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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Memory as a dorsal spine

For the first in a new series of expositions presenting sound art works commissioned by RESONANCE, French artist Pascal Broccolichi created a next version of his Table d’Harmonie. It can be experienced as a mono-solo-exhibition entitled Invasive Harmonie, produced by RESONANCE co-organizer Le Bon Accueil at the Galerie EC’ARTS of the Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maîtres in Rennes, France, until March 22nd. A couple of hours before Invasive Harmonie‘s opening on Thursday February 7th, Pascal gave detailed insight in the background and motivations for this impressive piece, which is a new phase and step in one of a number of continuing, evolving (research) processes that are an integral part of his method and approach in the making of art.

“With the notion, the concept, of table, comes always a scene: the scene of a meal, of things that are being discussed around it. The table’s top shapes relations among those that are gathered there. A table installs some sort of a game. A dialogue. Communication. Negotiation. A table dramatizes in and by itself. When I started to work in the EC’ARTS gallery’s space, I quite literally circumscribed a table on the floor: a surface, dimensions… Except, of course, that in the end the Table d’Harmonie is not perfectly flat. On the contrary: it has an awful lot of relief.”

“I always try to keep things evident, to keep things easily perceptible. And at the same time I try to have them border on paradox and tautology. Which is why this show is called Invasive Harmonie. Harmony is always total, always global; and invasive, almost by definition. This incites a repeat, a tautology. But you can also read Invasive Harmonie in a more indirect manner, and find two ideas that actually annihilate each other. So I am always steering near to either a ‘sur-definition’ or a ‘neutralization’. Which is also contained within the idea of a cartography. A map gives you a view of a territory that is global, but also local in its details. That allows for a circulation of energy (from the global to the local and back again) that, mind you, may very well be wasted, because in the end it leads you nowhere: while you are reading the map, you’d better stop moving; unless you want to break you neck…”

“Over the years, as part of my artistic output, there of course are what one usually calls ‘works’. But there are also a number of things, projects, that are more like research processes. Things that I started at some point and that I have continued doing ever since, without a foreseeable end. One of these processes is Table d’Harmonie, which I started as long ago as 1998. In this particular process I try to reach a way of thinking about how to organize the possible dimensions of listening along two quasi-contingent axes: one that leads to observation through the eyes – via the image – and the other to observation through the ears – via the sound. Here the interest and difficulty are not so much a differentiation, a separation of image and sound, but – on the contrary – the enrichment of an existing perceptual phenomenon. I am convinced that the majority of sonic contexts in which we find ourselves are, arguably, sonic images, sonic interpretations. An awful lot of the sounds that pass through us as part of the flux of our day-by-day environments, are intimately linked to sonic images.”

long term

“Table d’Harmonie is a long term experiment, which means – and this is important – that each of the successive installations is like an instrumentarium through which the research advances. You will notice that I am careful not to speak of instrument. It is not a musical instrument. The sounds you hear are not being generated by the heaps of sand. In fact, you may consider the sound to be fully independent of the installation. Again this is the sort of relation that interests me. A lot. But at the same time, Table d’Harmonie – which is French for sound board – is a term that strongly refers to music and musical instruments. The sound board of a piano is an intricate architecture (maybe we should call it a theatre of operations) that makes it possible for the instrument to resonate. In its metal structure you will find these holes for the air to circulate. Similarly, in the Table d’Harmonie there’s multiple streams of sound circulating inside of the little craters.”

“In my approach to this process, memory is the dorsal spine; it’s memory’s time-lapse, the time that it takes for things to install themselves, before they either persist or disappear. Before they reveal themselves as remanent and re-appearing, or as essentially furtive, leaving nothing but an indeterminate and very vague impression. What I want to try and understand is this permanent passing from the one to the other, in more or less concomitant or in fully separate ways…”

“When you enter the gallery room, on the floor you see all these heaps of black sand, material that, by the way, is an important ingredient of my research. I made all of these heaps (there are 66 of them) from precisely the same quantity of sand. Each of the heaps has an identical, conic, form, initiated by versing the sand on the floor, at very precisely indicated spots, the location of which is also of the utmost importance to me. The visual and the sonic image – evidently – will simultaneously cooperate and work against each other… as images of lines, as images of waves…”

gestures

“Over the years the forms that I use have evolved. For Invasive Harmonie the gesture that I applied – and this is exactly what it is: a gesture – is a very simple one. When I speak about ‘inscription into memory’, I refer to the fact that there is something – quite literally – being engraved. It is the repetition that lends the gesture of my silting a temporality, which, like a metronome marking rhythm, also marks memory. Therefore, within this process, the artistic gesture is so very important. All of the time that I spent developing the installation has been marked by these gestures that, to me, are like a ritual: the pouring of always that same heap of sand on the floor, making it conic, then taking the end of a vacuum cleaner’s tube, bringing it to the cone’s summit and then going down, aspirating sand until the tube is touching the floor… The result is this little crater, the remains of something that first was erected, then reduced and aspired, dissolved. Very simple. But I like these simple repetitive rituals. A lot. This room is about 80 square meters, and it is the ritual making of the ‘drawing’ on the floor that lends it its density, its massive presence; that enables it to invade all of the space.”

“The repeating of modules – four, five, four, five … – lend it an undulation which makes it a resemble a sound drawing, a drawings of waves, some interpretation of a sonic rhythm. Well, that’s close, but no cigar! It is more like a spatial cartography, like an atlas. For I think that the essence of one’s listening is the building of a set of benchmarks, each one its own, in order to be able to resize a perceptual space. The more rigorously things have been subjected to an order, the more they all will seem to be equal… at first sight. But that is merely an impression, an hypothesis that will collapse again very quickly. Because it is untenable. Because absolutely identical things do not exist. Not in reality; and even less so in the reality of your perception.”

“When you place yourself at one of the corners of the installation, you will get the impression that the surface over which the sand craters are spread out is larger on one side than it is on the other; also the light plays a role, that comes falling through the side windows. The rhythm of the light and the relief, the thicknesses, that it creates … all are very important. The end result, as a reality, is almost paradoxical.”

“I do not favor the visual part, nor do I privilege the sonic part. It is all about the material and about the context within which the construction takes place. The precise rhythm and the repetitions are dictated by the space. In a different room (for example one that would be less formal, less rectangular) there probably would have been less regularity. But it will never become random or discontinuous. There always will be this continuity, even though I would not want the repetitive pattern of the image to prevail over the presence of the sounds. Neither should it be an illustration, like the image of the propagation of a wave. That would be too specific. One would lose the ambiguity between image and sound that I find so essential.”

“The material that I used for this version of the Table d’Harmonie is black Corundum dust. The gallery floor here has a light grey color, the walls are white. So for reasons of contrast I picked a dust that is both very abrasive and very brilliant and crystalline. At the same time it is very black, and has the massive presence that I am looking for. On the other hand, when you watch it from a distance, it creates an almost velvety atmosphere. Like if it were a sort of foam. Which is yet another thing that disrupts reality.”

“In the end, what we get is a synthesis: of the image, the physical presence of the material and of the sound. Together they constitute the cartography that corresponds to a landscape that has been imposed by the space. It is a landscape, with emerging lines of horizons that shift according to the point from where you watch it. The sonic landscape, however, eludes you. The sounds you hear are not meant to provide you with the listening comfort of a kind of sonic illustration of what you see.”

the sonic

“In earlier versions of Table d’Harmonie I used granular synthesis to work with sound in ways corresponding to those in which, say, a liquid flows. But here I used exclusively recorded, untreated, sounds. And though some have a sort of watery quality, most of them, appearing outside their original context, are pretty difficult to pin down. If we manage to focus and decontextualize, in any natural environment with exceptional qualities, we will seize sonic moments that are pure abstractions. For me these are musical forms at their peak! It’s there that I find musicality at its freest, its most autonomous and with the fullest potential of power.”

“I chained my Rennes recordings together into 4 separate tracks, each of which is playing back in a loop from a CD in one of four CD players. And in 16 of the 66 little craters there’s a loud speaker at the bottom. Some of these are for the low frequencies, others for the high frequencies. So the high and the low frequencies are strictly separated, and are being projected from different places, which correspond to distinct listening points, to listening axes that will allow as to remember what we heard at another spot. This, as a matter of fact, is what for me constitutes the sonic landscape: its the thickness of the relief, that comes into play as the distance to what we heard at an earlier time.”

“For some time already I wanted to work with other phenomena of flow and fluid. And in Rennes there are canals, with locks, that are still extensively used to transport goods by boat. So this was a great opportunity to investigate what is happening under water in these canals. I spent many days recording under water sounds in Rennes, using hydrophones with several tens of meters of cable. These are usually applied to reach great depths in oceans and seas, but I used them to cover great distances, by throwing them into the canals like a fishing line, and then dragging them along, while capturing the very rich and unusual sonic universe inside the water (in fresh water, sound travels at about 1500 m/s, as opposed to its speed of about 340 m/s in dry air), including the frictions, and all of the sounds that came from the many mechanical and motorized devices functioning in and around the canals. All of it I kept just as it was recorded, but I sorted the sounds according to their color, tonality, character, and in relation to the different points of diffusion in the gallery space. Out of this black landscape of identical, black craters, sounds emerge of many different colors, and with a temporality that, because of the different lengths of the 4 looped tracks, is continuously shifting. It is a sonic landscape with no beginning, and no end. The heart of the work as a composition is the spatial distribution of the divers sonic particles. In fact, before I created the landscape of craters, I placed the 16 loud speakers on the floor, at the exact spots where you see them now, by precisely defining the space’s geometry via a grid of thin wires that I spanned across the floor. This was then followed by a rather pragmatic process of playing back the sounds and listening, thus creating, in a way, a table of depths, relief, accidents, colors, temporalities… until I arrived at a spatial distribution that convened. So I worked at placing groups, families, characters of sounds, according to what later would be the route taken by the beholder of the piece. For, as you see, the space and the disposition invite you to go around; it is like a sculpture that you walk around. That there is a part that you see, and a part that you have to imagine (a hidden part, a part that is behind) has always fascinated me in the apprehension of a sculptural piece. In the Table d’Harmonie it is the sound that functions as the hidden part. The sounds are evolving in a pretty much autonomous way, and when you walk around the crater field, you will do so with a foresight of the sounds that will come after. That’s unavoidable, it’s familiarization. The problem that I have to solve – and this is where for me the work (much like that of a sculptor) really starts – is the following: how can I create accident, fracture, misunderstanding, confusion and paradox in the midst of all this? Something that departs from the evident that one tends to imagine?”

“So Table d’Harmonie is indeed, and profoundly so, a sculptural work, as much as it is a sound work. And creating a ‘sonic landscape’ also means, in a very deep sense, that you are doing a painter’s job; besides being on top of it all, at least partly, also very cinematographic, even though there is nothing like a ‘scene’. What I mean of course is a ‘cinema for the ears’, the construction of which will strongly depend on each of the separate beholders’ psychological states. For me, there are a number of quite heavy and melancholic moments. Others, on the contrary, are almost ethereal. But somebody else may experience it in a very different way. I do think that listening encourages this type of solitary relation to the self. And whether the listening will take place for a mere couple of seconds, or for several hours, for me this does not change the way in which I approach the work as an artist. In all of the possible cases my investment and my concern will be the same.”

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You can visit and experience Pascal Broccolichi’s Invasive Harmonie at the Galerie EC’ARTS de l’IUFM de Bretagne, 153 rue Saint-Malo, Rennes (France), weekdays between 12h and 18h, until March 22nd.
Pascal Broccolichi’s website is at pascalbroccolichi.com.