Before, during and after the deluge: Sounding Kortrijk

In the beautiful, peaceful garden of the Broelmuseum in the Belgium city of Kortrijk, 4 loudspeakers projected the soundscape that renowned British wild life sound recordist Chris Watson composed for this year’s edition of Kortrijk’s Sounding City.

Watson’s piece/installation was inspired by one of the paintings in the museum’s collection: After the Deluge (Na de Zondvloed), an oil-on-panel, relatively small (the painting measures 53 by 91 centimeters), by Kortrijk’s Golden Age master Roelandt Savery (1576-1639).

In view of the image’s scenery, I readily imagined a little Chris Watson wearing top-notch headphones, holding a pricey microphone and carrying state-of-the-art digital sound recording equipment, hidden somewhere behind one of the rocks or trees in Savery’s delicous & fantastic ‘wildscape’. It is a scene that looks ‘unnaturally natural’, not unlike the way in which Watson’s filmic collages of bigger-than-nature recordings sound ‘unnaturally natural’. Linking them, then, is obvious. But it is too much so. Paintings like Savery’s are full of implicit, unhear-able, sound (as David Toop pointed out in a lecture, also in Kortrijk, after having visited last year’s Savery exhibition in the Broelmuseum). But that what is unheard I prefer to imagine, in a non-sequential, in a time-less, way. The imposed explicitation in a sequential soundscape, that re-starts every 30 minutes or so, actually annoys me. On Saturday April 28th, in the Broelmuseum’s garden, during the opening of Sounding City, the sound of Watson’s exotic 4-channel ‘Savery’ nature-scape faded in the presence of the far more modest natural soundscape given by the mere fact of being out in the open, in public space, in the small city of Kortrijk. It was a subtle but forceful pointer to the simple beauty of what this work might have been, without loudspeakers and without exotic wild life sounds: just (a copy of) Savery’s painting installed in the middle of the garden’s lawn together with a small bench to sit on and listen. Nothing more.

Chris Watson’s installation is one of the 11 sound/art works that, as part of the Festival of Flanders in Kortrijk’s Sounding City (Klinkende Stad), can be found at 11 different spots in the old Belgian town. All of them out in the open. Each one of them in ‘public space’. That’s pretty exciting. Though some of the works mainly keep their sounds ‘in a box’, the majority, like Watson’s Savery piece, are sounding out in the open. And whether they were meant to or not: the ‘art(ificial)’ sounds merge with the continuous flux of the ‘real’ small-town-sounds. As for Chris Watson’s installation, these proved to be stiff competition indeed. I was surprised at just how much the sound of each one of the Sounding City pieces made me more aware of the many other, contingent, sounds, that sur/s/ounded them.

David Helbich‘s work Public Sounds from Kortrijk and Jeruzalem thereof made explicit use: two loudspeakers, unobtrusively mounted at the top of the gate of the Begijnhof, played back recordings he made in 2011 in Nablus and Jerusalem, thus combining the sounds from these far away cities with the daily soundings at that particular spot in Belgium. A simple idea, and maybe not overly original, but I found it to be highly effective. A pity, however, that the Palestine city soundscape consisted in static, fixed recordings, repeating, over and over again. I actually had imagined the work to make use of a semi-direct transmission of sound (time-shifted, in order to account for the difference in time zones) from a corresponding spot in Jerusalem…

The best among the ‘outside a box’ pieces at Sounding City, each on their own terms and in their own manner, managed to include & subtly transform the Kortrijk soundscape that they were being inserted in. Like David Helbich’s Kortrijk + Jerusalem piece, like Patricia Portela and Christophe De Boekck’s Hortus or Dawn Scarfe’s Tree Music. And like Evelina Deicmane‘s Becoming a Tree, one of the two Resonance contributions to Sounding City, a sequel to her earlier Resonance piece, A Long Day (that premiered in Kunsthaus Meinblau in Berlin in August 2011, and then went to Riga and Maastricht).

Also for Becoming a Tree Evelina found inspiration in an ancient Latvian tale, that she visually abstracted as three simple, clean, wooden constructions, surrounding three trees on the Vandaele plein, in which from a number of tiny loudspeakers various wood-y sounds, based upon documentary recordings of her father’s working in the woods, un-loudly sprang back and forth between the buildings surrounding the square.

A second Resonance contribution to Sounding City was Stefan Rummel‘s Articulated Chambers, who installed his intricate and solid construction on and off the river traversing Kortrijk, the Leie. Stefan’s work could be found on the other side of the river right opposite the Broelmuseum, where a nice stone stair case invited passers-by to step inside.

Even though the Articulated Chambers are, obviously, boxes, and the visitor, in a way, has to step out of the city to hear the soundscape that Stephan composed for it, once inside, through the open-ness of its construction, the city’s sound naturally mingles with the played back city sounds.

It thus was far less of a retreat than the little wooden garden shed that one discovered when entering, through what looked like a ‘secret corridor’, a most wonderful ancient garden in de Kleine Leiestraat. The cabin was part of and home to Gardening with John (2005), a piece by Alvin Curran, an American composer who has been living and working in Rome since 1965.

This year, 2012, being John Cage’s centenary, it is difficult to avoid the inclusion, in whatever major sound art exhibition, of a tribute to the composer whose work and ideas have proven to be so very influential. Curran’s garden shed, though, is more than ‘an hommage’. The (too little) time I spent, on Saturday April 28th and Sunday April 29th inside this small cabin, looking at the old gardening tools, a couple of browned score pages, and listening to the pretty peculiar, secular & musical, sounds, that every now and then gave way to John Cage’s laughing and yodeling, was definitely among my this year’s most pleasant experiences. (Click here to listen to a short sound impression from inside Alvin Curran’s Gardening with John.)

It were the touches of sudden ‘strangeness’, of slight – sonic, but also visual – alienation, that made strolling through Sounding Kortrijk such an interesting and agreeable experience: suddenly stumbling upon Evelina Deicmane’s brand new wooden packing of the three small trees; Alvin Curran’s garden shed, looking a bit silly and misplaced in the old stately garden; Stefan Rummel’s Articulated Chambers, that also in Kortrijk gave the impression of having been installed at the side of the river for some, practical, industrial reason or other; but it’s just impossible to make up one’s mind as to what precisely that ‘industrial’ reason would be.

Arguably the strangest, as well as the most unobtrusive of them all, were the some couple of tens of meters of long brass ribbon that could be seen dangling across the Tacktoren lawn near the Korte Kapucijnenstraat. Here, there was little or no sound to be heard, other than that of the rustling of the trees’ leaves, birds whistling, footsteps, far-away voices and the occasional car passing…

Leif Brush is a, by now 80 years old, sound art pioneer, living in Duluth, Minnesota, where he transformed his spacious garden into an artist’s studio. The long brass ribbon is one of his terrain instruments: the Wind Ribbon. The long brass ribbon is supplied with contact microphones. To hear the sounds captured, we had to step inside the space on the ground floor of the Budascoop building, where Guy de Bièvre and Sofia von Bustorff (who went to Duluth, to meet up with the artist) furnished a room dedicated to Brush’s work, including (an inside version of) another of his terrain instruments: the Insect Recording Studio.

For the duration of Sounding City, the sounds of Leif Brush’s Wind Ribbon in Kortrijk are streamed live on the web, where you can listen to them continuously. And though Alvin Curran’s Cage piece is a good runner-up, you will probably find, like I did, that few or none of the sound-parts (mostly loop-ing) of the other pieces at Sounding City are able to match the endless variety, sonic wealth and at times – yes – sheer musicality of the Wind Ribbon.

Here are a 13 minutes and 23 seconds of the sounds that I recorded from the ribbon’s ongoing live stream, around 20h on Tuesday, May 8th, while finishing writing this article, catching, as if by magic, the Sounding City’s ribbon at a particularly tumultuous moment in time…

At the end of our rainy inaugurating tour of Sounding Kortrijk on Saturday April 28th, Leif’s story as recounted by Guy and Sofia, felt so wonderfully weird, that Touch label‘s Mike Harding’s suggestion, the next day in the Handboogstraat, where we had a coffee in the Hoochie Coochie cafe, that this ‘Brush artist’ had to be a fiction, ingeniously made up by Guy and Sofia as their Sound City project, for a while seemed plausible enough. We had quite a bit of fun later that Sunday afternoon, in the train from Kortrijk to Lille, making up the possible biography and the possible oeuvre of a female sound art pioneer, eager to cooperate with the fictional Leif on future fictional projects. But, well, also in sound art some truths are stranger than fiction. For, believe me, no one – no one, could ever ‘simply make up’ a web site like Leif Brush’s weblackwhole.net…

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The following vimeo clip gives an overview of the opening of the Sounding City: Public Sound sound art exhibition at this year’s Festival of Flanders in Kortrijk, Belgium, followed by an impression of the evening concert, with sound projections by Jana Winderen and Mike Harding, who stood in for Chris Watson. It all sadly will no longer be part of Kortrijk’s Public Sounding space again too soon. The complete set of installations can be viewed and heard in its entirety only two more days, over the coming weekend, on the afternoons of Saturday May 12th and Sunday May 13th.

Sound City – De Klinkende Stad

Resonance at the Festival of Flanders in Kortrijk, Belgium

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The Resonance Network celebrates its first anniversary at this year’s Flanders Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium, with Sound City (De Klinkende Stad). It is the network’s biggest showcase to date, bringing together the four sound installations that were realized during the first year of the network’s existence. For those who saw the earlier versions of some of the installations, the exhibition in Kortrijk provides a great opportunity to see and hear how these works evolve and ‘resonate’, when they are re-built and adapted to a different kind of space, which, indeed, is one of the motivating ideas that underly the Resonance project.

Pierre Berthet presents a third version of his Extended Drops. This work was first realized at the Singuhr Hörgalerie in Berlin (Germany). There it could be seen and heard from July till September 2010. Pierre did a second installment of the installation at Intro in situ in Maastricht (December 2010 – February 2011).
Esther Venrooy brings A Shadow of A Wall to Kortrijk, her joint work with Ema Bonifacic that was first realized and shown in Maastricht (December 2010 – February 2011). The installation for Sound City is the work’s second realization.
The remaining two installations are premieres. They were finalized in Kortrijk, in the weeks preceding the opening of Sound City: Maia Urstad spent several weeks in the small Belgian city working on her Meanwhile, in Shanghai…, while Paul Devens was touring the town on a bicycle, recording the sounds for his City Chase.

_It was a hot and very sunny day, when I arrived in Kortrijk on Saturday May 7th for Sound City’s opening. As fas as I can remember (and I can remember pretty far), it was the first time ever that I visited this old Belgian city, which sprang from a Gallo-Roman settlement at a crossroad near the river Leie and two Roman roads. I walked the short distance from the railway station to the Grote Markt, where I dropped my luggage at the hotel, and then walked on to the Buda-eiland, the old part of town (named after the western part of the Hungarian city of Budapest) where the Sound City events are taking place.

The Resonance installations can be found in, and next to, the Buda-toren, the tower of a former brewery, that in the 1990’s was converted into a production house for the arts.

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_Maia Urstad installed her “Meanwhile, in Shanghai…” on the tower’s ground floor.

Some 80 radio’s, radio cassette players, and some other radio-like machines are hanging motionless, just slightly off the floor, in long lines stretching across the crepuscular space. They are all facing the (obscured) windows. My first impression was that of a regiment of soldiers, lined up for inspection. When I entered the lines, this curious army seemed to be a silent one, until I became aware of the soft static that, in short bursts, came whirling like a mist, like whisper, along the floor. Every now and then, from this side or other, a voice arose, speaking a short message. But when I turned to try and locate where precisely the voice was coming from, it mostly had gone silent again. Sometimes the language spoken was familiar. Sometimes it was not. Such is the short multilayered piece that Maia Urstad composed. Each of the layers is transmitted via a short range FM transmitter to a corresponding group of radio’s.

The soft, crackling and ghostlike voices soon gave rise to a different image: that of a graveyard, where each of the old and pretty much obsolete machines acts both as a thombstone and an – almost but not quite yet – corpse, ‘speaking in tongues’ … I only wished there would have been quite a bit more of these voices …

The following few minutes of audio give an (of course highly approximative) impression of what I heard when I walked up and down the lines that make up Meanwhile, in Shanghai…

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_The fifth floor is the top floor of the Buda-toren. It is where one finds Paul Devens’ new work, City Chase. When I talked to Paul late March in Maastricht, the piece was little more yet than a soundless drawing that resided on his laptop. Meanwhile the drawings had materialized, and four gondolettes were moving small loudspeakers back and forth along a long metal rack with four parallel tracks.

Shortly before the exhibition’s opening, Paul was still busy adjusting the mechanics and lubricating the tracks. Which was necessary to assure an as smooth as possible movement of the little wagons carrying the speakers, so that none of them will get stuck during the four-part linear choreography of the eight minute dynamic city sound scape that comprises the current, first version, of City Chase.

Here’s is a short sound fragment, that I recorded during one of the City Chase‘s test rides early that Saturday afternoon:

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The soundscape of the city of Kortrijk was very loud and very prominent on the day of Sound City’s opening: these were the final days of the yearly Kortrijkse Paasfoor, a mega-fair that could be seen cramming many of the center’s old squares with blinking lights and metallic constructions, some reaching as high as 52 meters. As the afternoon advanced, the sonic excitement of the fair that came drifting across the river Leie to the Buda-eiland continued to grow. The swooshing, shrieking, clanking, beeping and the mingling of up-tempo bumpings of very deep basses of multiple musics, made for a densely ondulating sonic texture that enveloped the city center of Kortrijk throughout the day, and that was pretty difficult to ignore. For, as you will know, one may shut one’s eyes, but it is a pretty tough task to shut one’s ears…

Also on the fifth floor of the Buda-toren, with its marvelous view on the city, it was hard to lock that day’s “sounding city” out, even when the doors and windows were all closed. And given the fact that in City Chase this very same “sounding city” is framed (it is tamed, in a way), the proximity and presence of the Paasfoor‘s wild, unleashed sounds, made it a rather strange experience to hear the recorded city sound fragments of Kortrijk’s City Chase parade before my ears, watching the gondolettes glide back and forth along the bare metal tracks, at times providing past-time echoes of the fair sounds that meanwhile, outside, continued to rage in real-time random force and abundance. It almost felt as if the “sounding city” was taking revenge …

It had me wonder whether City Chase should not be taken away from the city, out to the country side. And then, maybe, there be experienced out in the open? Somewhere up in the mountains, where the real-time soundscape is of an entirely different type?

An essential part of City Chase is the idea of a ‘double movement’ of the recorded sound sources: a first movement while recording, and a second one during playback. But most city sounds are highly complex, and in many cases, indeed, the (multiple) sound sources in the recording are themselves also moving, thus severely testing the limits of our ability to perceive and distinguish the different kinds of movement of the sounds that are involved. I’m curious to find out how, over the coming months, City Chase will evolve, and how the work will sound when, in its upcoming installments, the collection of fragments used in its composition has become larger. The range of the current pallette of Kortrijk sounds struck me as being somewhat too limited for a full appreciation of the idea of the work, and of the ingenious construction that underlies its realization.

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_Pierre Berthet installed the Kortrijk version of his Extended Drops in a former stable of the brewery, just opposite of the Buda-toren. It is a pretty long, but relatively narrow, space, shaped as a simple rectangular box, quite different from the spaces in Berlin and Maastricht, where the previous versions of the work were made. Pierre told me that he actually would have preferred such a simple space to start with, as it makes the setting up and tuning (of, for example, the intricate network of wires) of the installation quite a bit easier. It is maybe one of the reasons why Extended Drops in the long rectangular Kortrijk stable makes for such an impressively balanced, and very spatial sonic experience.

Here is a short impression of how Extended Drops sounded there on the day of the opening:

On the other hand, I also found that the rectangular stable space, enabling one to overlook the entire installation, as it were, in a single glance, made Extended Drops lose some of the visual attraction (and with that some of the mystery) that it had in the Intro in situ space, and in the obscure and almost labyrinthine rooms of the Berlin Singuhr Hörgalerie, a historic waterreservoir in Prenzlauer Berg.

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_Esther Venrooy & Ema Bonifacic’s A Shadow of A Wall, a work that premiered in Maastricht and in Kortrijk’s Sound City has its second rendition, can be found on the third floor of the Buda-toren. The original inclined wall, which is the heart of the installation (a patchwork of differently sized rectangular panels), was adjusted: a part of it had to be removed, in order for it to fit into the space. The decision to do so was a very good one. The low and not too large brick room with its wooden ceiling and floor appears to be near to perfect for the work.

More than in the very bright and white living room type space in Maastricht, here the inclined surface indeed acts as the ‘architectural intervention’ it was intended to be. Whereas in Maastricht the light, whiteness, and the relative small surface, but bigger height, of the room somehow seemed to keep the slope from thoroughly imposing itself, in the Buda-toren it does succeed to transform the space. Also at Intro in situ the slope was an intruder, very much so, yes; but in the Buda-toren the intruder really manages to, be it ever so gently, take control.

Though the work did not give up on any of its introvert serenity, it seemed to have grown up. I found it to be powerfully self-contained, and an easy match for the outside sounds that, from time to time, in intermittent waves, came drifting in through the door, that Esther had left open. On purpose.

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_Following the official opening and reception in the Budascoop, around 17h30, visitors were led on a tour of the four installations. Then, after dinner, there were the evening performances, one by each of the participating artists.

Two of the concerts took place inside the artist’s installation, and two were done on stage, in one of the Budascoop’s concert halls.

The evening program began with a very varied, dynamic – and at times also very loud – duo performance by Esther Venrooy (on electronics & laptop) and a young, and equally versatile, Belgian percussionist: Lander Gyselinck.

We then walked over to the ground floor of the Buda-toren, where Maia asked each member of the audience to take place behind one of the radio’s. It made for an interesting way of experiencing the short, quiet and reflective radioscape that she presented.

Next we moved to the stable, for a performance by Pierre Berthet. Expirateurs et Gouttes is a two-part ‘concerto’. First part for drops, the second for vacuum cleaners. In the manipulation and control of both, Pierre Berthet undeniably is a master. The gradual building up of ever more intricate rhythmic drop patterns, giving way to the forceful swiping of vacuum cleaner tubes, and then onto the grand finale of an ecstatically trumpeting ensemble of Filter Queens, doesn’t cease to intrigue.

For the evening’s final concert, we returned to the Budascoop, where Paul Devens performed his Storm, for live electronics and fieldrecordings, based on John Cage’s Variations VII. At the end of his performance Paul managed to rest sound- and motionless for a very long time, thus forcing all of the audience to hold their breath equally long… until he finally relaxed, and invited applause. It was a forceful and worthy conclusion of a fine evening of music and sound.

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Especially for those who were not there: the following ten-minute audio track is a succession of four short fragments from the evening’s performances:

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_When, after a couple of last drinks, I walked back to the hotel, the Kortrijkse Paasfoor was still going strong. While contemplating all that I had heard and all I had seen that day, I strolled along the Leie and on over the Grote Markt, where I watched with quiet amazement the quite monstrous (but many no less ingenious) machines, that were created to sell mere minutes of adrenaline pumping excitement.
With all windows of my room wide open I fell asleep, listening to the loud, excited and piercing screams of bunches of young fair-goers, that continued to fall from the Kortrijk sky.

Sound is a very funny thing, for I slept like a rose.

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Sound City (Klinkende Stad) is the Resonance exhibition (with sound installations by Pierre Berthet, Esther Venrooy, Paul Devens and Maia Urstad) that is part of the Flanders Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium. The exhibition can be visited on the afternoons of Saturdays and Sundays, between May 7th and May 22nd. Entrance is free. On Saturdays at 15h there are guided tours (participation: €2,-).
On May 18th-20th an international symposium (with performances) is taking place, entitled Listen. Perspectives on Auditive Space, curated by Esther Venrooy. Locations are the Witte Zaal, in Gent (Belgium) on May 18th and 19th, and the Budascoop in Kortrijk (Belgium) on May 20th.

The Human Measure

Paul Devens on essentials, control, dead kittens and sound mapping the city of Kortrijk.

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City Chase is the title of a new Resonance installation produced for the upcoming Festival van Vlaanderen in Kortrijk, Belgium (from May 5th until May 22nd) by Dutch sound artist Paul Devens. I visited Paul in his little white home, a bit outside the center of Maastricht, at the border of the Caberg neighborhood. It was a very sunny day in March. The weather had decided to settle for spring. Paul had just returned to base, after several weeks of travel that took him to the east: to the Estonian city of Tallinn (one of this year’s European Capitals of Culture); and to the west: to Brooklyn, New York. In Tallinn he performed at the radio art festival Radiaator. In Brooklyn, Michael J. Schumacher’s Diapason Gallery showed his Probe, a site specific work developed especially for the exposition space of Diapason. It was on show there in March.

Paul and I have quite a few things common. Both of us were born and raised in the Dutch city of Maastricht. And when we were young, we both were fascinated by the many small wonders of technology that surrounded us. Paul told me how as a kid he used to take radio’s apart, put them back together again, while attempting to find out what would happen if on the way one changes something here or there. I used to be a pretty fanatic young de-constructor as well, with a liking, also for radios and other things electric, but very specifically for mechanical clocks. Contrary to Paul, though, I have little remembrance of ever having succeeded in even approximately putting back together again the collections of loose parts that were the result of my pre-teen deconstructive efforts.
So that then is a difference.
It might explain the fact that eventually I left Maastricth, while Paul stayed.
Which is another difference.
Paul Devens has been living, studying, researching and working in Maastricht until this very day.

“When I entered art school,“ he said, “this technical bricolage gradually became less haphazard. It took on a more focused form. It was also in art school that I became interested in the peculiarities and possibilities of ‘sound’. I embarked upon the artistic research that I pursue until this very day, in which research into ‘the sound itself’ became more and more central. This then led me to create installation pieces, even though I started out as a painter. But already for my graduation work, though, I did installations that make sound.”

Several of Paul Devens’ recent works, such as Panels or Probe, investigate and re-sound specific locations and the corresponding architecture by means of the sound of the space itself, often using audio feedback as sound material. Both also involve meticulously produced and well thought out electro-mechanical devices, that impress by their effectiveness and (apparent) simplicity. Panels, as you may remember, was pretty large, while Probe is relatively small. But both witness Paul’s keen eye for materials and his love for construction, in the broadest sense of the term.

“For ‘Probe’ I asked Michael to send me an architectural drawing of the space where the installation was to be,” Paul explained. “I then used that drawing to make a 3D model of the space in Google SketchUp. As I could not just hop over to Brooklyn to have a look, this virtual model enabled me to get a first feeling for the circumstances as I would find them there. I then had a physical scale model made of the space. The real space has a length of about 20 meters. The model is about 50 centimeters long. It was made in stainless steel. With a waterjet the doors, windows and pillars were cut out, and then bead blasting was used to get a specific surface texture. More than a maquette, I wanted it to emanate a certain functionality. To have it look like a little machine.”

It is also a sculpture.

“Yes, it is a sculpture, of course. A replica of the space. And for the installation at the gallery, I placed this replica of the space inside the space itself. It is partially filled with water, and a probe is moving through the model, like someone erring through the real space. Six spots on the bottom of the model correspond to six fixed loudspeakers in the gallery, and whenever the probe comes near one of the spots, you will hear the sound coming from the corresponding spot in the gallery. You can see how it works in this short video.”

“As you see, the model thus acts as a potentiometer which uses the conductivity properties of the water, for the panning of the sound, its division among the six loudspeakers.”

You once told me that, when it comes to sound and sound art, you see yourself as ‘a purist’: when you create a work for a specific space, you try to reveal the sonic properties, the sound of the space, and its relation to the specific architecture, the materials and the geometry. In doing so, you avoid adding or imposing whatever accessory or incidental sound events in the process.

“Yes. Even though it regularly happens that I am tempted to also consider the esthetics in and by itself as a point of departure, I have until now always managed to restrain myself in that respect. Like in Probe, or in Panels, I work with little else but the Larsen effects of a space, with audio feedback. It is of course true, that the feedback of a microphone placed at a certain distance from a loudspeaker in a room can be rather unpleasant to listen to. So I could make it more agreeable to the ear by adding harmonies, by using techniques like, for example, pitch shifting. But I do not do that, because in the end this is little more than decoration, without conceptual connection to the piece itself. It is possible that this makes some of my works somewhat hermetic. Maybe. But it does assure that everything fits, which I find essential. Because that is how I think I can achieve the broadest possible artistic range. For me this is a necessity, as I want avoid at all cost that a work in the end is little more than a first encounter, a mere gimmick. It should be coherent, in all of its aspects. It is this internal coherence that emanates a strong interrelation and interaction with all that what one sees and what one hears. I want to be very strict about this.”

The work becomes, let’s say: ‘pretty’, because you avoid trying to make it seem prettier than it really is… Does this approach make your work ‘abstract’? Or is it, on the contrary, very ‘concrete’?

“What would you say is ‘abstract’ about it? I often hear people use that term in relation to my work: ‘abstract’. But I don’t know …”

‘Abstract’ maybe in the sense that you keep things bare. The materials are bare, the sounds are bare. You strip it all down to the essentials, and do not add something like a ‘narrative layer’, a ‘story. You see what you see, you hear what you hear…?

“But is that ‘abstract’? Is it ‘concrete’? As far as I see it, there always is a ‘story’. A very clear story, even. An evident one. No, I feel pretty uncomfortable with all of these terms: ‘abstract’, ‘concrete’, ‘figurative’… A work results from a certain conditionality, that is based on a given reality. This conditionality represents the reality, ‘the way that things are’, in a situation that transforms, with and by the work. This enables one to see, to experience, that piece of reality (a given space) in a different manner. In order to achieve this I probably do apply strategies that can be associated with terms like ‘abstract’, ‘concrete’ or whatever; strategies that I put to work depending on their functionality, in certain circumstances, at certain times. In other situations I may find a certain narrative envelope, or social-cultural facts that are related to the place, of utmost importance for the production of a work.”

The installation in Kortrijk also will be different in this respect. Your point of departure is a different type of space.

“Yes. In City Chase it is not so much the given room for the exhibition (which in Kortrijk is the topfloor of the Budatoren) that I take as my point of departure, but the space of the city itself. The idea is to create a ‘city sound scape’ by applying – to use a fashionable term – a mapping technique: I will be mapping the city. The sound material consists in field recordings that I will make in the streets of different parts of Kortrijk at the end of April. I will go to different areas, with different sonic characteristics, and put together a collection of recordings that will constitute a cross-section of the many different sounds that can be heard there: sounds in residential areas, in the more industrial areas, shopping areas, and so on. But I will not record these snippets of the city sound scape by going to different places, then placing myself here and there, put down my digital recorder and then statically record. What I aim for are recordings with a strong dynamic component, in the sense that there is no ‘focus’ to the recording. There is no static, single ‘point of hear’, no fixed spot for the listener. For this, I will record the city while riding on a bicycle.”

Riding the bicycle through the city will by itself already be an impressive & dynamic sonic event. There might be a lot of wind, also… I guess you’ll have to limit your speed…?

“Well, I just got my ‘dead kitten’… I will use a double protection: inside the ‘dead kitten’ there is another windshield. I hope that will do to minimize the noise of the wind in the microphone. I’ll have to see for that. I just received it, so I did not yet try it out. With these recordings I then will compile a library of fragments of the sound of the city.”

“This library of dynamic, unfocused, city sound recordings is the material for a four channel composition. There will be four voices. And each of the voices is linked to the installation, via a computer. The installation itself consists in a long, self-supporting wall, that is now being built, and that I will position within the space in the Budatoren. Along the wall, at a little distance, there is a range of benches that visitors can sit upon and listen. Onto the wall four metal rails have been mounted horizontally. Each of these serves as the track for a little motorized wagon – a little gondola, a ‘gondolette’ – on which a small loudspeaker has been mounted. These gondolettes can move along the full length of the wall, in both directions. Each loudspeaker corresponds to one of the four sound tracks; each is one of the voices. The installation is variable in size. It is conceived in a modular way, put together from a number of identical parts. So I can adapt it to the size of the available space. In Kortrijk I will use the full length; that is about 10 meters. In other spaces it will be possible to use different lenghts, down to 2 meters. And then of course whatever there is in between.”

For next installments of City Chase, like in Bergen or in Maastricht, will you replace the Kortrijk library with another library of sounds, recorded in the corresponding city? Will the sound part be specific to each of the different cities?

“No, I want City Chase to evolve with each subsequent version. It will grow as it goes from town to town. So in each of the next cities that will host the installation, I will not replace the sounds, but add new recordings to the library of sounds.”

And how are the movements of the gondolettes determined? What will make the little speakers move the way they move?

“The gondolettes will move when there is sound on their track; they move as soon as they have a voice. When there is no sound, they don’t move.”

How do they move? What will make them move in the one, rather than in the other direction?

“That will be a matter of choreography. I am going to compose the movements: when a little wagon will move, in which direction it will go, whether it will go fast or go slow… This I will program, so eventually the choreography will be a fixed thing. I really want to determine this, and not leave it up to chance, or some algorithm or other. Because, as I see it, not all movements will be equally good. An algorithm would reduce the choreography to a set of mere mathematical relations. That I do not want. I want to stay in control.”

…

“In the very end, in all of this, it is the human size that matters. The human measure. Are things bigger than you are? Or are they smaller? And these questions in turn, of course, eventually also evoke a relation with ‘power’.
Who is it, that is in charge?”

…

The Festival van Vlaanderen Kortrijk 2011 takes place in Kortrijk, Belgium, between May 5th and 22nd. Sound City (Klinkende Stad) is the title of the Resonance exhibition (with sound installations by Pierre Berthet, Esther Venrooy, Paul Devens and Maia Urstad) that is part of the Festival. The exhibition’s opening (in the Budatoren, Korte Kapucijnenstraat), will take place on Saturday May 7th.

First steps in Kortrijk

The RESONANCE project kicked off on May 1st, 2010, when representatives of the network’s nodes and the first four participating artists came together in Kortrijk (Belgium). During the two day meeting the RESONANCE partners filled in a first version of the project’s timeline and each of the participating organizations – Festival van Vlaanderen Kortrijk (be, the host of the meeting), Intro/In Situ (nl), Singuhr (de), Association Bazar (fr), Lydgalleriet (no) & Skano Mezs (lv) – gave an overview of their activities and how these relate to the project and sound art in general. Also the four artists – Pierre Berthet (be), Esther Venrooy (be), Paul Devens (nl) & Stefan Rummel (de) – introduced themselves and their work, and sketched their plans for an upcoming RESONANCE residency.

The RESONANCE meeting in Kortrijk, very appropriately, coincided with Klinkende Stad. As part of the (Happy New) Flanders Festival, between April 24th and May 9th 2010 Klinkende Stad indeed made of Kortrijk a resounding city: 12 sound art installations by Flemish artists could be discovered and experienced at several different, surprising locations around town.