Soundscripts Vol. 2 : Proceedings of the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference. Available from The Australian Music Centre.

1.  Editorial: Cat Hope -The Nth Art: The State of the Sonic Image at the 2007 Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference 

2.  Keynote 1: Philip Brophy - Pseudo Soundtracks: The myth of inventive audiovision in contemporary cinema 

3.  Keynote 2: Jonathan W. Marshall  - Freezing the Music and Fetishising the Subject: The audiovisual dramaturgy of Michel van der Aa 

4.  Paul Thomas  - Audionano—Vibrating Matter 

5.  Bruce Mowson  - Being Within Sound: Immanence and listening 

6.  Clare Nina Norelli  - Suburban Dread: The music of Angelo Badalamenti in the films of David Lynch 

7.  Darren Jorgenson - The Marvellous Surrealism of Nurse With Wound and The Sylvie and Babs Hi-Fi Companion 

8.  Christoph Herndler –  Im Schnitt, der Punkt [At Interface, the Point] (2003) 

9.  Jonathan W. Marshall  - Flatness, Ornamentality and the Sonic Image: Puncturing flânerie and postcolonial memorialisation  in the work of David Chesworth and Sonia Leber 

10.  Cat Hope  - The Bottom End of Cinema: Low frequency effects in soundtrack composition 

11.  Patrick Shepherd  - From Ice to Music: The challenges of translating the sights and sounds of Antarctica into music 

12.  Ross Bolleter  -  The Well Weathered Piano: A study in ruin

Kats-Chernin says that she is “grateful I’m born now and I’ve got all this other music before me that I can ‘grab’ or ‘borrow’ from.” Hence she feels that in a way she just soaks up influences and then reformulates them in her own compositions. The omnipresence of various musical influences can however at times seem “almost like a nightmare. I don’t do it consciously, but every composer over the centuries has picked up on other people’s music and that which has come prior to them – because you can’t get away from it. It’s like a picture you’ve got in your head that you can’t get rid of. I’m not the only one who has that problem, but I see that as enriching – it’s not a problem!” Kats-Chernin’s work may therefore perhaps be seen as part of a trend within Classical and popular music where musicians quote, sample and reinterpret other forms within a new context. In such compositions, music almost becomes a type of self-conscious historical montage – and Kats-Chernin agrees that Matricide had an episodic, non-narrative style which made it akin to a form of “operatic collage”.

Kats-Chernin does not however feel that she herself is part of this current musical movement. Since coming to Australia fourteen years ago, she has been flat out composing. She does not therefore have time to listen to much contemporary music. “That would mean not writing five pages that I have to do every day,” she pragmatically observes. Consequently any ‘trend’ that she may or may not be a part of is not a product of her conscious interaction with figures such as fellow Chamber Made composer David Chesworth (whose latest C.D. reworks the music from Terence Malick’s film Badlands, which in turn reinterpreted Carl Orff’s compositions for schoolchildren).

The presence of various registers and references in Kats-Chernin’s music is therefore in her mind simply the result of what it is to be a composer in today’s world. “All my music has always been described as very eclectic. I hear something and it goes right into me and it comes out somewhere – I don’t know where! It’s a mixture of modern with old: it has some somewhat dissonant clashes, some unusual sounds and it’s very rhythmical. There are [classic-style] tunes but then they also collide with other feelings.”

Kats-Chernin is however most adamant regarding any comparison of her technique to actual sampling or quotation. “I don’t ‘borrow’,” she asserts. In taking themes from other composers, works and musical styles, Kats-Chernin significantly remodulates them – particularly with respect to the tempo. “I usually speed it up so that it becomes my own. It’s kind of my leitmotif. I don’t write complicated rhythms; mine are very direct. I speed it up inside and make it a bit more complex, but I like to have a basic rhythm.” Her compositions therefore often take 4/4 patterns and then double these with underlying internal sections, or layers, which are faster. Consequently her work cultivates a sense of both harmony and dissonance.

Given the dramatic modulations of style and feeling that Kats-Chernin’s work evokes, it comes as no surprise that she has worked in music theatre. Questions of plot and emotional journey are therefore central to her approach to musical composition in this field. Iphis if anything demonstrates this more clearly than Matricide, since Kats-Chernin chose the subject of this work herself, whereas Matricide was an already formulated project which she was commissioned to write. “What I do is try and find the right means to transfer this particular sentence into music,” she explains, “in a particular way that this particular character will say at this moment. So it comes out of the situation, and if I feel that this would be the right way to transport that idea then that’s how I do it. So I will use any style – I don’t care! It comes naturally. But I don’t go ahead and say: ‘I will try now the style of Baroque and I will collide it with the style of Schoenberg.’” It is the expression of the gender-bending sexuality at the heart the story of Iphis that Kats-Chernin is first and foremost interested in.

The article above was first published in “IN Press Magazine” (Melbourne: 1999).

Marshall wrote on music, sound, the avant-garde and performance at “IN Press” from 1995-2005. Sadly, “IN Press” back issues are only available in a handful of libraries today (notably the State Library of Victoria) and no proper indexing has been conducted. Nevertheless, a survey of the arts pages (“Interval”) offers an excellent gloss on the diversity of Melbourne performance culture throughout these years. During this time, Marshall interviewed such artists as Kats-Chernin, David Chesworth, Phillip Brophy, Darren Verhagen, Francois Tetaz, Dr John a.k.a. Mac Rebennack (whose name Marshall is now delighted to share!) and others, as well as composing multiple reviews.

Marshall’s articles for “RealTime Australia” are however readily available via the online archive of that publication as well as being held at most Australian libraries. Please contact the author should you require more information on Marshall’s previous criticism.

The way in which contemporary travel contains spatial complexity and variation has been allied to both utopic and distopian conceptions of global economics. On the one hand, the spatial universalism and lack of fixity of non-places like the super-highway offer a sense of freedom, of the transcendence of spatial, economic and psychological restrictions. This McLuhan-esque vision is expressed such popular works as “Around the World” by French house group Daft Punk. The cheesy mantra of the title is repeated endlessly as though the global transmission of its radically de-territorialised sounds, devoid of acoustic or cultural specificity, offers a positive end in itself. Sound travels around the world through the non-place of the modern night-club, a far cry from the fiercely territorial, marginal black and gay venues from which disco and house first emerged. Space, video and sound are not however as free as the experience of the WASP consumer or bourgeois backpacker might suggest—“as the many Rodney Kings of the world will tell you,” Samuel Collins points out.

The contemporary experience of travel, the non-place, global capitalism and “Super-Modernist” architecture (the same efficient 7 Eleven blueprint deployed in old Paris or modern Johannesburg) are based on an indifference to spatio-cultural complexity and difference. The construction of the non-place facilitates the ‘free’ exchange of goods—individuals, passengers, culture and capital—across boundaries in ways that benefit some more than others. The ubiquitous use of looped pygmy vocals for example—popularized by World Music group Deep Forest as a strategy for the representation of Rosseau-esque ideals of ‘ancient primitive wisdom’—has had little if any positive consequences for those sampled and disseminated in the realm of ‘free’ musical exchange. In the context of this metaphoric (and sometimes literal) strip-mining of cultural capital from the margins of global power, the re-territorialisation of space, sound and the bodies that move through them takes on political significance. Sound and the architecture of the body act as sites for the dramatization and contestation of global commodity exchange.

The work of Franco-British electro duo Battery Operated (Chases Through Non-Place and Vecuum) offers an example of these practices. Their music draws upon the history of music in the workplace, commerce and architectural theory, leading them to describe their acerbic, grating funneling scores as “inverse-muzak.” Unlike the acoustically ‘pure’ sounds of house music (and French house in particular) Battery Operated explore the simulation and deformation of acoustic space. This is not the clean, abstract electro sound of Brian Eno’s Music For Airports or Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express, but the mulched, muddied, screaming tones of contemporary electro-acoustics. The only ‘space’ that one imagines to accommodate “Around the World” is that of the anonymous club or the video’s flat images of equally anonymous bodies moving in unison to the global beat. The extruded noises of Battery Operated though create a complex virtual geography defined by linkages across realms, and squashed bleed-throughs from one acoustic space to the next, of environments varying from the oppressively dense, shattering overload of the distopian city, to abstract yet disquieting non-places characterized by dispersed, uneven muzak.

Battery Operated deploy the metaphor of “the chase” to describe these spatio-sonic deformations. The intermittent drum’n’bass beat establishes a musical pattern which metaphorically charges and stumbles through the score, pursued and opposed by other sonic textures but never fully arrested by them. This is not the idealized vision of travel as facilitated by the non-place, but rather a representation of the sonic violence that such a conception entails. For space to collapse into the familiarity of the universalized non-place, other sounds must be hammered out of one’s consciousness. The listener must succumb to the desire of the muzak programmer and fail to notice the variations and localized characteristics of the realms one moves through. Battery Operated encourage the listener to cease to simply be seduced or distracted, and to listen carefully for the patois of the supermarket patrons or the sounds of an ocean storm upon the roof—to ‘say no to muzak’ as the dominant sonic presence within social, spatial and acoustic environments.

Battery Operated’s net site (www.batteryoperated.net) provides a critical gloss on these sonic interventions in global transit and how this translates to musical tropes like the intermittent beat. The oppositional qualities of the rather different aesthetics of drum’n’bass, hip-hop and Afro-American music are invoked in this context to justify a political reading of the otherwise chaotic sounds produced by Battery Operated. While this has a certain merit for those who catch the references, it fails to account for the most striking aspect of Battery Operated’s strategies—namely the deployment of noise.

The manipulation and invocation of musicological history and its elements makes up the language of music. Sound on the other hand is pre-linguistic. Isolated sonic events devoid of context, place or musical order have no inherent meaning in and of themselves. Noise therefore has the potential to act as a pre-linguistic babble, an amorphous onomatopoeic jumble similar to the speech of babies. When realized through a powerful sound system such as Battery Operated used in their Melbourne concert (May, 2001), this has the potential to disrupt not only the global implications of muzak, but musical logic itself, generating a sonic assault so strong as constitute raw anti-meaning. Only such a radical challenge to sono-musical structures can come close to hinting at the immeasurable variation of space, time, geography and culture that travel negotiates. It is not therefore at the level of music that Battery Operated most forcefully contest the ideal of the non-place, but rather at that of sound itself.

The aim of muzak is to marginalise noise, the uncontrolled, that which has the potential to divert the individual from such acts as shopping in the mall, work in the office, or indifference in the train carriage. To return noise to the act of social movement and travel is to break down the walls of the non-place and let the full, illimitable potential of cultural difference, space and politics into one’s consciousness. Once one has become aware of the hiss in the headphones, the idealized acoustics of FM transmission can no longer hide the other sounds and sensations emanating from both inside and outside of the aircraft. To take off one’s headphones and listen to the jet-stream takes on a political content here, announcing the individual’s refusal to go with the disinterested flow which is facilitated by the non-place and the vectors it houses.

If a refusal to ‘go with the flow’ of global economics and its sonic manifestations constitutes an act of resistance, then Melbourne-based theatre company Not Yet It’s Difficult offers a somatic version of these strategies (http://www.notyet.com.au/). NYID work with the forms of space sustained and endured by the body. Director David Pledger’s physical explorations may be thought of as an ‘acoustics of the body.’ Just as sounds bounce off hard surfaces or are deflected by softer ones, causing noises to inhabit each space in a characteristic way, so the sensorium of the body is affected by the materials about it. It is no accident that Pledger has been using the scores of Japanese minimalist Ryoji Ikeda for recent performances. The rhythms of the body are highlighted, its contingent features and responses are dramatized and manipulated.

 Pledger too uses the metaphor of the chase to explore the potentially oppressive effects of social and cultural space. NYID’s most recent work Scenes of the Beginning From the End (March, 2001) began with the choreographed flight of the performers from the startling, red emptiness of the desert environment near Lake Eyre projected behind them, into another apparently uniform space—the ‘cultural desert’ of Australian suburbia. In the literal desert a certain abstract poetry possessed the body, a potential openness which was nevertheless threatening for these urban subjects (black or otherwise). As they charged down the road however an even more disturbing threat became manifest, the hyper-mobility of urban spaces and highways, an excess of roads, signposts, vehicles and urgency. The bodies quaked and gestured in response. Little wonder then that so many Australians come to rest in the suburbs, a region characterized by a quiescence and seeming sameness which enables one to escape both the threat of empty space and the overabundance of urban space. Though the suburb does not promote flow or movement in a significant fashion, perhaps its appeal lies in it being the ultimate non-space of contemporary Australian experience.Â

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September 11 witnessed a brutal caesura in the non-place of contemporary aero-travel and Western capitalism. The sonically standardised models offered by the non-place and traditional muzak were however quickly marshalled to fill the void. The World Trade Centre attack has been endlessly rehearsed and discussed as an event without precedent, as though multilingual murmurs and screams have not been incessantly emerging from American cities, the Middle East and elsewhere. The Bush administration has attempted to cover this gap in public historical consciousness, this interruption in the flow of capital, sound and lives, with national anthems and allegedly unanimous, orchestrated soundings of support for the state-sponsored terrorism proposed as a just response to the crime. Sonic strategies have ranged from Congressional applause to pop music benefits, or disturbingly uniform reportage endlessly repeating the same dialogue. Images of the towers, shot from every angle, have been widely distributed and transformed into a newly standardised iconography of 21st century Western tragedy. Yet few of the original recordings were accompanied by sounds. Where sound was included, it was that of the spectator reacting—not that of the event itself. Despite governments and commentators attempting to provide a soundtrack to this disaster, the attack continues to lie at the boundary of human comprehension precisely because no sound can match it (TV news’ saccharine string scores notwithstanding). Here at least the sonic non-place has yet to become established and we have space to reflect and mourn. Perhaps it is time to listen to the clash of languages emanating from regions such as Afghanistan, Palestine and elsewhere, rather than forcing these voices back to the sono-political margins by blithely returning the headphones to our ears.

The article above originally appeared in the journal “Umelec International,” 5.6 (2002), Czech Republic & an edited version was republished on the liner notes for the reissue of Battery Operated’s “Chases Through Non-Place” (COCOSOL1C1T1: 2002).