various disciplines**.

ER. You must have been actively listening to this (Vancouver) soundscape for over thirty years now. In that time what changes have you noticed in the soundscape of the place?

HW. Not only the soundscape has changed but also the listening itself. On a personal level, many years of listening practice, growing older, going through life changes and experiences, inevitably have shaped my perception in ever-changing ways. On a more general level, attention to sound and soundscape has changed significantly since the 70s. Sound design as a named discipline did not exist 40 years ago. Now it does: in film, in video games, in children toys, in cell phone rings, in appliances, motors, jet planes, just to name a few. But from the ecological perspective the soundscape has not become quieter. Sound design may have made many motors quieter, but there are more motors in our lives. Sound design may have created some interesting sound signals, but we also hear many more in daily life. Adding sound and music to just about anything and any situation is now a status quo, which did not exist in the 70s.

So, it is not so easy to speak in a comprehensive way about changes in an entire urban area. The more important issue really is whether the population is conscious of the changes and actively participating in encouraging or preventing them? Is there a public debate about the quality of our soundscape?

ER. Have you noticed any change in environmental sound awareness on a larger public scale?

HW. In Vancouver specifically there are small pockets of awareness and changes, but in terms of implementation of sound design on the level of the city government and urban planning, little has improved. I can name a few encouraging changes that are happening mostly through the initiation of cultural activities, artistic energy: for example the fact that there have been regular soundwalks for about 8 years now as part of Vancouver New Music’s yearly concert season and that people attend them mostly in good numbers is a sign that people desire to find a relationship to place through listening, want to become conscious of what the soundscape can offer them. Those who have been designing and leading these walks are applying their new- found skills in other contexts, such as schools, with special needs groups, in galleries, community centres and so on.

But there is little public debate about the fact that the enormous and fast-paced increase in high rises in Vancouver has produced an increase in air conditioning outlets and thus a ‘thicker’ urban throb that hovers over the city. There is no debate about this here, let alone about the location of these outlets. This ever-growing city in the context of increased global travel has also brought with it an inevitable increase in air traffic. There is no public debate about the fact that much of the traffic moves right across the city and not only during the day – jets, helicopters and seaplanes alike.

Industry has been moved from much of the waterfront and has been replaced by parks, residential buildings, seawalls for pedestrians and cyclists and has changed the soundscape significantly and mostly in a positive way. Access to the waterfront for the general population has opened up more open spaces and increased its quality of life. In addition, many water fountains in many different urban spaces not only help to mask traffic noise but also increase the sense of well-being for those sitting next to them, those taking a break from the work place during lunch hour.

ER. Are there any sounds you have noticed that have changed or even possibly become extinct during your extensive listening?

HW. Most prominently the sounds of the foghorns have changed: from the old diaphone which could be heard 20 miles away, to a less powerful one in the late seventies, to a squeaky high electronic one in the nineties, I believe, that can only be heard by small boats passing close by.

A train used to travel through the city around 9 p.m. at night and honk its horn at every crossing: long long short long. One could trace its route for a long time as it traversed the city from north to south. The train tracks still exist but the route is no longer travelled. Cash registers have changed, dial phones no longer exist.

ER. General critics of acoustic ecology often say those involved discriminate and de value the sonic potential of an urbanised city/environment. How would you respond to this accusation?

HW. These critiques have misunderstood our work and tend to squeeze it into as rather simplistic frame. It is as if they have never really read our documents or Schafer’s book, or if they have, they have chosen not to hear or comprehend the entire scale of what we have been trying to do. Ideally the acoustic ecologist is perceptually open to all soundcapes, driven by curiosity to know and understand any soundscape, its context and its inner relationships and workings. Whatever knowledge is gained through this very complex process (in addition to understanding as much as possible about the various sciences of sound) would ideally establish an intelligent and inspirational environment for discussion and action. Obviously the soundscape is not a dualistic world divided into nature (good and quiet) and city (bad and noisy). Silence and noise can be enriching, enlivening or oppressive and damaging. It depends entirely on context. To understand all the intricacies and communicative complexities of sound requires constant attention and study. The more we listen, the more we deepen our understanding of context and our relationship to the soundscape.

ER. Do you believe your compositions capture a memory or trace of a place and how do you think a sonic memory differs from that of a visual memory?

HW. Soundscape recordings are excerpts of moments in time, nothing else. But in their potential to be heard over and over again, they allow us to focus on this moment and extend it, deepen it in our perception, deepen even the memory of it. Of course they could have the opposite effect and focus our memory on that moment only and forget all the other sonic moments that were not recorded. It could mean a potential decline of our natural aural memory because we may tend to rely on ‘play back’, i.e. always available repetition. I think it depends very much on how each individual chooses to work with the recordings. At the same time I am convinced that memory cannot be replaced by anything. Memory stays active if we apply it actively, whether to heard sounds (unrecorded) or recorded sounds (which of course are also heard)

My compositions, based on such recorded excerpts, are conceived as times for heightened listening, an opportunity to connect more deeply to a place, a sonic moment or situation, in fact to ones own associations. Some listeners will connect, others may not, for whatever reason. Ideally, so I hope as a composer, this experience, like any sonic/musical experience, may allow the listener to return refreshed, or with changed perspective into the places of daily life. Daily life echoes in my pieces and the piece echoes in daily life, resonates.

I don’t know how sonic and visual memory differ from each other. Intuitively I would say that a sonic memory is remembered time passing. Sonic memory puts us into a time frame, a reflective state, in which time passes in resonance with the memory itself. Visual memory may be more instantaneous in its appearance and disappearance.

ER. ‘Soundwalking’ is a large part of your process, can you tell us a little about what soundwalking is, its aims and how and where it fits into your practice and compositions?

HW. My answer could be a whole dissertation. Perhaps I could point listeners to some links and readings. On my own website:
-http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings%20page/articles%20pages/soundwalking.html
-http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings%20page/articles%20pages/soundasecology2.html
-http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/bibliography/bibliography.html

Click on: McCartney, Andra. 1999. Sounding Places: Situated Conversations through the Soundscape Work of Hildegard Westerkamp, Dissertation, York University, Toronto and read Chapter Six “Soundwalking as Subjectivity in Environment: Kits Beach and Queen Elizabeth Park”

ER. Looking back, can you distinguish where your interest for sound and the environment came from?

HW. It was always there but was made conscious when I first met Murray Schafer and subsequently worked with the WSP, researching for the Tuning of the World among other things.

Before that my parents had made me aware of the environment from early on in the German/European context where I grew up, both on the micro level (care for and knowledge of plants and animals in our immediate environment) and the macro level (understanding and being a critical observer of the relationship between civilisation and nature). This may have set the stage for the deep resonance I felt towards Schafer’s approach to the soundscape.

ER. The soundscape compositions you produce have a beautiful quality of pulling the listeners ear, in and out of worlds, both real and imagined, where do you locate your practice between the real/representational phonographic tradition as opposed to an evoked or imaginary soundscape?

HW. On the edge between the two, always balancing, traversing the relationship between the real and imaginary, the inner and the outer worlds.

ER. How do you go about balancing the subjective and objective ear in recording a place of personal significance?

HW. I don’t believe there is such a thing as an objective ear. There may be an ear that perceives the sounds/soundscapes like a culturally shared experience, as part of a community. But within that each of us have our very own subjective relationship to place and to listening itself.

I record what interests me and welcome what the environment gives me. I don’t prepare. I simply go when it feels right to record. The place itself and my experience of it at that moment will determine the flow of my recording process.

ER. Can you offer a personal distinction between quiet & silence?

HW. Quiet can be a state of mind and heart, a pause, a place of calm and repose, or a soundscape full of sounds, subtle liveliness. A quiet place is not necessarily silent. Silence implies stillness, nothing moving. It can be an expansive soundscape that allows us to hear far, expansive also in the sense of inhabiting new possibilities, inspiration. But silence can also be empty, oppressive and fearful.

ER. And finally as always, Ear Room asks, what does the term sound art mean to you?

HW. That I am free to do what I want to do with sound! It is a liberating term, free of constraints of classical music traditions as well as of visual art traditions. Many sound artists come from the visual arts and experience sound art as a liberation from the silence of galleries and museums. It has given them licence to use sound as an expressive medium and insert noise, sound and music into a traditionally silent medium.

FIN

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………………

Footnotes:
*Schafer, R. Murray (1977). The Tuning of the World. Alfred Knopf, NY. p. 205.
**The previous two paragraphs were adapted from: Westerkamp, Hildegard, “Bauhaus and Soundscape Studies—Exploring Connections and Differences”, Aspects of this text were originally presented in two lectures at the Symposium From Bauhaus to Soundscape, Goethe Institut Tokyo, October 1994, revised March 2002. For entire article see: http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings.html

ER. Firstly, can you talk about the influence of your architectural training/background?

SVS. I had always wanted to become an artist but my parents advised me to learn a ‘good’ profession, one that I could earn a living with – so I went to architecture school (TUDelft, MA). After a few years of working in this field I knew it wasn’t for me so I went and followed my dream: in the day I worked as architect and in the evening I attended classes at the Rietveld (Art) Academy, Amsterdam.

My (art) teachers were very much in awe of this ‘high’ education I had had; they insisted I use my architecture background in my artwork. However, by then I disliked the architect world so much that I wanted nothing to do with it anymore! The teachers promised to fail me in my final year if I didn’t allow any inspiration from architecture to filter through, so I decided to graduate on my (terrible) neighbours out of spite. I didn’t realize at the time but I was doing exactly what they asked of me, and so at that point I really began discovering my own practice through the blend of both art and architecture.

ER. Your work encounters a dominant pre occupation within sound art – ‘silence’. Where does this specific interest in silence come from?

SVS. That’s often been asked of me but hard to pinpoint exactly. My noisy neighbours made me very curious what ‘silence’ is. I’m often contacted by yoga teachers or new age oriented people but I’m not necessarily interested in the ‘inner silence’ they talk of. I’m very much intrigued by the phenomenon of silence. We presuppose the word almost every day when we say things such as ‘Please be more quiet’, or ‘How quiet it is!’ But what does it mean? The more I am working with silence, the more ambiguous it becomes.

ER. Notions of silence extend into particular works such as a Cubic Meter of Broken Silence – what was the concept behind this work?

SVS. Macha Roesink of Museum de Paviljoens, Almere, was familiar with my work from the art academy days. When she saw my work again two years after at the Open Studio’s of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam she invited me for a group show. She asked me to reflect on the still ‘empty’ plot of land in the heart of Almere, where the museum is situated. It seemed to me that the plot was kept open as ground speculation, and in future it would be filled with new buildings. That made me want to reserve a part of its silence for future generations. Together with designers duo Catalogtree I mapped the silence of the plot of land and depicted it as a Silent Landscape. On the most silent point I put a cubic meter of silence, enveloped in acoustically enhanced glass made by Saint Gobain.

ER. How was this idea transferred to the museum?

SvS. In the museum you could take a set of wireless headphones communicating with a microphone inside the object, so the silence could be heard, if not touched. I hoped the object to be a new ‘unit’ for architects and planners to use. We already have the ‘meter’ and the ‘kilogram’; I felt it was time for a unit of silence.

ER. I read that vandals smashed the object. What was your reaction?

SVS. Of course I was sad when I heard the news, however when the museum showed me the first pictures of the broken object that mood changed. I hadn’t been fully pleased with it, the concept was good but I thought to my self ‘Oh no, I have made a Dan Graham’. However appealing it looked it did not feel ‘mine’.

ER. So it took on a new meaning?

SVS. When it was broken I knew it was right. Unknowingly and unwantedly the vandals have perfected the work for me, they’d shown what silence is.

ER. And you have also used the cracks in the glass to create another work, Breaking the Silence (Triple EP and Silkscreen).

SvS. Triple EP is a ‘mapping’ of the cracks in One cubic Meter of Broken Silence, a way of restoring the cracks back into sound. I silkscreened the cracks onto the (silent/blank) EP’s, the needle scratches away the ink as it plays and the listener will, eventually, end up with silence again.

ER. We touched on this earlier but can you expand upon your work How my Neighbours Became Buildings – its origins and intentions?

SVS. The first draft of this artist book was written as paper for my final graduation at the Rietveld. I did not even think about the possibility of the book being the artwork itself back then. I just combined text, images and drawings in a book, like I always had as an architect. The first drafts of the book were also made at the architect’s office I still worked in, after working hours. Thanks to the enthusiasm of my boss back then, Maike van Stiphout, I might never have kept the work up nor finished the book.

In my own words I tried to describe how your home doesn’t end with the walls but with your concept of silence, and how precarious and fragile this silence can be. In architect’s school I never learnt about neighbours – the ideal home just had no neighbours. In the book these reflections are combined with notes on two projects by other artists I had found extremely inspiring: Gordon Matta-Clarcks Fake Estates and Bruce Naumans Behavioural video’s where he enlarges things he does in his studio claiming ‘If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.’ My studio at the time was my home, so I realised my neighbours could be my art.

ER. And the final realisation of this work was also an installation?

SVS. My final presentation consisted of the neighbours noise, recorded and re-located to the lowered ceiling of the art academy with a book about the neighbours and a letter asking them to pay the same amount of my rent as they were taking up in my home with their noise. I made about 25 copies as a first draft and gave it to a few people around me. From this prototype evolved the English book I presented in 2010 at Annet Gelink Gallery.

ER. Your work seems quite a political, actionist endeavor that navigates delicate power relationships, which occur within everyday environments. Do you consider your works to be politically/socially engaged?

SVS. I guess you could definitely read it that way. However, I do not have an activist agenda other than making people aware of ‘immaterial architecture’: all these aspects of living that are so commonplace we forget to teach them in architecture school, but that are omnipresent, determining the way we live much more than brick, glass, steel.

ER. Can you describe your Machine for my Neighbours and how it works?

SVS. After the book I felt I had reached a wall, I didn’t think I could ever make a better work of art. And yet I felt all these writings did not provide any real solace against my neighbours. So, I started to compile an installation from everyday equipment that most people would have in their homes or that could be easily purchased at low costs. The machine consists of a tiny microphone you could put through a key-hole for instance, leading to an amplifier and outputting to a woofer that was big enough to be heard through the wall and make considerable contact sounds. The neighbours are thus impeded upon their own sword: they are given back their own noise amplified.

However the machine encountered technical problems: whenever you record something, broadcast it and record that again you get tremendous feedback. At first I felt because of this the machine was a failure, but after a while I saw this feedback had an analogy to the mental process of arising irritation. In case of noise you are irritated by the neighbours, so you are more focused on their noise and therefore perceive it as even more annoying!

ER. What would you say are the key artistic influences on your practice?

SVS. As mentioned earlier Matta Clarck’s Fake Estates, and Bruce Nauman’s videos and works such as Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966-67), Eating my words (1967), Failing to Levitate in My Studio (1966), Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk, 1968), Bouncing in the Corner (1968), Stamping in the Studi (1968), Violin Tuned D.E.A.D (1968) and Wall Floor Positions (1968) were very direct inspirations and to my first steps in art and my neighbours project. Later on I have grown to love perhaps not entire oeuvres but specific works of art such as Jan Dibbet’s Perspective Corrections (1969), Luxurious Streetcorner by Ger van Elk (1969) and his piece The Wall (1968), Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-5), Duchamps Trois Stoppages (1913-14), Robbert Morrise’s Box With the Sound of it’s own making (1961), Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969), Gregor Schneiders Totes Haus U R (1985-now), Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960), John Cage’s 4’33’’ (1952), Francys Aly’s Tornado (2000-10), Ryan Gander’s The New New Alphabet (2008), Roni Horn’s Things Which Happen Again (1988), Maria Eichhorn’s The Artists Contract (1996-2005). I can go on and on!

ER. What’s coming up for you in the future?

SVS. With kind recommendation by Ann Goldstein of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam I was selected for a residency by the City of Mönchengladbach. It’s a city just below Germany’s Ruhrgebied, with a beautifull museum Abteiberg where I encountered at least ten of the before mentioned works or artist. As it turns out, Gregor Schneider even used to live here and has replicated some of the rooms of Haus U R underground at the museum. From august I will work for three months in Istanbul by kind invitation of PiST. While Mönchengladbach is rich in silence, Istanbul as I hear is definitely not. The transition will be, to say the least, remarkable.

ER. And finally as always, Ear Room asks, what does the term sound art mean to you?

SVS. I would rather not make categories. For me there is just Art. And of course there is sound. Without sound there would be no silence but without silence there would be no music, as rhythm is made by intervals of silence and sound – how strange that would be! My favorite quote by someone who says it better than ever I could:
‘When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings or about his ideas, of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic here on sixth avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking, I have the feeling that a sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does, is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower. And it gets longer and shorter. I’m completely satisfied with that; I don’t need sound to talk to me. We don’t see much difference between time and space; we don’t know where one begins and the other stops. (…) People expect listening to be more than listening. And sometimes they speak of inner listening, or the meaning of sound. When I talk about music, it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything. That is not inner, but is just outer. And they say, these people who finally understand that say, you mean it’s just sounds? To mean that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more. I don’t want sound to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s a president, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound. And I’m not so stupid either. There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Emmanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure. The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence. And this silence, almost anywhere in the world today, is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven, it’s always the same, but if you listen to traffic, it’s always different.’ (John Cage: In Love with Another Sound (1992) by Miroslav Sebestik).

FIN

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ER. Firstly, why did you call the project the London Sound Survey, I’m thinking particularly about the use of the word ‘survey’ and not ‘map’ or ‘archive’?

IR. ‘Survey’ is open-ended and suggests a work in progress, which is what the London Sound Survey is. Sound maps of various kinds are part of the site, but there are other things there too, like historical references. It was a struggle coming up with names and ‘London Sound Survey’ was the least bad of them. It sounded neutral and ageless.

ER. Can you talk about the origins of the project, its inspirations, how it came about, and what some of your initial aims were?

IR. The thinking came about slowly. I’d lived away from London for about ten years and found it hard to settle for a while when I moved back. London struck me as very anonymous and indifferent. Literary attempts to describe the city as an organism or having some sort of enduring spirit just seemed fanciful. It couldn’t be summed up in words alone. I had a vague idea that London was maybe better grasped through a statistical or sampling approach, close to what I was then studying at night school.

Around the year 2000 websites started popping up with an appealing worm’s-eye view of London. One favourite was Adrian Maddox’s ‘Classic Cafes’, and there were others which had photographs of derelict buildings, or were about subterranean rivers like the Effra and so on. There was also then a revival of interest in local history under the fashionable title of ‘psychogeography’, which hardly anyone can now say aloud without looking sheepish. I wanted to do make my own London website but I couldn’t come up with anything original.

This changed when I began working at the British Library Sound Archive as one of the two Vaultkeepers there. It’s like a storeman’s job where you take care of all the collection materials: hundreds of thousands of CDs, records, tapes, minidiscs, cassettes, wax cylinders and wire recordings. Many hours were spent going through the shelves just to discover what was there. A lot of the tapes hold field recordings such as wildlife sounds and the results of ethnographic field trips. Not all of them are made by full-time professionals. Amateur recordists have contributed a great deal as well, and so field recording began to look like a worthwhile hobby to get into.

Two chance discoveries in the Archive really helped things along. One was a CD from Steven Feld’s ‘The Time of Bells’ series, which was lying around on a table waiting to be put away, and the other was the Vancouver Soundscape LP, found while unpacking a crate. Feld noted that he’d used Sonic Studios microphones and on online search led to Aaron Ximm’s ‘Quiet American’ website, as he also uses them. Ximm’s site has a lot of helpful information, and the ‘one-minute vacation’ recordings there showed how even quite short recordings could be satisfying to listen to and give a vivid idea of what a place was like. Another inspirational website was the Xeno Canto birdsong collection and database.

ER. Sound in urban environments has a notoriously negative reputation for being a ‘noisy nuisance’. Are you trying to re-address this often negative perception of environmental urban sound?

IR. Not really, no. It’s already been done effectively by projects like Peter Cusack’s ‘Your Favorite Sounds’ series, which is an example of crowd sourcing before the term existed. There’s also the ‘Positive Soundscapes’ research program which has a chance of influencing urban planning and achieving something in the wider world. I hope that urban sounds can be recognised as informative in their own right and worth studying. There’s a common assumption that sound should be the support act to vision, at least for documentary purposes. It’d be good to help redress that even in a small way.

Not all the recordings on the London Sound Survey are particularly uplifting and hopefully it doesn’t come across as a celebration of the city, just an investigation of it through the organising principle of sound.

ER. Can you talk about the role of maps in the work?

IR. There are several different maps mainly because it’s fun playing around with graphics, but also because a map can depict part of a recording’s context very easily. I use a grid with 112 squares in it to pigeonhole recordings into different areas. Each square’s about 2½ miles or 4 km across, and for a while I went around with a GPS receiver trying to get to the exact middle of every square to record whatever sounds were present. It was a good excuse to go climbing over fences and trespassing on golf courses and other privately owned land. The results were plotted on a map made up of little symbols showing what sorts of noises occur where and how prominent they are.

I don’t use Google Maps because they’re everywhere and they aren’t needed for something the size of a city. I worried that they might also be visually distracting, with site visitors wandering off to look at Timbuktu or the Faroe Islands rather than listen to the sounds on it. But some Google-based sound maps are very impressive and with them you’re unlikely to drift elsewhere. Radio Aporee in particular has so much to listen to, and it’s got a compelling interface that holds the attention.

ER. The site itself is now an important sound archive of present day London, but there’s also a real engagement with the history of London. Can you talk about how you incorporate a sense of past into the site?

IR. Sounds which people make on purpose have their own histories. Everyone knows something about the development of music over time, but other sound signals are also inventions which people adapt and refine. Examples include car horns, church bells, football chants, police whistles, public oratory, political sloganeering, factory hooters, begging and street sellers’ cries.

I was hoping to get hold of some old sound recordings for the site, but the rights issues were a headache. Portable field recording equipment hasn’t been around that long in historical terms, and the shadow of mechanical copyright falls over much of that time. So it was better to follow the path of least resistance and this meant hunting for written references in old books instead. It’s a nice way to spend a rainy day. The site now has a few hundred historical references organised into a simple database.

The further back you go the harder it is to find such references, partly because writers before the 19th century dwell more on action and dialogue than on sensory descriptions. Samuel Pepys’s diaries stand out because he was skilled musically and their privacy and confessional nature let him describe sounds that startled and alarmed him.

A new site section simply called the ‘London Map’ is putting all the sound recordings together in one place. I’ve been having old maps scanned so you can switch between different map layers going from the present back through time. For one of the layers the London School of Economics let me have some beautiful scans of the Booth Poverty Survey maps from the end of the 19th century, which show levels of wealth for individual streets through colour-coding. In some districts those relative patterns haven’t changed much since then. There’s also a more ambitious historical project earmarked for 2011, hopefully with someone else getting involved.

ER. You also offer technical advice on the site, is this something that has come out of demand from users?

IR. Now and again emails and comments arrive asking about this or that mic or recorder. I try and answer those as best I can, and once compiled a specification list for all the head-worn or binaural mics I could find information on, thinking that might be useful to someone. But otherwise I’m not at all qualified to give detailed advice on sound recording in general. The nature recordists group on Yahoo has got some very knowledgeable people like Rob Danielson contributing, so that’s a good place to go to learn things.

ER. Do you have any favorite spots to record in the capital? What are some of your most interesting experiences/revelations you’ve had whilst listening to the City?

IR. I like the Thames more as it goes east where you get a mixture of industry, scraps of marshland, housing, and seemingly un-owned bits of land which are used for scrambler bikes and clay-pigeon shooting. The city centre always has a lot going on but it’s too easy to concentrate on it to the neglect of other areas. Brixton has a wide array of soundscapes because it’s the pole star of Caribbean culture in London and there are several indoor and street markets. It attracts a lot of buskers and soapbox preachers too. Any place where there’s still street life of some kind is worth checking out.

Making the dawn chorus recordings was interesting because of having to catch the night bus to get to the recording spots. You’d hear amazing arguments, soul-bearing conversations, people being sick, or trying to walk along the aisle before collapsing sideways across someone just sitting and minding their own business – the miracles of alcohol. I wish I’d recorded some of that.

The happiest experience was recording bat sonar for the first time, jump up and down happy. Next best was finding an old man who’d I’d heard reciting poems in the street about two years earlier and had been looking for ever since. On that first occasion the batteries in the recorder had gone flat. I’m not sure about revelations; it’s more like making clear those things which were known in a vague way before. The peacefulness of much of London and the private-ness of most people’s lives, how they’re often heard rather than seen. Also, how widespread the sounds of birdsong are, nearly everywhere.

ER. Is there an ideal user of the site?

IR. Anyone who leaves a comment, sends an email, tells other people about it, makes use of the sounds on it, or gets some pleasure from it.

ER. And finally as always, Ear Room asks, what does the term ‘sound art’ mean to you?

IR. Sound art is part of the general expansion of art over the last two or three decades, due to great changes in the economy and the growth of higher education. It’s one of the countless ways in which people are adapting to labour casualisation. I haven’t met many sound artists, but those I have strike me as imaginative and technically inventive people. 30 or 40 years ago they’d likely have been working in the electronics industry, in research and development, or education. Education is now almost the only route by which some can eventually stabilise their incomes.

I tend to think of sound art as something that happens in galleries or as part of an installation somewhere, like the Singing Ringing Tree sculpture in the Pennines. There’s all sorts of ways in which sound art could be disseminated – through iPhone apps, websites, memory sticks, you name it. But social events and physical objects will probably always be more highly thought of than the delivery of pure data, because they’re what our minds have evolved to grapple with and to appreciate.

FIN

Download printable version [here]

ER. Can you recollect where your interest for sound sculptures came from?

Z. Since a little kid I have been interested in exploring sound, playing instruments and creating compositions in addition to visual arts such as paintings, cartoons, photographs and so on. So, from a very early age I was fascinated and somehow obsessed by being active in the all these fields; sound, music and visually realised projects. Now, through my sound sculptures and installations many of these interests are coming together.

ER. There’s a fantastic mix in your works between highly systemised automata and the overarching element of chance. Can you elaborate on this collision and apparent tension?

Z. I’m very interested in a mix of living structures on the one hand, and control about decisions and details on the other. A combination of structures continuously generating or evolving by chance, chain reactions or other generative systems, and a specifically delimited and contained space in which these events are allowed to happen. The compositional intentions are manifesting themselves through my deliberate containment and cautious monitoring. So I’m not using chance to discover unexpected results, but to elevate the works to a higher level of vitality. I’m intrigued in simple systems to generate and study complex behaviours in sound and motion – the generation and degeneration of patterns. Moreover, in defining and exploring space, simplicity, raw and reduced aesthetics, staging and architectonical elements.

ER. Your works, although large in scale clearly have a minimal aesthetic, even down to each piece being called ‘untitled’. Can you explain where this aesthetic comes from and what you hope it provides for a listener/viewer?

Z. Through my interest in simplicity, repetitive and reductive principles, raw materials and the properties related to sound and motion my works turn out in some kind of minimal aesthetic. It’s a careful but radical use of materials and space I’m looking for. I work with many small elements, small sounds and small mechanical systems, small motors, small materials, even when presented finally in large scale. I pay attention to the tiny things and I’m trying to shell the materials and concepts to their essential elements. Through this reduction the works can stay abstract – more like some kind of a code or system behind something – but they also open a large field of connections, views, associations and interpretations. From nature to artificiality, individualism to humour and absurdity to activism, science, technology, space, physics, perception, aesthetics, and so on… so in answer to your question: there’s not one specific hope from my side of how to look at it. I see it in many different ways and I create it based on many different interests coming together. Let’s say I hope the listener/viewer is able to get inspired – somehow activated – by the works and to make his/her own connections, associations and discoveries on different, individual levels.

ER. There’s a striking physicality to the work visually. In terms of the sound in space, this too must be a dense sonic atmosphere for a listener?

Z. I’m trying to bring visual, sonic and spatial elements together into one essence with my installation work. Direct, simple and reductive. What you hear is what you see. It’s often about creating space, playing with the atmosphere or space and its impact relating to the staging and architecture – a spatial perception of sound. The compositional aspects of my installations are less focused on getting from A to B but rather to create static sound architectures, which can be entered and explored acoustically like a building. The compositional focus lies on the altercation between void, density, space, structure, interfacing, static and balance.

ER. Your installations are presented in very stark space with the use of machines and automata exemplifying a sense of isolation, of a world void of humans; where do you position yourself in the work in relation to your aesthetics? Do you think humans are necessary in relation to art and performance?

Z. In relation to art humans seem to be necessary somehow since we (the humans) create, explore and consume it. To create a new work many decisions must be made, many details must be worked out. That’s the artist’s job and he/she is responsible for it and all its details. Even if an artist decides to let others make that decision it’s important for the piece. So yes, inside the world of art, humans seem to be necessary to me. But in relation to the universe, its balance and beauty that’s another question. In general I don’t think we are important or necessary at all, but an interesting species for sure.

ER. Do you ever physically perform an installation?

Z. In terms of performance I do two types. One is based on physical objects, materials and mechanics (employing similar elements and systems I use for the installations and sculptures), and the other is multi channel sound performance in total darkness with constructed or pre-recorded sounds. The pre–recorded matter is also often based on recordings from prototypes and experiments related to the installations and sculptures. To work with recordings is an interesting way for me to study the sound structures I create physically. It’s another way for the recipient to enter and explore the structures and sound forms of the physical pieces, possibly on a more microscopic level. So far I have never performed an installation, the prepared motors already do that for me! (laughing).

ER. One of your latest works [186 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes 60x60x60cm] shows the scale, concept and level of detail we’ve been talking about previously. How do you practically start working on these things? Do you draw and design prior?

Z. Normally it’s a mix of different things. For example, the work often starts with a specific space that I am invited to present in. I think about the possibilities of how to work with the space, how to use it as a body and what kind of piece would make sense in relation to that particular space. At the same time there are always my own ideas waiting in the pipeline. For example, working with a specific material or a specific kind of prepared motor, or perhaps a physical movement, behaviour or sound. Many ideas often buzz around at the same time for me, from this I start to pick out small, single elements that seem to be most interesting in relation to the specific situation or space. I then begin making experiments and prototypes.

ER. And how does this process of prototyping influence the final piece?

Z. Through the process of physical tests things become more concrete and comprehensible, I start to see what could work and where the problems are hidden. Often many steps of prototyping are needed. Each step is vital in order to build the next one and to optimize performance along the way. Through prototyping sometimes totally unexpected results show up and can influence the whole process as well. But once a prototype satisfies my criteria I start to calculate how many elements I need to work with and I begin to refine and optimize all spatial aspects. Often at this stage the whole relationship with the actual space is conceptual, a vision and an imagination only. Sometimes it just works like I had it in mind but often I need again to react in, and to, the real space – the devil is always hidden in the details.

ER. Do you build everything yourself?

Z. Normally all the single elements (preparation of the motors etc…) are made by hand. Since I often work with a large number of the same prepared elements I have help from assistants in the studio to do these little “mass productions”, to produce the prepared elements. For larger pieces there’s often a need for helping hands (sometimes many of them) to install in the space and get everything wired and ready. This can also influence the development of a new piece for a specific space i.e. if I know the presenter/organizer of the show is able (and motivated) to get many assistants ready to help set up the piece in the space or not.

ER. How important is research in your practice? Do you see your work as an evolving body of research?

Z. Maybe we could call it ‘artistic research’. A playful examination of sound and motion, of chaotic principles and generative systems, structures and textures – the physical behaviours and sounds of materials, resonance properties as well as concepts of staging and spacialization. It’s all based on practical tests, experiments and prototyping. Often I need to take many steps in my own research to develop and finish a piece, even if it is, and if it looks very simple at the end.

ER. Do you collaborate with various disciplines and how do you go about striking a dialogue with another artist/professional from another discipline?

Z. Yes I am interested in developing works in collaboration with various disciplines. From technical development to architecture, technology, industry, science and others. Building bridges and involving experts from other fields is very inspiring and I see big potential in this kind of collaboration. For example I have just started to develop a new piece in collaboration with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by the department of Informatics of the University of Zurich. They are one of the leading laboratories in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics worldwide. It’s super exciting and inspiring to be able to connect with the scientists and their huge internal knowledge and research. The great thing is, this kind of crossover is not only interesting for me, but for them as well. I am able to develop works and to involve technologies that are far removed from my own possibilities. For the AI Lab it’s interesting that their work and research is getting presented in new contexts and is being lighted from another perspective and focus.

ER. And finally as always, Ear Room asks; what does the term ‘Sound Art’ mean to you?

Z. Well, categories in art and culture, or even in general are not really something I’m interested in. Of course it does somehow help to order things a little bit. But on the other hand it’s always the single, individual piece, thing or human which/who makes the interesting difference or not. It’s not the category itself. For that reason ‘sound art’ does not really mean much to me. But to try a definition I’d say sound art could be; to wake up in the morning, move into the kitchen and sit for a while as you realize how beautiful the fridge is sounding that day.

FIN

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ER. Your work covers many disciplines, from sculpture, performance, film and writing. Where did your interest in sound arrive from?

AS. Actually I started off with an interest in performance and ideas of removed or mediated agency – the tableau vivant, the puppet, the Ubermarionette, and so on. This led to my interest in ventriloquism and voice projection; sound as a marker of presence. All the work I have done using sound centres very much around this idea of sound and source being pried apart and then joined back together again. I am fascinated by the way sound is at once embodied and disembodied, it marks out a space and denotes presence while it leaves that presence behind. The first sound-related performance I did was ‘Ventriloqua’, when I was pregnant in 2003. A musician played the electromagnetic waves of my belly using a theremin, transforming me into an antenna or medium for the voice. This physical experience of being the receptacle of another body seemed to resonate profoundly with many of my interests, and since then I have worked through various ways of visualising or re-embodying sound.

ER. Are there any particular historical periods that influence your work?

AS. In my early works I drew inspiration from early Christianity, Byzantium and the Middle Ages, in particular iconoclasm and the articulation of image theory, which centres around the possibility of presence and mediation in icons, sculptures and relics. In recent years I have spent more time looking at the period between 1840-1940, which coincides with the heyday of spiritualism, but also many major technological inventions such as the typewriter, telegraphy, photography, the telephone, the phonograph, radio, film, etc. I am particularly interested in the way the technologies of the time informed cultural understandings of proximity, distance, agency, presence, language and writing.

ER. There seems a leaning toward redundant technologies in your practice. What is it about these technologies that lend themselves to your work?

AS. Obsolete technologies fascinate me, as do obsolete or surmounted, leftover belief-systems. Redundant technology draws attention to its sculptural and ergonomic qualities, the way it no longer fits our bodies comfortably and has become opaque, heavy, and dense. I am particularly attentive to the way our bodies are implied in these instruments, how we are choreographically and haptically inscribed in the object, which is held, tapped, worn, pressed against our physical selves. Whereas up-to-date technology aims to extend our bodies prosthetically, in a transparent imperceptible manner, obsolete technology becomes more viscous, highlighting the shape of our bodily and perceptual yearnings as well as our boundaries.

ER. Although many of your works encounter a sense of ghosting, of inanimate objects being tickled into life, there’s clearly a physical, almost anatomical process at work?

AS. Yes, I like to look very closely at the objects I am filming or working with, to transform them into a body of sorts that can be dissected through the gaze, opened up and flayed, animated but at the same time only just alive. There’s something prosthetic and anatomical about the sound technologies I have looked at over the past few years. The musical automata have fascinating inner workings that seem like viscera – the lungs and mechanical fingers of pneumatic tubes, heaving bellows, cranking arms, and mechanically articulated joints. The gramophone needle seems like a fingernail or a tooth, the horn like an ear or mouth. Most technologies are modeled on the body and intended as prosthetic extensions of our anatomical capacities.

Equally I am drawn to film certain movement qualities that imply bodily presence or the transmission of presence through objects. There’s a choreographic puppet-like quality that alludes to certain anatomical configurations, a system of transmissible movement. I love the gestures of winding up, turning handles, switching on, pedaling, pressing buttons, in that these hauntings convey a different economy and logic of animation – the folding and contracting of time and gesture into a device that then unfolds, expands and amplifies those gestures.

ER. Your latest work Sound Seam certainly involves anatomical reference; I believe you undertook a residency at the UCL Ear Institute? What did that experience bring to the piece?

AS. The Wellcome award was fantastic in that it allowed me to spend time at the Ear Institute, speak to people with different areas of expertise, and use some of their facilities such as the microscopes and the anechoic chamber. The staff at the Ear Institute were fantastic, extremely generous and inspiring. I am particularly grateful to Professor David Kemp who provided original recordings of his own otoacoustic emissions, which were to become a crucial element of the soundtrack to the film, layered into the compositions provided by musician Aleks Kolkowski. Professor Kemp actually discovered the phenomena of otoacoustic emissions in 1978 and had a particularly active ear which produced spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (as opposed to evoked otoacoustic emissions). I was also fortunate to work with Professor Andy Forge using the Scanning Electron Microscope – I animated a strip of inner ear stereocilia to make it appear like a groove, a sound inscription of sorts. In addition I filmed the coronal suture of a skull, an eardrum and a gold-plated cochlea. It was fascinating and beautiful. Much of the biomedical content of the film has a poetic resonance with the imagery of the gramophones, phonographs and wax cylinders, and is rather evocative and subtle, so that like the grooves themselves it becomes an abstract moving image, rather than a medical illustration. I also worked at the Ear Institute for my multi-channel spiraling sound piece, which reconceptualised a large phonograph horn as a giant ear trumpet tuning into invisible soundwaves, commissioned by the Jerwood Space, and shown there in August 2010.

ER. Subjects such as spiritualism, presence even phantom limbs seem vary much akin to the intangible nature of sound. Would you say you are trying to wrestle with the temporality of sound? To almost ground sound and materialise the immaterial?

AS. Absolutely. As you say, I have an ongoing attraction to subjects which hover between the material and the immaterial, presence and absence, the animate and the inanimate. Sound is a perfect example of this, in that it both belongs to the body and departs from it, it inhabits a strange inside/outside space, and an intangible subject/object status, all of which I find inexhaustibly complex and stimulating. I am really interested in exploring the embodiment of sound, its materiality, the way it looks and moves. ‘Automamusic’ [watch video] was all about how the mechanical music automata negotiated the visibility of sound reproduction, engaged in an intricate rhetoric of showing and hiding musical performance, transforming readable music notation into codes to be deciphered by a mechanism. Music still looked like itself, though without human performers to animate the musical instruments. With ‘Sound Seam’, I wanted to get into the body of sound, hence the opening sequences of zooming into a variety of horns, as if entering the locus of sound. This is why I spent so much time exploring sound inscriptions, wax cylinder and gramophone grooves using a microscope, as it really enabled a sense of getting under and into the material quality of what is mostly overlooked or merely instrumental to the reproduction of sound. The sound inscriptions are a fascinating material trace of an acoustic event, a kind of pure automatic writing, and yet they are indecipherable to the human eye. I have also yet to finish editing a series of short films on musicians with unusual instruments. The films aim to explore the way the instruments fit, how they imply their bodies, and shift one’s understanding of the space of music. The film I completed on the wonderful thereminist Lydia Kavina is a good example of this [watch video]. The theremin itself as a musical instrument questions where one might locate sound, how it looks, and the haptic engagement with this ether of sound.

ER. What have been some of the key influences on your practice?

AS. As I mentioned earlier, I am very much influenced by researching and reading about history. I am also drawn to films such as ‘Dogville’ by Lars von Trier, or ‘Heart of Glass’ by Werner Herzog. Those films have an unresolved ethical dimension that I find fascinating, difficult and inspirational, but also a performative mode that is a complicated suspension of disbelief (brechtian alienation technique in the former and trance hypnosis in the latter). I was profoundly influenced by puppet shows as a child, which equally imply a sophisticated mode of spectatorship. I aspire to produce a similar effect on my spectators, lure them in and evoke a sense of bodily or perceptual conviction, which is then subverted or alienated. I have frequently worked with psychoacoustic, optical or sensory illusions as they enable this dual mode of reception – consent, complicity, interiorisation or belief in the experience offered by the work, but equally critical detachment, distance, dissent. Suspending disbelief implies a transitory belief.

ER. What do you have coming up in the future?

AS. I am currently working on a new film project which looks at Chladni sound patterns and ideas around utopian language, absolute film, abstraction, thought-forms and synaesthesia, exploring also optical-sound-on-film and synthetic music. It’s an ambitious project which has smaller constellation projects which pre-empt it. I am showing the first incarnation of what is provisionally entitled ‘Onomatopoeic Alphabet’ at VIVID (Birmingham) in December 2010, when I will also be showing ‘Sound Seam’ at the Wellcome Collection. Other than that I am working on a smaller film–performances called ‘Drawing forth sound’ for an event as part of the Hayward touring exhibition on John Cage, and I will be doing some performances at Kings Place with a talking book, and at the Barbican, using Chladni sound patterns.

ER. And finally as always, Ear Room asks; what does the term sound art mean to you?

AS. That’s a difficult question, as I don’t tend to categorize my practise in this way, nor am I convinced of the usefulness of such categories for artists. I usually make the work that suits my area of interest and enables me to explore my query in the best possible materialisation. Sometimes it happens to be film, other times performance, and on some occasions sound. They all feel very closely related, and the fact that sound features in the work doesn’t necessarily make it sound art, whatever that term means.

FIN

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ER. Can you remember where your interest in sound came from, can you pinpoint
a certain memory or moment?

FL. Not really. I’ve always been intuitively drawn to sound. When I started doing field recordings I wasn’t aware of other people / artists with similar interests. Instead, I was simply fascinated by the presence of sound. Sound as space, sound as a world in itself. Nothing to do with
documentation or representation.

ER. What made you train in entomology and ecology and has this training influenced any particular elements of your practice?

FL. My fascination for insects and nature began when I was a kid. Not the training itself but rather the extended experience in many natural environments that comes with the field work in Biology and Ecology. That brought my attention to the complexity, the intricacy and the different layers of sonic “reality”. And this had the most dramatic impact and influence on the way I understand how to deal creatively with sound, more than any other sonic or musical influences.

ER. You were heavily involved in early cassette networks, how did this influence your development as an artist?

FL. Well, that was my learning in sound making. Through the international home-music or “cassette network”. One of the main features of this network was the exchange and collaboration with other artists, so naturally (and very quickly) you’d find yourself involved in a number of collective projects. You’d also receive tons of music / sounds by so many different people with such diverse aesthetics and ideas that the field of experience was amazingly rich and, I suppose, somehow influential. At that time, there was not such a rush to be updated with everything in real time, and thus we had time to reflect and let things seep in, in a probably more reasonable manner.

ER. Your works predominantly feature environmental sounds from specific locations but they are not necessarily a typical phonographic representation. Where do you position your practice?

FL. As I mentioned before, I’ve never been interested in representation. To me, field recordings are fascinating not as “documents”, representation or simulations of “reality”, but rather as separated worlds in themselves. For most people the fact that a recording cannot convey “the real thing” is a shortcoming of the medium. For me it’s precisely the opposite: this recording medium is in fact richer than reality, since it has been gathered by non-cognitive entities, i.e. the recording devices we use.

ER. And this ‘non representation’ relates to how you approach live performance and your concept of ‘absolute music’?

FL. “Absolute music” is an idea from Romanticism, in which music was considered as the ineffable art. This idea didn’t exist in this explicit form before and didn’t survive long into the XXth century. In essence, it’s the vision of music as a non-referential world, with its own rules, logic, and sets of possibilities for the listener. Not a tool for story telling or self-expression. In my live performances I try to convey this through an immersive experience in sound with its own internal “geography”, in which every listener is free to roam around and find his/her own meanings and values.

ER. This sense of acousmatic listening carries through with much of your published works, often clear cased with little or no source information given. Could you expand a little on this sense of confusion and freedom for a listener?

FL. It’s very straightforward, really. My belief is that by not giving certain types of information the listener is drawn to create his/her own listening experience, freed from any impositions on my side. From what I’ve seen so far in my experience, it works. People focus on the sounds/music, instead of the covers, references or explicitly expressed intentions by the artist.

ER. Do you have any particular performance spaces’ you are fond of and how
Important is the ‘experience’ of space in your live shows?

FL. Sound doesn’t exist without space. In the recordings or in whatever other devices for real-time generation we have no sound, but code for storage or for generation. From a performance point of view, sound is the perceptible sonic entity we happen to create by the combination of sound system and space. Therefore, in essence, we are -or we should- always performing with space itself. This is a main focus of my work live, as my performances are site-specific, with real-time reaction, in both the choices of materials and the live operations of processing/spatialization of sound.

ER. Can you talk a little about your Amazon workshops and the importance of sharing/facilitating others?

FL. It’s an amazing experience combining intense field work and intense adventure in a wonderfully rich environment. Sharing that with other people interested in sound (and a number of other things related to that kind of environment) is, of course, a great learning experience. I try to facilitate the interaction with such a place and with all the virtual, “unreal” places that we naturally construct from vivid and rich experiences of “reality”.

ER. You have obviously traveled the world with you work, are there any particular soundscapes that stand out for you?

FL. Rainforests are particularly rich in their complexity and variety but I have a very broad taste for sound and, in my experience, you never know where you’re going to find an amazing surprise. And that’s the beauty of the exploration.

ER. What projects are you currently working on?

FL. Many! I always work in parallel with many different ongoing projects in the making. For example, right now I’m finishing a new piece made by a thorough complete mutation/evolution from my first recordings/compositions, from 1980 (this will be a double CD release). In the making also I have several projects/pieces with so-called “straight” field recordings (not so
“Straight” for me for the reasons explained above) from different environments in Cuba & USA, Argentina & Paraguay, South Africa & Namibia, Australia & New Zealand, South Holland, the Basque Country, South Spain… Then a lot of collaborations with other artists like Asmus Tietchens, Slavek Kwi, Aernoudt Jacobs, Esplendor Geométrico, Daniel Menche, and Brandon
LaBelle… and a bunch of other things that go in new directions.

ER. And finally, as always Ear Room asks, what does the term sound art mean to you?

FL. I don’t really care about terms. That’s actually the way music was often called in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, so go figure!

FIN

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ER. Can you recollect where your interest in sound came from, in particular an interest in kinetic energies?

RL. When I was eight my mother ordered some LP’s from a record club. The first to arrive was Beethoven’s Fifth with Shubert’s Unfinished on the other side. I can distinctly remember ‘borrowing’ the record and creeping uninvited into my brother’s bedroom and playing the album on his Dansette. I was compelled to start conducting along. What followed was about ten years of classical music snobbery, refusing to listen to ‘pop’ music under any circumstances.

I have always been a musician, singing in choirs as a kid, learning the piano, writing music, playing in bands (once I got over my classical music affliction). My father was a sculptor and I grew up with a sense of familiarity with making things, using materials, messing around with stuff. When he died I ‘inherited’ a big box full of old motors and mechanisms and maybe in some way as a tribute to him I started making mechanical sculptures that made sound. I use sound primarily for its possible musical characteristics rather than sound as a carrier of meaning. That said I like the idea of using sound as a way of revealing hidden electro-magnetic processes where sound becomes a kind of by-product, evidence of unseen phenomena or a way in which these invisible-forces can be made tangible. When I use machines it is because I like making them, but also because I’m trying to invest energy into the things I do, to make the work dynamic, exciting. To make it the kind of thing I’d like to experience as a member of the audience.

ER. How important is a sense of physicality in your works, not just the actual structures, more so the sonic content and composition?

RL. Physicality is essential to the work and it is inherent in both the structures I build and the sound that is created. The idea is that one is inseparable from the other. I build machines that make sound. The fact that they often move means that the sound itself is being modulated by the movement. In my approach it is not possible for me to have the sound in any way separate to the physical structure, object, or machine that produces the sound.

ER. Compositionally, minimalism and noise feature heavily in the works. How do you begin working on a composition such as Siren?

RL. It would be nice to think I could sit down and start composing a piece like Siren. The reality is less comfortable and much messier. For example, I had no idea that I was going to create Siren much less that it was going to become a composition with minimalist tendencies and would end up going twice round the world. Siren emerged out of an organic process of working with materials. As a musician/composer I am more of an improviser than a notational or studio composer. As the machines evolved and took shape I began to see the potential for them (the Siren tripods) to have a compositional form, but this in itself emerged out of a desire to create a theatrical structure/form for them to be experienced within. This way of working, an empirical approach, means that many of the structural facets of Siren are functional. The motors are 12v windscreen wiper motors. When you apply 12v they go from a standing start to 75rpm. This has a disastrous effect on the mechanism and as a consequence I use variable voltage power supplies so that I can start the motors slowly and gradually build up and then slow down their speed. This has become a compositional tool, allowing me to create different effects through the speed of rotation of the arms. Because the arms have to start slowly and slow down gradually and not just stop dead this means that the shape of the work takes on a gradually curve upwards in speed intensity and then a slow decline to a conclusion of stillness. This shapes the performance and the composition, but it is the result of practical issues. Likewise, the sound is produced by small 9v battery powered oscillators situated on the top of the arms (to avoid having to use commutators). This means that the tuning needs to take place before the arm is set it motion. Once in motion the tuning can’t be changed. So structurally the tuning of all the arms takes place at the start of the composition and once tuned the individual sirens are not re tuned at any stage of the composition. So, I see Siren as a composition, but also one that has emerged through a practice based approach to what is possible to achieve given the logistical/practical necessities of the work. I enjoy this. Although I listen to minimalist music, I’d never set about composing it. Siren became minimal through its nature, much like Reich’s early tapes works.

ER. Having seen/heard this (Siren) work, it’s apparent that it combines elements of performance. Could you talk about your performative role and the roles of other operatives?

RL. For me, good performers engender trust and allow the audience to relax and focus on the end result rather than worrying whether they are going to get it right or not. Watch a skilled musician engaged in the act of performing music and there is little or no pretence. They are engaging for an audience to observe because of their skill, their concentration and their lack of self-consciousness in a performance situation. As a member of the audience you are not distracted by them. This is one element. I think of the performers in Siren, in particular, as somewhere between skilled musicians performing a difficult musical task (which it is!) and factory workers engaged in manipulating dangerous machines. It is not an act. In Siren the performers take the audience through an experience, they shape that experience, controlling the pace and timing, first demonstrating then manipulating the machines, keeping the whole thing in precarious control without affectation, ensuring that the giant machine works safely. But they are also humans in a mechanical environment, and for the audience this relationship between the performers and the machines is important.

ER. There appears thematic overlaps between science, the universe and philosophy in your practice. Are these subjects relevant areas of research and practical discovery for you?

RL. Sound art is a form that my work currently fits into. As an artist I explore my fascinations with the world. I am continually fascinated by themes that include the emergence of the scientific method, the development of technology, and the way science represents our view of the universe. So my work stems from these interests and has found a form through the use of sound and kinetic elements. Maybe it will be different in the future.

ER. The works are, on a technical scale, very intricate. But how important is the listener’s ‘experience’ of a piece, not necessarily their ‘understanding’ or ‘rationalisation’ of what is happening?

RL. It’s an interesting question. A computer is intricate. But its intricacy is hidden, inaccessible. A fundamental part of what I am trying to do is uncover, unwrap technology and make it accessible primarily to myself but in so doing to others. I don’t think about listeners. I think about an audience. Listening is one aspect. For me my work attempts to create experiences that involve listening and looking and the two are not easily divisible. I try to avoid deliberate obfuscation of the processes use. I don’t expect everyone to understand how I am creating what they are experiencing, but I go to some lengths to try and make the process accessible without making it obvious. In Siren we carefully tune the first few tripods to show the audience what is happening before we start making them rotate. They have the chance to start making up their own minds about what is happening.

ER. How important is the use of cutting edge technology when representing something kinetic and essentially natural – where do you position yourself between primitive and new technology ends?

RL. Primitive is an interesting term. I am fascinated by how our view of ourselves in 2010, for example, affects the way we view the past. We look back on previous technology as primitive, on current technology as cutting edge. But this is a highly transitory state. Our cutting edge is quickly replaced by tomorrow’s new thing and what was once brand new and shiny is consigned to the scrap heap. There is a tendency to associate primitive with simple. My view is that the technology we use is very frequently under used before it is replaced by the next ‘new thing’ and more often than not it is replaced for economic exploitation rather than for creative reasons. So I can’t oppose primitive with technology. I might oppose digital for the sake of digital when analogue would do the trick. I’m a huge fan of Nicolas Collins’ book ‘Handmade Electronic Music’. It made me feel that the years I spent messing around, taking things apart and reconstructing them was completely valid as an approach to making music.

My approach is to use the technology that is appropriate to the result I am looking for. So if I want to make a high quality recording of one of my works I use a digital recording and digital editing. However, this is because I don’t see my work as being about the recording, but being about the event, the experience of being with the work in a live context. In order to create the effect I’m looking for I use deliberately arcane ways of making and manipulating sound. I think of my work as a kind of vision of the future of sound but one imagined from about 100 years ago.

ER. Your installations have been played across the globe. Do you have any favourite spaces/experiences?

RL. I have some great memories of Siren now. It has become a bit like the sound art equivalent of some long running Broadway musical, we’ve done it that many times.

One of the last spaces we did it in was in the middle of the biggest hall I have ever been in, part of an exhibition centre in Miami. This room (one of four the same size) was the size of about three football pitches. It took the audience about 5 minutes to walk to the middle where we’d set up Siren. And then, it being Miami, we had about 1500 people seeing it in the space of a few hours. Complete mayhem. More like an American Football match than an art event. My favourite space was probably the grand church at Laboral in Gijon, Northern Spain. I’d always wanted to do Siren in a church, not for religious reasons, but because originally I had intended to call the work ‘Choir’ and I liked the association with singing and choirs and the strangely choral sound that the active Siren piece creates. As it happened it both looked and sounded great in there (see video below). My abiding memory though is of being in the same church doing a schools performance of Siren to about 150 four year old Spanish children.

ER. What are some of your key influences?

RL. I tend to avoid charts, top tens, and collecting favourite bands/composers/artists. My key influences are diverse and actually things change in relative importance as I move through my life. What might have been a key influence twenty years ago is now less important. If I look at Siren I can see what should be the key influences. I can post-rationalise the references that the work throws up, but at the time I made it I was more interested in a book about Victorian technology that my dad had given me. Early scientific experiments, the history and development of science, electricity, magnetism, radio waves and of course early electronic music. There is a difference between an influence and things I like. I love the bell-casting scene from Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev and I have been learning English church bell ringing for several years now. I listen to more Bach than any other single composer and am inspired (and sometimes appalled) by great works of industrial technology. I’m inspired by libraries and bookshops, ancient sites, by good science and bad science, by the extraordinary things people do, believe in and make in their spare time and of course the astonishing beauty of everyday existence.

ER. What’s coming up?

RL. I’ve been buying old wooden boxes off e-bay. I think something might happen with them. I’ve measured them, drawn them and listened to them. Let’s see what happens.

ER. And finally as always, Ear Room asks, what does the term sound art mean to you?

RL. Sound art is an evolving term. For me it describes a spectrum of activity that ranges from Sonic Art, (i.e. a practice emerging out of contemporary composers working with electro-acoustic studio-based work) to visual artists working with sound as a carrier of meaning. It’s also a problematic term as any umbrella term tends to be. For me it’s similar to the way Live Art is used to encompass a broad range of vaguely related activities. Whether what I do is sound art or not shouldn’t be something I spend too much time thinking about.

FIN

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