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<strong>Haroon</strong> <strong>Mirza</strong>S c u l p t o r ? C o m p o s e r ? B o t h ?N e i t h e r ? B r i t i s h a r t i s tH a r o o n M i r z a f u s e ss o u n d a n d i n s t a l l a t i o n i n t oi n d i v i s i b l e w h o l e s a n d – a ta t i m e w h e n e a c h n e wm u s i c a l w o r k s e e m s n o m o r et h a n a d r o p o f w a t e r i n a no c e a n o f d o w n l o a d s –r e d e e m s t h e s p e c i f i c i t y o fi n d i v i d u a l m u s i c a l p i e c e sb y e x p l o r i n g t h e i r p h y s i c a lt r a c e a s s c u l p t u r a l w o r k s o fa r t . B u t d o e s t h a t l e a v e u sw i t h s o m e t h i n g n e w o rm e r e l y e x p o s e t h e t w i nd e f i c i e n c i e s o f m u s i c a n dp u r e l y v i s u a l w o r k s o f a r t ?-w o r d s : M a r t i n H e r b e r t68 ArtReview
<strong>Haroon</strong> <strong>Mirza</strong>over the past few decades, Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in Dmajor has served as the melodic reference point for all kinds ofleft-field musical moves. When Brian Eno copyrighted ambientmusic with Discreet Music (1975), there was the Canon –subjected to whispery algorithmic permutations that rendered italmost unrecognisable. When the 1984 film Electric Dreams calledfor a duet between a cellist and Edgar the sentient computer,there was the Canon, 8-bit bleeps and all. Needless to say, there’sa Korean hip-hop version, too. Even so, it’s arguable that no onehas dismantled and rebuilt Pachelbel’s beatific baroquecomposition more dramatically than <strong>Haroon</strong> <strong>Mirza</strong>. Others havemade music out of the 300-year-old tune; the thirty-three-yearoldEnglish artist also turned it into sculpture.Improvised into shape while <strong>Mirza</strong> was enrolled on a designMA at Goldsmiths (after first training as a painter and thenmaking looped animations and photographs of seascapes thatexplored a kind of digital photorealism), Canon Remix (2006) sitscasually on the floor, a tangle of cables and ingeniously hackedand tweaked everyday objects. A semideconstructed Discman,containing a CD in which the artist has separated the openingnotes of the Canon onto individual tracks, rests precipitously onthe lip of a black bucket of water that’s being bombardedcontinually with ultrasonic vibrations. The switching device for theportable CD player’s skip function dangles into the effervescingliquid, whose movement shuffles the tracks randomly; the resultantfragmented version of Pachelbel is percussively augmented,meanwhile, by other soundmaking “bits and bobs” (in <strong>Mirza</strong>’swords), including an exposed, upturned, thrumming loudspeakercontaining a rattling handful of coins.Here, the optical and auditory are inextricable within aclosed loop of pure functionalism: Canon Remix sounds how itdoes because of how it looks, and it looks that way in order tocreate those sounds. “In a way, I wasn’t thinking about these worksas artworks”, says <strong>Mirza</strong>, sipping tea in his austere live/work piedà-terrein East London, a perk of a fellowship (his other, busierstudio is in Sheffield). “They were prototypes for things you mightwant in your house; instead of a hi-fi system, you’d have this thingfor one piece of music. Music is so accessible now; you candownload anything you like, but you’re so far removed from howthe thing was created. With my work, I very rarely record thesound separately: you have to be there to hear it.” What mightseem a retrograde idea in an age of instant downloads is, rather, aformula for a different kind of connectedness.From this breakthrough point, <strong>Mirza</strong>’s aesthetic – andconceptualising – would quickly expand, via audiovisualcompositions often using items sourced from the artist’s thenlocalmarket in Deptford, South London. (The interest inobsolescence they suggested was an upshot of pure pragmatism,he says: the outmoded tends to be inexpensive.) So thecontinuous overlapping metronomic pulses of Open (2007)apparently derive from the electromagnetic interference betweenthe work’s combination of a landline telephone, an LED sign and astring of coloured fairy lights. “Most of my music is the sound ofelectricity”, notes <strong>Mirza</strong>. Elsewhere, he’d create miniature abstractconcertos of clicks, pops and hums from the tetchy interaction offlashing lights, loudspeakers and the extended aerial of a radiospinning on a turntable and passing near a dangling illuminatedlightbulb (as in various versions of Sanctuary, 2009), or forge abeat from a run-off groove’s intractable clunk. In each work, thedispersion of objects resolves into visual order when we see whatit ‘does’, and the sound it makes resolves in turn, however briefly,into stutteringly syncopated musicality – reflecting modernistcomposer Edgard Varèse’s dictum that ‘music is organised sound’.What we realise amid these flickeringly resolved works isthat, first of all – and unexpectedly – there isn’t a comfortablecategory for such an interstitial art-into-music position. Historicallythe crossover between art and music, from Luigi Russolo’s futuristnoisemaking machines, or Intonarumori, to the works of JohnCage and Max Neuhaus, has been occasioned almost entirely bymusicians and composers encroaching on the visual. <strong>Mirza</strong> iscoming from the opposite direction and bringing a differentaudience with him. This could easily reduce to a bit of formalistterritory-claiming. Instead, in a number of cases, his works becomeroomy containers for stacked inferences.The installation Adhãn (2009), for example, whose titlecomes from the Islamic call to prayer, is a multisection confab ofthe old and new (video projections, noisemaking used furnituretriggered in part by a transparent cube containing condensingwater). Its delicate interplay of clacks, guitar strums and cello isdominated by its video elements: a looped clip of Cat Stevensplaying the introduction to a song in 1971, and a cellist performinga transcription of the Islamic muezzin call. “Cat Stevens – who I’dtried and failed to interview before making this piece – gave upmusic for Islam”, says <strong>Mirza</strong>. “There are schools of thought in Islamthat see music as bad, as encouraging dancing, which encouragessex. I wanted to point towards this contradiction in the faith: musicis embedded in Islam – in the muezzin call, even in the rhythm andmusic of everyday actions.” Previous commentators on <strong>Mirza</strong>’swork have hitched his own religious upbringing to his interest incoordinating sound, seeing the latter as an allegorical plotting oforder onto chaos. “It’s obvious in a way. But I wouldn’t say it’sconscious. Quite early on, I rejected not just Islam but religious70 ArtReview