Part 2

Which tools have been most important and useful for you when it comes to working with and editing sounds?

My tools:

a smart phone with external audio/video recording device (for fast recordings)
a notebook (with drawings, notes and auditory scene analysis)
a pack of chewing gum (creating a plop to illuminate‘ the space)
a laptop with audio software for mixing and mastering

The possibilities of modern production tools have allowed artists to realise ever more refined or extreme sounds. Is there a sound you would personally like to create but haven't been able to yet?

When I think of extreme sounds, Koji Tano aka ‘Molten Salt Breeder Reactor’ aka M.S.B.R., comes to mind.

I recall an unforgettable performance early 2000s. Standing very quietly behind his small table, Tano unleashed a space-saturating mass of harsh, grasping noise. At first I could hardly handle the sound attack and cowered behind the audience in front of me, shielding my ears with hands and professional earplugs to no avail. Because of the insane-making volume and harshness of what was barraging me, I could feel the sounds even in my bones and teeth. This pure and absolute sonic assault felt like an unstoppable avalanche, to the point that most people fled for their lives.

After 10 minutes, I attuned myself to the atonal intensity and slowly began to raise my head to see Tano perform. He seemed perfectly calm, and quietly worked on his machines, without any drama or head banging – as though he were a mechanic dutifully setting about a repair, or anyone other than the sonic terrorist he was. This sonic earthquake did not fill every corner of the space like a liquid would, but was rather a living thing which changed shape, morphing from a stinging nettle into a wall of noise.

As a composer I would be very interested in creating this harsh dense avalanche, and I feel a strong desire to become an alchemist, making an object from sound.

Many artists have related that certain sounds trigger compositional ideas in them or are even a compositional element in their own right. Provided this is the case for you – what, exactly, is about certain sounds that triggers such ideas in you?

I do not envision or hear a composition just by hearing an isolated sound. In composition I am often interested in a sense of perspective. It is not the idea of a sound being nearby or far away, but the experience of a foreground sound or something happening in the background.

There are tones or frequencies that immediately grasp our attention, drawing our ears away from or even masking other sonic events. During the first moments of a sound work we usually perceive a general image. But through attentive listening we can break through the surface, and experience more subtleties, colours, frequencies and tones.

How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?

Music is a performance art based on a ‘horizontal’ concept of time. Time is as viewed as a line, and a composer divides time into parts or blocks, i.e. form. As John Cage famously stated: "the composer (organiser of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time." Cage refers to this concept of music as ‘time-objects’, linear
structures which form a whole with a beginning, middle and an end.

But like Cage I was not so much interested in creating a time-object, a process in time, but in the concept of ‘sound as time’, the idea that music is continuous and listening is intermittent.

Like French/Greek composer Iannis Xenakis and Austrian architect Bernhard Leitner I was interested in the concept of building a sound space. Leitner has consistently developed sound installations as an art form. In his ‘sound space instruments’, the audience is not standing, watching and listening from the outside of the work, as in a concert situation.

The audience can experience the work like a visit to a gallery or museum, by becoming part of the work as a ‘visitor’ as opposed to a ‘viewer’, perceiving the sound not only with the ears, but with the whole body.

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During my doctoral research the process of „reading the space“ became an important part of my practice. Walking through a space for the first time, you become aware of the inherent stillness of the architecture. The only things moving through the space are shadows and light.

I often look at the transitions between rooms, between floor and wall, ceiling and wall, window and door. Besides making (architectural) drawings of the space, and photographs I also listen to the sounds of our footsteps, all the while becoming carefully aware of the rhythm of walking and moving through a space. While walking through the space (touching, smelling, seeing and listening), I am trying to find points of tension, lightness, silence or resistance in a space. We experience architecture from an early age and we subsequently compare buildings and spaces we encounter later in life with these early architectural experiences. The emptiness and silence of the art space gave us time to observe the environment more carefully and make observations, as well as the possibility to reflect on ourselves.

Our ‘dwelling’ might in future lead to an artistic response to the corporeality of a space, but at the moment we enjoy the permanence of absence, light and resonance.

Humans are often characterised as "visual beings". In your opinion, what role does our sense of hearing play in our understanding of the world? How do sounds affect you, compared to other senses like sight or smell?

Sound, like Proust’s famous madeleine, is a fragment of a remembered past, addressing our deep-seated auditory memory and transporting us back to a particular place in time. I hear the sound of boat engines and again I am back in my hometown, but I am not the same.

As an artist working with sound, I have several strategies available to me if I wish to analyse this curious transition: expose the composition of the memory – engine hum, creaking, wind – or reflect on its qualities as a sonic phenomenon. But I choose neither option and instead attune myself to the poetry of the memory: the sound of the boat engines, the creaking and the broken silence of the night. I receive the transmission and let it operate upon me, carrying me off in a different direction.

In my work I am continually trying to reconstruct this experience, this amazement. It’s not a simple act, and one made harder by the fact that it involves carving out a new, emotional function for sound – a human factor – that my discipline does not admit.

The idea of acoustic ecology has drawn a lot of attention to the question of how much we are affected by the sound surrounding us. What's your take on this and on acoustic ecology as a movement in general?  

I have always been interested in new and different approaches to sound and music. I’ve read a lot about the artists in 1960s, who started to create and perform sound works outside of the concert hall, without using musical instruments, instead focusing on sound in its natural form.

Investigations of the relationship between sound and space and our understanding the spatial qualities of sound have been of major interest to American composer Maryanne Amacher. In her series of works ‘City Links’, she would bring the outside sound world into the art space. Since 1967 she created several ‘City Links’, by transmitting in real time sounds from remote urban spaces to an art gallery. Sounds of factories, mills, airports and silos would blend with the gallery sounds.

The German-Canadian composer Hildegard Westerkamp took this approach even further and invited the listener to leave the art space. She developed the concept of ‘soundwalking’. Westerkamp would invite her audience to come on a walk and listen attentively to their surroundings, applying different perceptual strategies. Following the ideas of John Cage and R. Murray Schafer, a new genre emerged: ‘soundscape music’, musical outdoor performances incorporating everyday sounds, such as birds, cars, the wind, etc.

We can listen to a pop song or open our window and simply take in the noises of the environment. Without going into the semantics of 'music vs field recordings', in which way are these experiences different and / or connected, do you feel?

Working in the field of electronic music I started to notice since 2000s a growing number of people referring to themselves as “field recording artists”. Lonely figures schlepping microphones, hydrophones, cables and recording devices to the ends of the world, they defied the heat or cold or even nuclear radiation to “capture” a sound and bring back home a “sonic snapshot” to present to an audience.

Perusing interviews and books, I would often come across these figures pointing a microphone at trees, animals or landscapes. Typically wearing headphones, they would avert their gaze from what they were conceivably recording, and direct it to the ground or hinterland, as though caught in an act of intense audition. When I would meet these same figures in real life,  we would invariably talk about their travels to impossible places, and the technical armoury they carried with them. As an artist without money or means, both were then off-limits to me. Nonetheless I understood that, the more expensive and extensive the microphone, the better the work – that’s sound art’s take on men and their supercars.

Still today field recordists often reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic painting ‘The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’, a focal point of Romantic culture. Like Friedrich’s young mountain-scaling visionary, the image of the “man with the microphone” (less likely to be sporting a tailcoat than trainers) concerns a silent observer attuned to nature: simultaneously mastering the landscape, while recognising his own insignificance within it. Standing in a blizzard with a set of microphones turns out to be a 19th century power play – presumably with the intended effect that we marvel at the subject’s heroics, documenting the extraordinary at the moment of its perception.

And yet, watching a field recordist at work, we have no idea what they are hearing, only coming to know it in the sonic “after-image” of concert or record.

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

Sounding things out isn’t always so forlorn a task. In some instances you are rewarded with beautiful coincidences.

Once, out walking in a forest in central Morocco, I had a creeping sensation that something was happening, something that I at some level recognised, and at once cried: “Stop!” Excitedly I pressed the button – and then nothing, only birds. I was about to end the farce when far, far away I suddenly heard somebody singing, and then the sound ceased as abruptly as it had wafted in. Almost like I had captured a phantom singing on the recording.

But the phantom, as I realised when I played the recording back, was me: I had said nothing at all throughout the event.