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what’s up
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UK
whatsupuk@audiomedia.com
The great proportion of British people are a little sniffy
about art and much to the disgust of the purists, it is
no longer just about painting. Photography, video
and sound are now the basis of gallery exhibitions,
interpreting the media in new ways and forms.
This is something that has been happening with
photographs and video screen installations for well
over ten years but more recently audio has become
a means of artistic expression that moves the
medium away from being about music, conventional
composition and tonal construction. The idea goes
back to Italian futurist painter Luigi Russolo's 1913
manifesto Art of Noises, which declared "we must
break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds
and conquer the infinite variety of noise sounds".
This led to Pierre Schaeffer creating musique
concrète, which was then further developed by
Cage, Stockhausen, Varèse, and others, paving
the way for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the
industrial electronica movement of the '70s and
the synth-pop boom of the early '80s. In the last
few years experiments in sound have been staged
The Art Of Sound
KEVIN HILTON explores the growing acceptance of sound as art in the UK and talks to some of the main players .
in galleries, museums and city squares around
the world but the UK has been slow to respond.
That's changing this year, which has seen significant
exhibits based on sound, with more to come.
The unlikely starting point was the sedate south
coast resort of Bexhill in East Sussex. The 1930s
modernist building the De La Warr Pavilion, now
an arts centre and concert venue. From January to
March it hosted an exhibit by composer Michael
Nyman, featuring video filmed over the past 15 years
in various locations, with the segment on bell makers
coming close to musique concrète, and Anthem, an
installation by sculptor, and founder of Audio Arts,
a CD (previously cassette)-based magazine, William
Furlong.
Anthem consisted of 48 box-less loudspeakers
suspended from wires. Recordings made by Furlong
on location at the Pavilion last summer were played
around 24 of the loudspeakers, with visitors and
locals talking about the venue and reflecting on
Bexhill itself. Furlong used his trusty old DAT machine
for the interviews and passed the recordings on to
Sonica Music studios in
south London, which he
has been using for his audio
projects for ten years.
Sonica was founded by
electronics engineer Matt
Clark and he and his brother
Paul have built much of
the equipment they use,
although the ubiquitous
Pro Tools was used to mix
Furlong's interviews. The
studio's main business is
post-production but has
been involved in sound
art for some time. Paul
Clark comments that while
the artist has the concept,
he or she needs someone
who knows what to do
technically to realise it.
Sonica is currently working
with Hilary Champion, a Fine
Arts Masters student at the
University for the Creative
Arts in Farnham, whose
work on war and peace
turns recordings of weapons
into musical instruments.
Sonica's DIY approach
AUDIO MEDIA MAY 2009
echoes the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Former
members of the Workshop are playing live at London's
Roundhouse this month and during August the
venue will be a giant musical instrument for a project
conceived by David Byrne. For Playing the Building:
An Installation, cables and wires will be attached to
pillars, pipes and beams in the Roundhouse, and
then "played" from a keyboard in the UK premiere of
an event staged last year in New York.
Among other events this month are Futuresonic
2009 and the Social Technologies Summit in
Manchester, and Sonic Art at the Blank Gallery
in Portslade, near Brighton. This is curated by Mike
Blow of Evolutionary Art and seeks to "explore
sound in art through recordings, installations, new
instruments and visualizations".
The coming together of sensory information is at
the heart of work by Martyn Ware, a founder member
of The Human League and Heaven 17. Through the
Illustrious Company, which he founded in 2001
with Vince Clarke from Erasure and Yazoo, Ware has
developed the 3D AudioScape spatial surround
sound program, which he has used for the Future of
Sound installations and performances.
In June a Ware-designed installation will be
running in London's Leicester Square, part of
a project to promote the area and help visitors
appreciate it as more than just somewhere to go to
the cinema. Sound Life London features two rings
of six loudspeakers and will characterise the city
through sound – the noise of traffic, the River Thames,
church bells, the speech and languages of Londoners,
material from the National Sound Archive, and songs
about the city. "We asked ourselves that if we were
creating a composition in sound that was indicative
of what London sounded like to someone who had
never been, what would you do," Ware says.
Ware feels the UK has been behind other counties
in embracing sound art but with new media and
technologies the form is finally making itself felt.
"It's been hard to sell, and has been looked down on,
because there's no commercial value to it," he says,
"and has usually been publically funded or done by
students for virtually no money. We are coming out
of that phase, thank God."
For Ware sound art is as much about the
setting, whether in a gallery or a public space, as
it is the technology, with the concept feeding off
the surroundings. With a new found enthusiasm
for something that perhaps only other people and
countries did, perhaps the UK will become one big
sound art installation itself.. �