Resonanends in Riga (lv)

The RESONANCE network’s final showcase took place in 2014’s European capital of culture, Riga (Latvia). Organized and curated by Viestarts Gailītis and Skaņu Mežs, his ‘association for adventurous music and related arts’, all works commissioned by the network in its second two year period could be experienced as the first part of the Sound Art Exhibition SKAN II, between May 30th and June 20th of this year.

All artists were assigned their own special spot in Riga’s Botanical Garden, where they re-installed the work they had created for RESONANCE. Except for Pascal Broccolichi, who re-created his Table d’harmonie in the nearby Kalnciema iela Gallery.

Also in Riga Pascal composed the corresponding sound piece with recordings that he made locally, with a hydrophonic sensor. This time they revealed the sonic patterns caused by the streaming waters in different parts of the Daugava river and the Gulf of Riga.

Jitske Blom and Thomas Rutgers profited from the modular construction of their Beaters. They separated the installation into a number of smaller Beater panels, that then occupied an old shed (the Pump House) in the Botanical Gardens.

Peter Bogers’s Untamed Choir and Stefan Roigk’s Bursting Confidence each took up a wing of the Wolfschmidt Estate: a wooden manor-house that – or so we were told – used to be the summer house of Albert Wolfschmidt (Volfsmits in Latvian), once the royal Dutch consul in Riga, and owner of the land on which now the Botanical Gardens stand.

As the pictures suggest, the unusual spaces and surrounding in many cases managed to open up some hitherto hidden dimension of the works. This was definitely the case for the 18th century dome-shaped former wine cellar in which Aernoudt Jacobs set up his Photophon, not in the least because of the domic space’s typical acoustics.

On the first floor of the Palm House one could visit Signe Lidén’s Writings. For this fourth and final of her RESONANCE installments, Signe set up a veritable meta-installation: an installation about her previous three installations; an archive of her Writings, a diorama, photographs, things to look at…

As a work to which the notion and concept of material memory is central, Signe here turned her Writings installation into an archive of itself, which thus in Riga came full circle; like the RESONANCE project as a whole.

Last in the list, but of course not least: David Helbich made a Riga version of his performative soundwalk Tracks, starting from the Botanical Garden. As with the Kortrijk, Bergen and Maastricht versions of the walk, also the Riga version of Tracks is available at David’s web site. Anyone thus will be able to ‘perform’ the walk, at any time, until long after Riga has ceased to be European Capital of Culture, and long after now that the European sound art network RESONANCE became history…

[ Read an interview with SKAN II organizer and curator Viestarts Gailītis on Arterritory. ]

Peter Bogers’s “Untamed Choir”

The past couple of weeks in Østre (the Lydgalleriet’s new space for sound art and electronic music in Bergen, Norway), Dutch artist Peter Bogers has been working on the installation and fine tuning of Untamed Choir, a new work that he produced for RESONANCE, and which will premiere as part of a short summer-exposition at Østre (from July 25th until August 11th, 2013), also featuring The Beaters, by Jitske Blom and Thomas Rutgers.

Peter Bogers’s new work is a spatial composition that uses 30 vocal tracks, played back through a set of 40 small loudspeakers that are hanging from the ceiling of the room into which the piece is projected. 20 of these are positioned on a large circle, with their cones pointing inwards. The others are spread over the rest of the projection space.

The following picture shows a sketch of a possible positioning of the loudspeakers, but the precise distribution of the speakers will obviously depend on the properties and dimensions of the room in which Untamed Choir is presented.

“Up until now the installations that I made, were more like sculptures; visual things; things that are,” Peter said. “The visitors might contemplate them and listen to them for as long as they liked. This is sort of a first time that I present a work that actually has a definite beginning and a definite end. Untamed Choir is a composition, a thing with a fixed duration. Of fifteen minutes.”

“The installation nevertheless does have a strong visual component. It consists in a projection of images of noise, moving between white dots on a black background and black dots on a white background, that illuminate the space into which the piece is projected. These images are of a ‘positive’ and of a ‘negative’ kind, just like one might consider ‘screaming’ to be the ‘sonic negative’ of ‘singing’ or ‘chanting’. The projection thus reflects the transformations: from ‘screaming’ and ‘crying’ to ‘chanting’ and ‘singing’ to ‘screaming’ and ‘crying’.”

How did you go about collecting the vocal material that you needed for the work?

“Much of the material consists in samples. Of singing, of choirs… I took anything that I could get hold of and that I thought might be useful. And then there are parts that I sung myself, and parts that I asked friends and acquaintances to sing. Originally I had planned to do a lot of the necessary vocal recordings in Bergen, in cooperation with a number of students here. But unfortunately, due to several changes in the work schedules, that has not been possible. So I ended up doing most of the recording and collecting of the sound in Amsterdam.”

“The things that I recorded myself were primarily related to the many transitions that I needed, in various tonal pitches, between the crying/screaming and chanting/singing. Often such transitions had to be very, very gradual. So gradual, that it becomes impossible to pinpoint the precise moment of change… In the singing parts I aimed at a very stylized… eh… well, yes, I may indeed just say: at a kind of ‘beauty’. I wanted it to be the sort of thing capable to seduce the listeners.”

Many of the fragments that I heard, in your preview video (which you will find embedded at the end of this article), struck me as almost Wagnerian in atmosphere…

“The singing had to be beautiful. Parts of it – including the end – are indeed kind of ‘dark’, kind of ‘heavy’. And some parts get kind of ‘psychedelic’… The piece has been conceived as a single, continuous, expiration. I removed all the breathing from the samples and the recordings. And I distribute the 30 vocal tracks over the 40 loudspeakers. This allows me to actually move sounds in the space. I can make them go round in a circle; and I can freeze them, keep them in one specific spot. Most of the singing is located everywhere in the space, including the circle; but the screaming is concentrated within the circle. When the chanting turns into screaming, the transformation initially takes places within all of the channels. But then gradually it is pulled towards the center. Until the scream occupies nothing but the middle of the room, where it literally is running around in circles. At varying speeds. So it is a pretty … yes … physical work.”

And with the extensive spatial configuration, the listener, when moving around, will experience a continuously changing perspective?

“The idea indeed is that one moves through the space, and that one will encounter changes in the sound on, say, every square meter. But these changes and these shifts are very subtle. They do ask for some concentration, so it may help if one closes one’s eyes… I am actually very happy with the acoustic conditions that I have been given here in Østre. My studio in Amsterdam is a bare space, with a lot of reflections. Here the sound is muted. And that is what this piece needs, because it allows for a far more precise localization of each of the sounds.”

Along with the noisy images that illuminate the space, also a running time code is projected. What do the numbers refer to?

“The numbers actually do not refer to anything specific. It is just a counter that is running, all through the piece.”

Like the transitioning noise images, they seem to suggest, though, that there is also something rather formal about the piece; in contrast maybe with the expressionistic – the untamed – ‘romanticism’ of the singing; ánd of the shouting…

“Maybe… I have to confess that I still have my doubts about the use of the counter. It will be part of the show here in Bergen, but I have not yet made up my mind as to whether I will also include it in the subsequent renderings of the piece… But there is a system to the numbers. When screaming transits into singing, the noisy projection simultaneously transits from positive to negative. So if at first the images are very light (white noise on a black background), then during a transformation from screaming to singing the picture will gradually turn into something very dark (black noise on a white backgrond). And the tipping point will correspond to the counter’s transition from plus to minus. Via zero. The counter also indicates the beginning and the end. When the work begins, the noisy image will just show you the dots, standing still. The dots do not move. And the counter is at 0. Untamed Choir then starts with a scream. And at the same time the counter starts running. The piece ends fifteen minutes later with a transition from low singing to very low screaming, which eventually turns into a kind of sigh, while the counter runs to 0. There it stops, in a still image of noise…”

“So there is a beginning. Then there is an end. And in between it is a cycle.
Like a life cycle.”

“My earliest fascination, in the 1970’s, was for performance art, with its very challenging physicality and direct confrontation with the audience. Around that same time, the first handy video cameras became available, and I realized that I actually preferred this use of technology, as an intermediary, between myself and the audience. I specifically remember one of these early works, of which no documentation has survived, but which was crucial in my development. I was sitting on a chair, surrounded by lights, making sounds with my mouth directly in front of a camera. The close up image of the lighted inside of my mouth then was shown on a monitor above my head, along with the amplified sounds – I started with baby like gurgling and vocal noises – that I was producing. That was how I began apply technology as a means to put up a separation between myself and the onlookers.”

It also shows a very early fascination for the human voice.

“I did an awful lot of recording of the vocal sounds of my first born son. Babies just begin to make noises. It’s a very free form of vocal experimentation, something that I find absolutely admirable, really. And then language starts sneaking in. This transition I find extremely fascinating. I made a work in which I imitate the sounds he made. There are two images, on two monitors. One showing his sounds, and on the one above there’s me. And the alternation of the two produced this very strong rhythmicity… So, yes, the human voice has continued to be a focal point.”

Your background is quite obviously in the visual arts, but do you consider yourself to be, nevertheless, in some sense, a composer?

“Actually I think that music is the best there is. So, to be honest, I really would have liked to be a musician…”

Do you play an instrument?

“Ah, well, a little bit of everything, one might say. I have a pretty good sense for rhythm, so I can do some drumming, play a bit of mouth organ. Nothing properly, though. But sound always had a strong presence in my work. It is only now though, with this work, that some sort of composing is involved. That I find myself being concerned with decisions about pitch, frequencies, timing, the combination of voices, and so on. With real musical components. Before, my point of departure always were the images. But when you turn on a camera to capture images, you also get the sounds. And I always have used this immediate link between image and sound. I would never add a soundtrack to images just to create a certain atmosphere. Sound that is being used to manipulate the viewer into a certain mood while looking at images usually makes me feel pretty uncomfortable. There has to be a connection between the two, a natural link.”

There is quite a long tradition within music and sound art of works that quite specifically address the distribution of sound sources and musicians within a space. Is this something that you have looked into?

“No, not really. I have to admit that my historical knowledge is pretty limited. Especially when it comes to this field of ‘sound art’, which as a matter of fact is sort of new to me. Even though some of my works, in hindsight, actually might very well be labelled as such. ‘Heaven’, for example, a work from 1995, installed in a little working-class house in the center of Utrecht. I had a great many of these old, small black and white surveillance video monitors, which were scattered around the three rooms. And each of the monitors showed an image lasting no more than one second, playing forwards and then backwards. With the corresponding sound, playing forward one second, and then in reverse for one second, on and on and on, in endless repetition. These were all sorts of images of small things, that you might see happen in such a house. Someone’s neck that is turning this way, one second, and then back the other second. And the second hand of a clock, going one tick forward and then one tick backwards again. A baby sucking milk from his mother’s breast. All the time there’s this repetition, this back and forth, and it becomes like a machine, something very rhythmic, going… ta-duh ta-duh… ta-duh ta-duh… which makes it, in a way, highly oppressive. So like ‘Untamed Choir’ this was a piece in which the spatial distribution was central, and the visitors had to walk through the piece.”

“The title ‘Heaven’ is that of a Talking Heads song. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. That’s a wonderful image. When this kiss is over it will start again. It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same. Heaven is a place where events do not devalue. Here on earth, for us, that is not the case. And maybe that is indeed our problem.
Things continue and repeat.
But they will hardly remain fun.”

Peter Bogers – Untamed Choir | Thomas Rutgers & Jitske Blom – The Beaters. Two RESONANCE sound art installations presented by Lydgalleriet at Østre, Skostredet 3, Bergen (Norway). From July 25th until August 11th, 2013.

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The following YouTube clip gives you a 4’50” preview / walk-through in stereo, of Peter Bogers’s Untamed Choir.

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The Beaters

Over the past couple of years, the Dutch duo made up of designer Jitske Blom and sound artist & composer Thomas Rutgers has been creating quite some public hubbub (Openbaar Kabaal), by their occasional invasion of public spaces with a small army of remotely controlled ‘ticking devices’. Little percussionists, like tiny electric woodpeckers, that Jitske and Thomas stick, in the abstracted form of transparent wireless boxes, to lampposts, litter bins, traffic signs, benches, doors, shop windows, and to whatever else that through its materiality will provide an interesting sounding response to the ticking stimuli of the mechanical mini guerrilla musicians. And then they have the little buggers play… To the often not little surprise and astonishment of unsuspecting passersby.

“The pretty unobtrusive small ticking boxes (they’re almost invisible) incite us to have a new, fresh look at the space that they – and we – are in,” Thomas said, “because through their ticking, they all of a sudden make us hear that space. This public hubbub work actually started out as a fixed composition, for eight of such tickers, that was performed at each of the different locations that we installed the piece. Later on it became more of a live improvisation, in which I manipulated the ticking via a Pure Data interface.”

Openbaar Kabaal / Public hubbub was the starting point, the genesis, for The Beaters, a work devised by Jitske and Rutger for the Resonance Network, which will premiere at the ECI Cultuurfabriek in Roermond (the Netherlands), between March 15th and April 15th 2013.

What is the precise relation between your variable public interventions with the ticking boxes, and The Beaters? Is the new work a more formal version, a dynamic public intervention captured in a more static installation?

“It actually involves quite a major shift of attention,” Thomas explained. “In our work with the little boxes the goal was, so to say, the creation of a little ‘symphony’ made up from existing objects; the objects that we glued the boxes to. In The Beaters our attention has shifted from these objects to the subject: from the thing that is being ticked against, to the thing that is ticking. The focal point now is the ticker itself.”

“It is still all about materiality,” Jitske added. “But now it is about the material of the ticker itself.”

And the ticking, the beating, will be all the time agains the same object?

“Yes, for The Beaters we actually built sort of a gigantic wooden sound board. It is almost like a fake wall,” Thomas said.

“It really is like a wall,” said Jitske, “wooden boards separated by a layer of air. We made four of them, that function like modules that can be put together in different ways, depending on the space that is available. Each of them is about 2 meter and 20 centimeters by 1 meter and 20 centimers. In Roermond we will put them together into one huge rectangular panel, but elsewhere we might make two little walls out of the four boards; or even place all four of them separately in the space, like four musicians.”

Did you pick a special kind of wood?

“Not so special; it’s just wood,” Jitske explained. “We ended up choosing a type of plywood, not for some deep technical reason, but because that was what to us sounded best.”

So The Beaters are the black things that we see on the wooden panes in this picture of the work under construction? They really look like ‘stylized’ woodpeckers, don’t they? They also remind me a bit of little pumpjacks (jaknikkers).

“They are all of different dimensions, all have different sizes, and all are made from different materials,” Thomas said. “Some of them are solid, some are hollow. Some are made from plastic, others are made of wood, metal, rubber, styrofoam… They form a family. Like you have families of classical instruments: violin, viola, cello, et cetera.”

Or maybe even more like the different kinds of sticks, of different sizes and materials, that are used by a percussionist…? Did you compile this collection of sizes and materials in some sort of a systematic way?

“We wanted to use as many different ones as possible,” said Jitske. “But with the condition that they’d all have a similar visual appearance. As you can see, the beaters all look the same. Their materiality is being disguised. We don’t want the audience to be able to see what kind of material a particular beater has been made of. So that has driven our selection: use as many different materials as possible, but sticking to the condition that they all should look the same. That has been an important part of my research, experimenting with all sorts of different kinds of plastic, et cetera.”

But all the beaters are powered in the same way?

“Yes, they are all moved electrically, by small electric motors,” Thomas replied. “And it now is an essential part of the work that you actually can see the movement. The little transparent boxes of the Openbaar kabaal series all contain the same small ticker, and there is actually not much to be seen there. But in The Beaters, the visual information conveyed by the movement of the beaters is an inextricable part of the composition.”

So that the composition will actually also be sort of a choreography?

“In a way The Beaters are not unlike kinetic art,” added Jitske.

But each of them has its fixed spot on the wood. They do not move along the panes, from one spot to another, do they?

“No, each one has its fixed spot on the board,” Thomas confirmed. “And that’s where they are going back and forth. An important part of the composition consists in bouncing mouvements, like that of a ball bouncing on the floor.”

But then vertically …

“Indeed!” Thomas smiled. “So that is one little devious play: it suggests that gravity is being defied. A question that is at the heart of the work is whether it is possible to manipulate the sound, or one’s expectation of a sound, via the visual information that comes with it. If I pretend that I am going to hit you, you will startle in a backward direction already quite some time before I will actually hit you. So with the movement of the beaters, long before you hear a ‘hit’, you will feel that it is coming because you react to the visual information entering via your eyes. Also, the bouncing effect and the bouncing movement convey a sense of time. If we disregard friction, two objects on earth will bounce in the same manner. So what if things suddenly seem to be bouncing slower, or faster?”

Because you are hiding the specific materiality of the beaters, it will not be easy for a viewer to anticipate on a beater’s sound; unless he or she already has been watching and listening for a while, and formed sort of an auditive catalogue of the work…

“We use a number of ping pong balls,” Jitske replied. “Their sound is very recognizable; so these you will be able to pick out rather quickly.”

Are there more duplicates? Or are most of the beaters different?

“There are some duplicates,” Thomas said, “but most of them are different.”

How many beaters do you have beating? And why?

That question made Rutger laugh. “There are 31 beaters,” he said. “And why 31? … Well, you know that often when programming things, or putting things together with electronics and computers, you end up working with powers of two. So this is … well, it’s odd, so maybe it’ll give you one as an extra …

31 is the 5th power of 2 minus 1. So it is more than just ‘odd’. It is also a prime number. Actually it’s the 3rd Mersenne prime. OK, I guess that’s a good enough reason to pick 31… Joking apart, what I have been wondering about in the context of specifically the Resonance project, is why you decided to construct something fixed, something that is like an instrument, instead of taking the opportunity to ‘invade’ spaces like you have been doing before, and use the beaters to investigate the different locations that the work will be presented in, make use of the different materials and their different acoustic properties, etcetera.

“That has been the outcome of quite a long process,” Thomas explained. “Our starting point indeed was closer to that of the public hubbub, but while thinking and working on the project it occurred to us that for practical reasons it would be much better and far more convenient to build, say, our own wall, and bring that to the different locations. And actually, I am very curious to experience how this will work in the different places, each with its own and very different acoustic properties. In Roermond it will be in a very open, very high space, and floating freely as one large rectangular panel, at some distance from a wall. In April, at the Flanders Festival in Kortrijk, The Beaters will be in a very different space, much smaller, and far more closed; also a space that in relation to the visitors fulfills a very different function… All these are very interesting aspects, and it is in this respect that the work will still continue to be a work in progress. It is a composition. But it is also an installation. It is the relation between the two that fascinates us.”

You are still working on the details of the composition. Which will indeed be a composition, I mean, a piece that has a well defined starting point, a fixed development, and a well defined end.

“Yes,” Thomas said. “It will be a fixed composition, with a duration of about 10 minutes; a composition for clicks, and, of course, to have nothing but clicks is a major limitation for a composer. A click in itself is not short or long; it has no duration, and therefore gives you almost no means for expression. There is just the moment of ‘click’; that’s infinitely short. So what I will be investigating is whether the visual information makes it possible to add expression to this click. Can visual clues make a click last longer? Or shorter? The beaters are pulled towards the wooden panel by some sort of a gravitational force, but sometimes, halfway that movement suddenly will stop dead. This gives a kind of tension that is being released, or not released; almost like in a classical harmonic progression. So these may provide equivalents of musical building blocks that can be applied in a visual manner. This is the type of research this composition will be concerned with. Research that is situated somewhere in the borderlands between choreography and sound; somewhere between sound and music.”

Isn’t it also typically a work, a situation, in which you would expect some sort of an interactivity? Between the actions of the beaters, and those of the visitors of the installation? With the density of beatings depending on the number of onlookers? Or vice versa?

“That would of course be possible,” said Thomas. “And certainly not too complicated to implement. But of course, it would add another infinity of possibilities. And personally I am not very interested in such forms of interactivity, that necessarily imply that the music gets some sort of a generative character. I find it difficult to make that interesting, because it mostly implies a relation that is very one to one; or, if it is not one to one, the relation is unclear… so… No, my preferences lie very much with a fixed form composition.”

But does a fixed form composition, of a very limited duration, that is continuously, literally, being repeated (a sound track), not contradict the idea of an installation work, which in itself does not impose any duration, no beginning and no end? Which would suggest some form of variability or evolution (not necessarily interactivity or generativity), instead of strict and unrepentant repetition. Sometimes, also for that reason, sound installations make use of a number of fixed composed parallel tracks, each with a different duration, which upon playback therefore will result in continuously shifting layers. Which, I guess, is more of a pseudo solution than a real solution…

“For the time being I am going to stick to the fixed composition, of about ten minutes, that will be continuously repeating,” Thomas insisted. “It will be a piece with very gradual changes, and of course people can step in somewhere in the middle of it; or leave in the middle. But it will be a relatively short cycle, that’s true. It remains a fascinating problem indeed, how to compose for a sound installation. And a problem, that, I think, does not have an easy and straightforward solution. When you use such shifting layers, to me that feels like giving up control; you then already switch to another level, far more abstract and far more ‘macro’; which can be OK. If you are willing to accept that. For me it remains a challenge, to look for forms that continue to provide me with enough control, but that also allow me to make something that remains dynamic…”

Even though it was maybe not intentionally conceived as such, The Beaters is – besides many other things – also clearly an instrument, a percussion instrument. And Thomas now is writing the first score (in Q-Base) for this instrument. Could he imagine inviting other composers to write pieces for The Beaters?

“Yes, that is definitely a possibility,” Thomas replied. “For this of course is another border that we are investigating. Is The Beaters an instrument that is playing a composition? Or is it one piece in which image and sound tell one story? The fact that this is not at all clear is, we think, part of its charm and its force. And I am actually considering using The Beaters in the future in performances. One can easily imagine pieces for The Beaters and all sorts of different ensembles… That would be fantastic to do!”

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Jitske Blom and Thomas Rutger’s The Beaters can be experienced in the ECI Cultuurfabriek, ECI 13, Roermond, the Netherlands. The opening will take place on Friday March 15th, 2013, from 17h00. The work will be on show in Roermond until April 15th, 2013.

… “The Beaters” has been produced for RESONANCE by Stichting Intro in situ in Maastricht, the Netherlands, with additional support from the Dutch Province of Limburg.