sound and story: what comes before

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Just saw, in Vienna, two very different projects commenting obliquely on the desire for immersion in a distant time or place - both the appeal and the power of sound to provide a momentary forgetfulness of its impossibility.

One, RAW, by Stephan Agamanolis, Joelle Bitton, and Matthew Karau uses still photographs from a digital camera accompanied by a minute of sound recorded from before and after the shutter clicks closed. Rather than being the primary referent, the still image becomes something like punctuation to the sounds - ambient or narrative - that establish the particularity of that recorded moment. The sound complements the image, rather than merely annotating it. The images and sound - from Mali and Paris especially - are raw - and beautiful in their conviction that the beauty of everyday life continues around and between the moments when we're recording it.

The second project I saw right before I was due to leave Vienna - Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, a sound installation in a shabby, dusty hall at the back of an art school.

Her own website describes it best:

Janet Cardiff’s new large scale work, Forty Part Motet, is based around the music Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis, and is a sculpturally-conceived sound piece, in which forty separately-recorded voices are played back through forty speakers.
Janet Cardiff’s work combines sound, movement and environment; the viewer/listener often proactively moves through the space activating sounds and unfolding narratives. Forty Part Motet allows the audience to experience sound from the viewpoint of the choir by physically involving them in the piece. When listening to live music the traditional position is to be at the front, looking on. In Forty Part Motet each speaker unit becomes a mouth; the audience unravels the composition by intimately moving amongst the speakers and hearing harmonies change as if singers were standing next to them. It allows sound to be heard as a changing construct, to be interpreted quite differently, to be carefully considered in a sculptural way.

I walked into the large, shabby room - very dark after the bright noon sun outside. It seemed inordinately dusty and echoing, the room - more like an abandoned ballroom or empty church than an art school gallery. There were 40 speakers in a wide circle in the middle, and each was singing in its own voice. I walked around the circle for a long time, putting my cheek so close to the speaker that I could hear each singer's minute gasps for breath in full song, and even the quality of their silences between words. Then the song ended. There was a brief pause, and then we could hear the singers begin again from the beginning - the real beginning, before the motet started, when they were all just ordinary people having ordinary conversations in a recording studio in England, sometime in the past.

I don't know what I felt there in the large empty room; I do know that there was something important in starting the piece before the "performance" officially began - something important in insisting that the almost over-the-top romanticism of the empty gallery filled with classically trained voices be compared with the intense everydayness of the moments before they began to sing, and we began to listen.

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