Renew Your Audio Media Subscription for 2009!
Renew Your Audio Media Subscription for 2009!
Renew Your Audio Media Subscription for 2009!
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
what’s up<br />
18<br />
UK<br />
whatsupuk@audiomedia.com<br />
The great proportion of British people are a little sniffy<br />
about art and much to the disgust of the purists, it is<br />
no longer just about painting. Photography, video<br />
and sound are now the basis of gallery exhibitions,<br />
interpreting the media in new ways and <strong>for</strong>ms.<br />
This is something that has been happening with<br />
photographs and video screen installations <strong>for</strong> well<br />
over ten years but more recently audio has become<br />
a means of artistic expression that moves the<br />
medium away from being about music, conventional<br />
composition and tonal construction. The idea goes<br />
back to Italian futurist painter Luigi Russolo's 1913<br />
manifesto Art of Noises, which declared "we must<br />
break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds<br />
and conquer the infinite variety of noise sounds".<br />
This led to Pierre Schaeffer creating musique<br />
concrète, which was then further developed by<br />
Cage, Stockhausen, Varèse, and others, paving<br />
the way <strong>for</strong> the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the<br />
industrial electronica movement of the '70s and<br />
the synth-pop boom of the early '80s. In the last<br />
few years experiments in sound have been staged<br />
The Art Of Sound<br />
KEVIN HILTON explores the growing acceptance of sound as art in the UK and talks to some of the main players .<br />
in galleries, museums and city squares around<br />
the world but the UK has been slow to respond.<br />
That's changing this year, which has seen significant<br />
exhibits based on sound, with more to come.<br />
The unlikely starting point was the sedate south<br />
coast resort of Bexhill in East Sussex. The 1930s<br />
modernist building the De La Warr Pavilion, now<br />
an arts centre and concert venue. From January to<br />
March it hosted an exhibit by composer Michael<br />
Nyman, featuring video filmed over the past 15 years<br />
in various locations, with the segment on bell makers<br />
coming close to musique concrète, and Anthem, an<br />
installation by sculptor, and founder of <strong>Audio</strong> Arts,<br />
a CD (previously cassette)-based magazine, William<br />
Furlong.<br />
Anthem consisted of 48 box-less loudspeakers<br />
suspended from wires. Recordings made by Furlong<br />
on location at the Pavilion last summer were played<br />
around 24 of the loudspeakers, with visitors and<br />
locals talking about the venue and reflecting on<br />
Bexhill itself. Furlong used his trusty old DAT machine<br />
<strong>for</strong> the interviews and passed the recordings on to<br />
Sonica Music studios in<br />
south London, which he<br />
has been using <strong>for</strong> his audio<br />
projects <strong>for</strong> ten years.<br />
Sonica was founded by<br />
electronics engineer Matt<br />
Clark and he and his brother<br />
Paul have built much of<br />
the equipment they use,<br />
although the ubiquitous<br />
Pro Tools was used to mix<br />
Furlong's interviews. The<br />
studio's main business is<br />
post-production but has<br />
been involved in sound<br />
art <strong>for</strong> some time. Paul<br />
Clark comments that while<br />
the artist has the concept,<br />
he or she needs someone<br />
who knows what to do<br />
technically to realise it.<br />
Sonica is currently working<br />
with Hilary Champion, a Fine<br />
Arts Masters student at the<br />
University <strong>for</strong> the Creative<br />
Arts in Farnham, whose<br />
work on war and peace<br />
turns recordings of weapons<br />
into musical instruments.<br />
Sonica's DIY approach<br />
AUDIO MEDIA MAY <strong>2009</strong><br />
echoes the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Former<br />
members of the Workshop are playing live at London's<br />
Roundhouse this month and during August the<br />
venue will be a giant musical instrument <strong>for</strong> a project<br />
conceived by David Byrne. For Playing the Building:<br />
An Installation, cables and wires will be attached to<br />
pillars, pipes and beams in the Roundhouse, and<br />
then "played" from a keyboard in the UK premiere of<br />
an event staged last year in New York.<br />
Among other events this month are Futuresonic<br />
<strong>2009</strong> and the Social Technologies Summit in<br />
Manchester, and Sonic Art at the Blank Gallery<br />
in Portslade, near Brighton. This is curated by Mike<br />
Blow of Evolutionary Art and seeks to "explore<br />
sound in art through recordings, installations, new<br />
instruments and visualizations".<br />
The coming together of sensory in<strong>for</strong>mation is at<br />
the heart of work by Martyn Ware, a founder member<br />
of The Human League and Heaven 17. Through the<br />
Illustrious Company, which he founded in 2001<br />
with Vince Clarke from Erasure and Yazoo, Ware has<br />
developed the 3D <strong>Audio</strong>Scape spatial surround<br />
sound program, which he has used <strong>for</strong> the Future of<br />
Sound installations and per<strong>for</strong>mances.<br />
In June a Ware-designed installation will be<br />
running in London's Leicester Square, part of<br />
a project to promote the area and help visitors<br />
appreciate it as more than just somewhere to go to<br />
the cinema. Sound Life London features two rings<br />
of six loudspeakers and will characterise the city<br />
through sound – the noise of traffic, the River Thames,<br />
church bells, the speech and languages of Londoners,<br />
material from the National Sound Archive, and songs<br />
about the city. "We asked ourselves that if we were<br />
creating a composition in sound that was indicative<br />
of what London sounded like to someone who had<br />
never been, what would you do," Ware says.<br />
Ware feels the UK has been behind other counties<br />
in embracing sound art but with new media and<br />
technologies the <strong>for</strong>m is finally making itself felt.<br />
"It's been hard to sell, and has been looked down on,<br />
because there's no commercial value to it," he says,<br />
"and has usually been publically funded or done by<br />
students <strong>for</strong> virtually no money. We are coming out<br />
of that phase, thank God."<br />
For Ware sound art is as much about the<br />
setting, whether in a gallery or a public space, as<br />
it is the technology, with the concept feeding off<br />
the surroundings. With a new found enthusiasm<br />
<strong>for</strong> something that perhaps only other people and<br />
countries did, perhaps the UK will become one big<br />
sound art installation itself.. �