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

A WORD FROM THE CURATOR

The following is the catalogue entry composed to accompany a screening of dance film organised by Edith Cowan University in association with Artrage Perth, entitled “Body Cuts”, Cinema Paradiso, 5 Nov 2006. See www.artrage.com.au for details (under Reel Dance).

In 1910, a coalition of painters from the Italian Futurist movement declared that the new art forms of cinema and stop-motion photography were those most in keeping with the modern world. Surrounded by cars, trains and later airplanes and telephones, the Futurists saw their world as one dominated by speed, by movement, and by the endless replacement of one image by another in a chaotic procession which Filippo Marinetti labelled “body madness.” Treating machines and humans alike as subjects for their representations, they proclaimed:

Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears … moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

The Futurists themselves had little direct influence upon film or dance until the 1950s, when their work was rediscovered by the artists in the Fluxus movement and by key figures in postmodern dance and music such as choreographers Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown, composer John Cage, and video artist Nam Jun Paik. Nevertheless, the Futurists’ championing of film for the creation of a kind of emotive “dynamism” in which both bodies and objects danced upon the screen as equals, accompanied by crashing, metallic noises and fervid symphonic explosions, was prescient. From the music videos of Chris Cunningham (Aphex Twin’s Come To Daddy) through to Japanese anime (Akira, Ghost in the Shell), the films of David Cronenberg (Crash) or Matthew Barney (Cremaster), such modes of presenting bodies and objects have become commonplace in contemporary cinema and the visual arts.

As a performing art, however, dance is often strongly invested in notions of live “presence”—in the idea that one must be in close, sympathetic proximity to the embodied dancer to fully appreciate the work. When translated to film, this dancerly model may nevertheless create a visceral sense of physicality akin to that of Futurism or Fluxus. As in the work of Brown, DV8, or in Claudia Alessi’s films in this program, such an approach tends to emphasise the weight, texture, malleability and sensation of flesh. The body is examined in close-up, with pans and cuts across fragments of skin making up much of the montage. The body comes to feel highly “material” in these films, like the thickly painted surface of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, or the tough, glossy skeins of industrial sculpture. Such dance films also recall horror and action cinema in their attention to a body which endures being beaten, flattened, thumped, stretched and thwacked. When watching such films, one feels one could touch the body, leaving an imprint like the boot-tread on Alessi’s shoulder in Wandering.

Indeed, throughout its history, dance has been likened to sculpture. In 1921, a reviewer described one of Loïe Fuller’s films as an exemplar of “the art of moving plastique”—that is to say a performance which revealed the almost clay-like malleability of the body as it moved through space. Fuller was famous for her technique of manipulating long, serpentine extensions of her dress such that they were caught by her intricately designed light-shows and cinematic projections, transforming her dance into a display of dynamic forms and colors which whirled about the ever moving central point of her otherwise concealed body. Although a pioneer of modern dance, Fuller’s performances were as much about the creation of a vocabulary of shape and color akin to a moving, abstract painting, as they were specifically “dance” performances per se. As the critic observed, Fuller had:

constructed a film with almost no literary compromises, one in which the rhythmic movement of the characters and the skilful play of light and shadow suffices to create the expression and impart the emotion.

This short history of dance’s relation to the other arts reminds one that dance has never operated in the absence of influences from the other arts, including those from film, photography and projection. From the time of its invention as a technique to analyse movement in the 1890s, film has always been concerned with the body and its rhythms. Nor can the description and representation of the body on film be separated from principles of montage, image or sculpture. If dance represents a kind of dynamic living sculpture which pulsates and surges with different tempos and rhythms, then it is hard to see why the movement of a human body across the screen is any more a kind of “dance” than is a similar on-screen animation of the color or form of an otherwise inanimate object, such as the ice-cream we see in James Teackle’s film within this program.

With the rise in cinematic dance as a recognised art form supported by international film festivals like Reel Dance, it is perhaps time to reassess the history of both dance and film, and to see to what extent, and in what ways, the category “dance film” is really a useful one. This is especially pressing given that all forms of cinema—by definition—involve the editing of image and sound so as to create a kind of choreography via a dynamic display of forms and noise.

The program you see this afternoon is designed to recast the dance/film dichotomy, to suggest that all film is a form of “dance,” and that perhaps the best dance films are not those made to recast a live choreographic form as cinema, but rather simply good films. Such an approach to dance film would have as its canon not only great pieces of filmed choreography such as those from Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Robert Helpmann, but also the work of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Chan, Hype Williams (the music videos of Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot and others), Dziga Vertov (Man With a Movie Camera), Jean Cocteau (Blood of a Poet), Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), Jacques Tati (Playtime), Martin Scorsese (Raging Bull), the Wachowski brothers (Matrix), Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin), and others.

—Dr Jonathan Marshall,WA Academy of Performing Arts / “RealTime Australia”

Introduction: 

Paco Peña at first seems an unlikely figure to be an international star. But it is this slight, softly spoken man who has wowed audiences all across the world with his masterful interpretation of flamenco guitar. In 1981 Peña established the Centro Flamenco Paco Peña in Cordoba, now the world’s leading flamenco school and he has taken the art form into new environments with a touring show which incorporates passionate, frenetic dancing, haunting vocals and virtuosic guitar.

Even though Peña is the artistic director and lead guitarist of the company, he often remains almost invisible on stage. I remember that it was not until half-way through his last Melbourne show that I realised that the demure man in black was the maestro himself. He allows considerable space within the show for the other members of the company to strut their stuff, supporting their solos and smiling to himself at the effects produced.

Peña’s mastery lies not only in how he orders the components of the production, but also in his selection of personnel. Most of the company members are drawn from the Centro Flamenco and have been performing with Peña for several years, including the awesomely focused dancer Charo Espino and the fabulous gypsy guitarists, the Losada brothers.

In remodelling flamenco from its origins in Southern Spanish festivals, gypsy celebrations and the cafes of Andalusia, Peña has proven himself to be keen further the tradition into new areas. Nevertheless, he does not wish to lose the “depth” of flamenco with trendy experimentation. He certainly has no trouble convincing others of the quality of his work, having admirers in John Williams, Paco de Lucia, Mario Maya and B.B. King, amongst others.

After talking to Peña and watching his shows one comes away feeling that he sees himself more as a craftsman than as an artist as such. Peña is keen to assert that flamenco is part of his life, a vital part which he wants to share with the world. He does not seem to think that his skills are in themselves anything special, they are merely things that he does extremely well. Like the work of a goldsmith, the writing, composition, direction and performance of flamenco is Peña’s task in life. Although this approach is disconcerting for those accustomed to swaggering, arrogant musicians, for me it is perhaps the most appealing aspect of flamenco. Listening to Peña is like having a discussion with a polite dinner guest and when watching his shows, one can fly across the footlights and be carried away by the aesthetic and emotional display on offer. As Peña says, feelings that flamenco engenders “belong to the world.”

Interview: 

So how do you find living in Cordoba, right in the heart of flamenco?

Oh, well it’s nice. You know if there is a culture from here, music from here, then even if you don’t hear the music, just living here you sense it and it’s nice to be here—it’s inspiring. Anyway, it’s beautiful, so I like it.

You divide your time between Cordoba and London, don’t you?

Yes, I have a place in London. Mostly I’m travelling but when I return from travelling London is the centre that I go to rather than Cordoba. It’s more convenient to be connected with everything from London. But when I’m not travelling then I’m here [in Cordoba].

Do you think of flamenco as more of a Spanish form, centred in Cordoba, or as an Andalucian form, in your mind?

Well it is a historical fact that flamenco comes from a pocket of the world that is in Andalucia, in a small part of Andalucia. So you can’t argue with that; it is a fact. Many elements have made that possible, many different ingredients [over] a long time in history have coincided here and for that reason this music has happened in Andalucia. However your question is interesting because it has become more and more widespread in other parts of Spain. It is from here, but it is also certainly accepted and even more than that, a lot of people are engaging in it in other parts of Spain: Madrid, Barcelona, other parts of central Spain, or Estremadora, which is close to Portugal, so there are pockets of flamenco everywhere. But that has happened later—it comes from Andalucia.

I suppose what I’m alluding to is based on a comment a Melbourne-based flamenco choreographer [Charito Saldaña] made recently when she argued that Lorca’s idea of what it is to be Spanish—in particular his concept of duende [described by Saldaña as a dark passion like the taste of blood at the back of the throat]—is essential for flamenco.[2] Would you agree with that conclusion?

There is something very true in that statement… I think it’s not only that, but the fact is that it is a music that, for good or bad, it has happened amongst a society in southern Spain that has been extreme in many ways, it has suffered a lot of discrimination, a lot of turmoil, it has also been a very creative society.[3] There’s been a great deal going on here in this pocket near the Mediterranean and the people here have always been passionate and expressive … cutting in their sincerity, in the way they do things, and so perhaps flamenco is an inevitable result of people being that way. It is [therefore] fair to conclude that the music requires those qualities. However, I think having said that, I would also add that duende or whatever it is that is the peak of achievement and communication doesn’t happen only in flamenco, it happens with other artistic manifestations, which can be Bach, or can be in other societies. Music is too big a subject and emotion is too big a subject to monopolise it in one area like flamenco. It would be pretentious for me to say that. I think duende belongs to you as much as it belongs to me and when it appears, you possess that quality of enjoyment equally as I possess it when I enjoy it and produce it. It’s a big subject and it belongs to the world.

Do you think that the ability of flamenco to express those kind of emotions with a certain clarity is part of what gives flamenco its appeal to the rest of the world?

I think so; you are absolutely right. This music has retained this clarity and sincerity in a way that perhaps many other things in Western civilisation have forgotten. It still has that and people respond to it very strongly.

Your performances take flamenco to new audiences and new locations. Do you find however that in putting flamenco in a theatre you can lose some of the aspects of flamenco we have just been talking about?

I accept the compromise. I don’t knock the fact that you have to be on a stage. I think that in many ways all kinds of music and all kinds of presentations on a stage are a compromise. Simply to raise a spot-light and to have other people just sitting and watching and not participating in some way is a compromise continuously. I accept it though in flamenco and I have grown up with that. I think there is so much you can do [on stage] nevertheless. I mean what I do on the stage fundamentally is to please myself—and I hope I don’t give you the wrong impression—I mean I have to convince myself of being good. I have to be honest to myself on the stage and convince myself on the stage with whatever I am doing and then I’m sure that that will project to the audience and convince them.

Your shows generally involve singers and dancers as well as yourself and other guitarists. Do you direct all of these elements or do you allow your fellow performers to mostly control these other elements, or does it involve more to-ing and fro-ing between you and the other performers?

I think it is all of those things. Certainly I direct it because it is my show and my ideas are the ones that I want to project. But again it would be pretentious to imagine that it is just me. I have a bunch of very talented people with me and I tap their ideas as much as mine, so we collaborate altogether to create—if you like—the animal. Of course initially I have the ideas but they can change as we go along. I’m not a dancer, but I know what I want from the dancers—but they are the dancers, so they can contribute something more perhaps than I have. I accept those things. We all make it.

I understand you have an Australian dancer in the company?

Oh yes, a long time ago there was a girl who had been in Madrid for many years and she originally came from Australia. She was very good and pretty so I included her in the group… That’s a long time ago though.

So the cast is all Spanish-based this time?

Oh yes, all Spanish and it’s not a big lot of people: we’re only seven. It’s just two dancers, both from Andalucia: Charo is from Seville and Angel is from Cordoba and the guitarists are the same guitarists that were with me last time. They are three brothers from Madrid—three gypsy brothers, the Losadas—and myself. There’s one singer, who has also been with me to Australia: Angel Gabarre.[4]

Can you tell me a bit about the design and the staging for “Flamenco Passion”? In your last show here, “Flamenco Fiesta”, the second act was performed as though it was in a town square.

Yeah, like a home in a sense—very similar to my home where I am standing now. It was an idea of bringing flamenco from it’s true environment—obviously artificially on a stage—but giving an idea of how it happens here. But this show now is almost like a musical show with dance; even the dance fits the music in a way that is very compact and very intimate with the music … it’s not showing off the dance. The other show was more allowing the virtuosic qualities and the choreographic ideas to project because it was a dance company. In this case it’s more the music that speaks, and the dance element fits very much with the music to give you a kind of concert, a very compact musical impression, but illustrated with the dance as well.

This is not the same piece as “Arte y Passion” though, is it?

No, that’s something else. I had a long season in the West-End in London with that show Arte y Passion.[5] The two main dancers in that show are the ones I am bringing to Australia now.

One of the striking things about the descriptions that I have read of “Arte y Passion” is the small narratives that the songs contained: talking about the foundry, various snippets of other stories. Do you find that a feature of flamenco itself or was that something you brought out in that show specifically?

The way flamenco poetry and songs appear actually is like that. The singer a lot of the time is improvising¾not actually making it up as he goes along, but improvising what to sing at what time, and each song, even if there are three different parts of one specific song, they can be completely unrelated. They’re all different ideas as you point out: one idea, then another, then another, all within the same song. So what I did for that show was because I was covering different areas of flamenco, specific ideas in flamenco, I wrote just a little bit of each of those worlds that I was presenting. I wrote a little bit of the poetry that goes with it so that people have an impression of what is happening emotionally, what the singer is trying to articulate¾in a general sense¾with each particular piece. You can’t give a complete idea of what the singer is singing but you can tantalise them, you can give a little impression of it and that’s what I tried to do with that show. I don’t think it’s so much the case with this show now. This is more of a musical thing that projects composition, illustrated by a bit of singing and dancing, but it doesn’t require a story as much.

You’ve said many times that you don’t want to present flamenco as a museum piece, that you want it to continue to evolve. How do you feel therefore about some of the other artists involved in flamenco and related forms? The Gypsy Kings for example captured public attention by bringing drumming and samba forms into flamenco while others such as Pepe Habicichlela have put touch-bass and sound-effects on-top of flamenco compositions. How do you feel about those kind of activities?

In a general sense I would put a green light wherever people want to experiment and to do things. I accept innovation like that—if people have something to say that’s good. In the case of the Gypsy Kings, obviously they are people who are out there trying to do the same thing that I do in their own way, so I’m not going to knock somebody who genuinely tries to put a show on. But I would say that they dwell in very superficial aspects of flamenco—and they do it very well, they do a nice production of those light-hearted aspects of flamenco. Good luck to them. But it doesn’t affect flamenco at all, that’s nothing to do with what I do, and what many, many other people do. Flamenco is much deeper than that, and so what they do I respect and it’s an excellent sound that they produce, but it’s inconsequential in terms of the development of flamenco itself. There are other people, like Pepe Habicichlela, who put extra things on-top of the flamenco world of music. I would have to listen to it and see whether I am impressed or not. I think what has happened in the last few decades is that the lid has been taken off the creative craving and ambition of young people in a way that hadn’t happened before. They have discovered many other types of music and they have been fascinated by other things and in a kind of naïve way they’ve gone and they have superimposed musical ideas from other places, other cultures, onto their flamenco. Sometimes—a lot of the time—that is not successful and sometimes it is a good contribution that the tradition accepts. So in order to answer that correctly I would have to listen to what it is and say whether it is worthwhile or not. As a general rule though, I think people should be free to do what they want.

How would you describe your approach then? You are certainly not a strict traditionalist, yet you have chosen not to venture into those sort of areas either.

I’m not good enough to go into other areas! I respond to my training if you like and my training has been my tradition.[6] I have been very close to my tradition and that’s where my ambition lies. If I was more clever perhaps I would have gone into other things … but I don’t want to appear silly when I answer that, I’m serious really. I think people have different abilities and I love tradition and I think it has a lot to offer. I think if you add new elements—which indeed I do as well and I love as well—I think I have to be very convinced that they are a positive contribution rather than just putting things there without much thought. I don’t have that vision. The vision that I have is my work and it is for people to judge. I hope that I’m learning, I hope that my life is creative in that sense—I want to learn more all the time so perhaps the future has some other ideas that I can put together.

As a final question, or comment perhaps, you have often been described as a very non-demonstrative performer when you’re on stage, sitting concentrating on your guitar and looking to other musicians, but basically keeping to yourself. Given your reputation people find this very surprising¾they expect you to bask in the limelight a bit more. Is there any particular reason for this or is it just how you prefer to perform your music?

Not at all; that’s the way I am. I’m simply not boisterous. I’m a bit shy, just in normal everyday life. I’m not showy, and I’m not showy on the stage either, but I am very committed to doing music well, to doing what I do well. So I feel an authority in what I do … it’s not that I am over modest or something like that, but on the stage I feel very strongly that I must convince… I don’t know if I’ve explained myself very well… I don’t show off on the stage but I have a conviction in what I do—I don’t use gimmicks or anything—I try to convince with the music, with the true result of what I do… I can’t change that I suppose: I’m that way in normal life and I’m that way on the stage as well.

Well, it looks impressive. It shows how focussed you are. I certainly appreciate it… Well, thank you for your time, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

Thank you very much.

[1] See Jonathan Marshall, “Master Craftsman,” IN Press, 526, 23/9/1998, p. 52.

[2] See especially Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Theory and Function of the Duende,” reproduced in the program notes for Charito Saldaña’s flamenco staging of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba at the Merlyn Theatre in the Malthouse complex, Melbourne, 24/2-1/3/1998, pp. 10-11.

[3]  The most obvious cultural/historical differences between Andalucia and the rest of Spain is that Andalucia was heavily influenced by the comparatively enlightened, multicultural occupation of southern Spain by the Moors, until they were driven out in the 15th century. This was followed by the Christian revival enforced through the Spanish Inquisition, which lead to the expulsion of the large Jewish population of Andalucia as well. Andalucia has also traditionally had a higher concentration of gypsies than the rest of the country. Andalucia was traditionally dependent upon a meagre peasant economy like the rest of Spain but the land is particularly uneven and poor. Andalucia suffered badly in all of Spain’s major conflicts: the Napoleonic invasion, the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, etc. For the relation of these influences to flamenco, see the program notes for the 1997 Australian tour of Flamenco Fiesta: [no author reference] “Andalucia: Origins of flamenco” and “Flamenco: Notes by Paco Peña,” pp. 2-4.

[4] Peña performed Flamenco Fiesta at the Comedy Theatre in Melbourne, 1/10/1997. The cast included Tito, Diego and Vaky Losada, Charo Espino, Angel Munoz, Angel Gabarre and others. Espino did not eventually perform in the 1998 Australian tour of Flamenco Passion¾her role was filled by Belen Fernandez. See Jonathan Marshall, review, IN Press, 527, 30/9/1998.

[5] Arte y Passion was performed at the Peacock Theatre, London, 2-3/1997. See: Jenny Gilbert, “Paco Peña, the saviour of flamenco,” Independent on Sunday, 9/2/1998; Nicholas Dromgoole, “After this I won’t be so sniffy,” Sunday Telegraph, 9/2/1997; Louise Levene, review, The Independent Tabloid, 7/2/1997; Neil Dowden, review, What’s On, 12/2/1997; Ismene Brown, “Flamenco with thunder,” Daily Telegraph, 7/2/1997; Anne Sacks, “He’s too sexy for his shirt, so get it off!” Evening Standard, 10/2/1997.

[6] Peña was raised in a communal farmhouse of ten families who played guitar and danced for most of the feast days, weddings and general celebrations. In a separate interview Peña said: “it wasn’t a musical family in any accomplished way but there were always people around who enjoyed making music.” See: Stephanie Brumby, “All hands clapping,” Age Saturday Extra, 12/9/1998, p. 3.

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

ADDENDUM:Â

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).

JG Ballard has always had a musical sensibility, despite his claims to possess a ‘tin ear’. He’s quoted in The Face as saying ‘there’s no music in my work. The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns’. In an interview with the French magazine Paris Review in 1984, Ballard says he didn’t even own a single record or player, though he didn’t mind listening to Serge Gainsbourg if his girlfriend put it on. Then again, his short story ‘Sound Sweep’ (1960) discusses the ultrasonic possibilities for music, and he was quoted in 2001 as saying that music by Brian Eno alongside architecture by Frank Gehry would best describe the ‘leisure world’ depicted in his Vermilion Sands stories. In an interview with the New Musical Express in 1985, he claimed that the music genre in the arts is the carrier of the ‘real news’.

And some of Ballard’s favourite films are created by directors who work in a fruitful and continuous tandem with composers. David Lynch, whose Blue Velvet (1986) was the best film of the ’80s according to Ballard, usually collaborates with composer Angelo Badalamenti. Alfred Hitchcock, who Ballard has written about in many contexts, had a long-standing partnership with Bernard Herrmann. Fittingly, the film adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash was made by one of the most important director/composer teams of the last 40 years: Canadians David Cronenberg and Howard Shore.

Ballard declared that Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) was ‘the first film of the 21st century’, and in a review of the director’s latest, A History of Violence (2005), he wrote that ‘all Cronenberg’s films make us edge back into our seats, gripped by the story unfolding on the screen but aware that something unpleasant is going on in the seats around us’. True enough, though this author tends to believe that it’s the complex relationship between Cronenberg and Shore that creates this effect.

Shore understands about space, silence, dynamics and layering in the context of film music and its ability to manipulate the viewer’s perception of the images, and he says he uses his visceral reactions to the director’s rough cut in order to start creating a score, allowing it to fuel his ideas. Before Crash, Shore and Cronenberg had made six films together, starting with The Brood (1979). Shore says Cronenberg has always granted him considerable freedom, often remarking that Cronenberg was his favourite director to work with — not bad from someone who has scored over a hundred films. Shore says he ‘thought of movies as BEING film scores’ — that for him, film and music are intertwined, not unlike film and sound editor Walter Murch, who says we ’see/hear film’. Shore claims that the act of writing music for film actually allowed his music to eventuate in the first place, and that films perform his music for him in a way.

Crash features a reverb-drenched score that mixes electronic, modified and acoustic instruments, classical arrangements and experimental electronic manipulation. The score successfully creates an atmosphere that allows the violence and sexuality to seep out, rather than representing it in some way. It is unlike any other score Shore has created before or since, and saw him return to a smaller ensemble. He had created full-blown orchestral scores for Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991) but the budget wouldn’t allow for such indulgence in this film. As in the more experimental scores in the earlier films, this led to a much more interesting musical product. The repetitive melodic patterns, the limited tonal and thematic range, and the reluctance to change key creates a claustrophobic environment for the film enhanced by an unusual instrumental combination.

Around a quarter of the score was written, then recorded, then manipulated electronically in the studio. As the film progresses, the music becomes stranger, perhaps representing the psychological unravelling of James Ballard, the main character. In the car-wash scene, Shore creates a sort of ‘music concrete’ by sampling Foley recordings gathered by the sound designer (music concrete can be best described as electronic music produced from editing together fragments of natural and industrial sounds) — not unlike Wilder’s tape-recorder manipulations or Laing’s observations of the acoustic properties of water pipes in Ballard’s High-Rise (1974).

The car-wash piece begins with detailed recordings of the convertible as it reconfigures: the sound of the window enclosing the occupants in the hermetic booth of the car, giving way to the mixture of shimmering water sounds and thick wads of cloth against metal. The sound of the pulsating machines builds to an intensity measured by the sexual activity inside the car. Elsewhere, the music is rarely louder than other film sounds — dialogue, breathing, car engines and traffic noise dominate the sonic landscape.

The throaty sound of Vaughan’s huge car is perhaps the most prominent sound in the film, a delightful contrast to the delicate, interweaving music score. Shore’s contribution almost acts as a sublime muzak, never intruding on the fabric of the film yet evoking qualities from it. Shore and Ballard have both expressed a dislike of background music, yet muzak plays an important part in Ballard’s vision of a bland future. Similarly, the intelligent balance of music and sound in Crash creates an interesting equilibrium between the idea of music creating an environment for action — magnifying the images and meanings — and the non-music often featured in Ballard’s work, like Super-Cannes (2000).

I wonder what genre of film Shore would classify Crash. In some ways, he has included elements of the ‘love story’, as the lush strings featured in the film’s conclusion suggest. In another film, this music could be heard as romantic, but here it adds a type of lyricism to the possibility of death, to the ugly distortions of form. The only other place this writing style appears is in a jump cut to James’s bedroom after the car wash and its score of sound effects — a similarly distorted ‘romantic’ scene.

The score uses six electric guitars, three harps, three woodwinds, prepared piano, strings and a percussionist. The guitars are the only instruments run through effects, creating what Shore calls a ‘harp sound’. This subtle use of electronic effect is mirrored in Ballard’s comments about technology in Crash: that the car is a part of technology that we are most involved with, providing a kind of marriage of human imagination and technology. These terms could apply to the modern electric guitar, but also to describe Shore’s take on his score for the film. The ingenious mixture of electronic instruments (guitars) with acoustic instruments (winds, piano, strings, percussion) is left raw but at times subtly altered — in the studio or through preparation. Whether it’s manipulated guitars or classic string arrangements, each idea is carefully considered, tapered and applied. The luscious antique sound of harps — strings plucked over images of slow-moving, heavy traffic — provides a connection between old and new technologies. The sensuality of the flute in the sex scene between James and Catherine belies the crudeness and somehow formal nature of Catherine’s sexual monologue about Vaughan.

The different colours provided by these instruments reflect the relationship between the cold machine and the warm body. The electric hum of a guitar amp, the slow decay of a delay effect, the eerie breath of flutes — music has long held a power to effect the body, and the construction of instruments may arguably represent one of the earliest uses of technology for art. This score polarises that most ancient of instruments (the harp and flute) against the more contemporary (electric guitars, computer manipulation), perhaps reflecting Ballard’s pairing of basic human needs (sex) with contemporary culture (cars).

The prepared piano is an excellent addition, carefully embedded in the score. It delightfully mirrors the adapted body of Gabrielle, with her additions and adjustments to what is considered a ‘normal’ body, as well as James’s ‘prepared leg’, examined in silence after his accident. The prepared piano is the musical parallel to the modified body — a classic structure adapted. When Vaughan rams Ballard’s car in the scrapyard, the prepared piano brings out the sound of metal on metal — via metal objects placed in the piano.

Unlike many film soundtracks, much of the best music from the film is included on the CD release. The CD frees the pieces from the heavy sound effects of the film, and tantalising titles such as ‘Mechanism of Occupant Ejection’ and ‘Chromium Bower’ add to the new experience of listening without seeing, and also cause us to wonder if this music would indeed be so interesting without having seen the film. This is perhaps answered by the occasion of a live performance of the score in Australia in 1998, when the music was presented as an assemblage of the cues from the film, configured to a continuous 40-minute piece. The musicians were positioned in a spatial pattern to reconstruct the spacing used for the recording of the score, which was originally produced in 7.1 (SDDS). The film was not screened for the presentation; the focus was on the music and its live spatialisation.

Film director Bernardo Bertolucci apparently told Cronenberg that Crash is a religious masterpiece.

Maybe it was Shore singing Ballard’s psychopathological hymn after all.

PHOTO CREDITS
Howard Shore -conductor: Photo by Daniel Smith/New Line Cinema.
Prepared piano image from Mego
All other photos © fineline films

BIBLIOGRAPHY
All web sites accessed April 2006
http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgballard/jgbsecondwave.html
http://www.spikemagazine.com/1197ball.php
http://www.salon.com/sept97/wsb970902.html
http://finelinefeatures.com/crash/
Brockman, Mikita (ed) Car Crash Culture, 2001, New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Brophy, Philip (ed). Howard Shore in Conversation; Composing with a very wide palette, Cinesonic, the world of sound in film, 1999, Sydney: AFTRS
V. Vale, Ryan, M (Ed.) JG Ballard Quotes: Does the Future have a future? 2004, San Francisco: RE/search Publications

This piece is also published at;
http://www.ballardian.com/critical-mass-cronenberg-shore

Since sound was first added onto commercial celluloid in 1926 (5), it has achieved varying degrees of success in its integration within the media. Sound in cinema is of course much more than a collection of songs or variations on a theme in a score; it is the way we hear dialogue, if we hear the sounds in the background or not, how loud they are, where they sit in the mix and when and where music comes. It also encompasses sound technologies such as the various types of Dolby, Cinemascope, SDDS, surround sound and 5.1 (6). All this influences the way we interpret images and action on the screen, how they affect us, and how we respond to them.

De Heer is well aware of the potential strength of sound and in the 10 films he has made since 1984 there is strong evidence of his willingness to use sound as a defining creative tool, more so in each film he makes. He is very involved in the post-production sound process, and claims that working on a low budget facilitates this as his crew is more compact. In fact, de Heer has claimed he would love to make an even smaller-scale film where he could do all the sound himself (7).

As a writer-director, de Heer has bravely tackled some serious sonic challenges that originate in the scripting stage. Incident at Raven’s Gate (1988) features a policeman with a hearing aid and the sonic effects of the supernatural. Dingo (1991) stars one of the all-time great jazz legends, Miles Davis, in his only film role. The audience is constantly exposed to the breathing of a woman with severe cerebral palsy throughout Dance Me To My Song (1998), as they are to the sounds of the jungle throughout The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2001). In The Tracker (2002), songs enhance the tale, and in The Quiet Room (1996) the story is told by a child who refuses to speak. Alexandra’s Project (2003) has a large proportion of the sound coming from the speaker of a television set. Each film offers a different sonic inventiveness evident in both the scripting and production stages.

In Bad Boy Bubby (1994) sound plays a role that is almost directive. In this film, music rarely appears without it serving a clearly defined purpose in the script. The metallic industrial background sounds that drone through the first 30 minutes of the film act as a bed for the sporadic, contorted dialogue, an effect similar to that achieved for the duration of Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1978). Once he is freed from the dark box which has been his home for over 30 years, there is a wonderful series of defining meetings with sound and music for Bubby (Nicholas Hope), from his initial encounter with a Salvation Army choir to his ultimate lead-singer role in a pub band, where his crazy sounds and repeating of lines from the film turn him into a wacky pop star (8). This is the perfect culmination of his habit of repeating what is said to him verbatim – his very problem becomes the thing that attracts the audience (inside and outside the film). In this film there is very little “background music”: almost all the music featured is tied to a character or moment (the church organ, pipe band, singing Salvation Army devotee, violinist or the rock band). The fact that there is no music until Bubby gets out of his home adds to the weight of these snippets, as if de Heer defines the real world through them.

Sound designer James Currie developed a binaural headset for Bad Boy Bubby, worn by Hope throughout the film. This device allows the stereo focus of the sound to change according to the movements of the actor’s head, and for his own voice and breathing to be recorded in the most intimate way. Small details often offer the best results – my favourite of these is when Bubby enters the pizza shop and a strip from the fly curtain streams over his head, the buzzing sound featuring prominently – that is really how it feels to enter a pizza shop. Combined with a microphone on the camera, this system gives the post-production sound team many exciting options to use in the final sound edit; these are fully exploited in the film, as a viewing with headphones on a stereo VHS will demonstrate most clearly. The system allowed the sound team to create a rich tapestry of sound that would have cost thousands of dollars in post-production studio time to create otherwise.

A similar binaural recording device was used on Dance Me To My Song to record the breathing of Julia (Heather Rose) which provides a disturbing sound bed to this film. In addition, a second “foam head” binaural recorder was used on the camera, creating further possibilities of sound direction and perspective. De Heer claims he did not use this device in Alexandra’s Project because the emotional engagement produced by the device would favour the perspective of Steve (Gary Sweet) (9) – something de Heer worked hard to avoid in the film as a whole – as Alexandra (Helen Buday) speaks from the television set for the majority of the film making the binaural effect redundant.

In The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, de Heer’s troubled foray into the larger-budget international film world, the ongoing sounds of the jungle maintain an intensity and tension throughout the film that has a more powerful effect on the viewer than Graham Tardif’s rather over-dramatic orchestral score. Sound designer James Currie also gives special attention to different locations in the film – the ambient sounds define spaces such as the riverside, a large hall, a small hut or the open jungle at night, enhancing the way viewers differentiate between these places – and to the colour and texture in the voice of the Old Man (Richard Dreyfuss) as he reads his trashy love novels, reinforcing this film’s emphasis on the pleasure in the simple things of life.

Like David Cronenberg with Howard Shore, Joel and Ethan Coen with Carter Burwell or Fellini with Nino Rota, de Heer has used the same composer, Graham Tardif, for the majority of his films (one notable exception being a film about music: Dingo). It is interesting to follow the development of the de Heer/ Tardif relationship, leading to extraordinarily powerful results in their most recent collaboration, Alexandra’s Project. In conjunction with no less than three sound designers (James Currie, Andrew Plain and Nada Mikas), Tardif’s minimal electronic score in Alexandra’s Project implies the undercurrent of invisible electro-magnetic signals in an urban landscape, making an ordinary street seem like a harbinger of impending doom. This creates a tension that sets the scene for the entire film, echoing the atmosphere of other suburban thrillers such as Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1996). The score is electronic, a minimal collection of colours and depths; it leaves room for ambient sounds to play a significant part, as often occurs in de Heer’s other films – such as the wonderful moment in Dingo on a traffic island in the middle of Paris, where the trumpet solo of John “Dingo” Anderson (Colin Friels) mingles with night-time traffic and he searches for a sound he hears in a subway labyrinth. All atmospheric sounds in Alexandra’s Project are exaggerated: the keys turning in locks, steps in the carpet and mechanised blinds leading to the ultimate household appliance, the vibrator. A similar emphasis is present in the mise en scène, with close-ups of household objects such as the toaster and light switches. The powerful, central role of video in this film significantly changes the way the viewer hears the audio – like Steve, we are listening to Alexandra pre-recorded on video, allowing the film to be understood as “a critique on the way we watch so-called erotic entertainment” (10). The presence of the television screen is conveyed beautifully with actual boxy television sound, and the sequences were filmed with the video running on the television, allowing Steve to respond to it in real time and creating a complex sonic situation. Steve’s interaction with the television set allows him control over the pace of the film up until Alexandra’s broadcast becomes “live”, giving her the control she so lacked in their relationship. At one stage, Steve takes refuge from the television screen behind an overturned couch, but continues his discussion with Alexandra and is drawn out again by her vocalised threats. Until then he was able to stop and start the video, crunching the buttons on the remote control. The eerie vocal loop “cheers dad” accompanying the last remaining images of Steve’s children on tape is a piece of sound art in itself. Again breathing features in the soundscape – especially in the piercing scene where Alexandra’s tense breathing is the only audio provided, making us complicit with her actions; as she nears the camera and the volume increases we feel more and more uncomfortable.

The most meaningful collaboration of de Heer and Tardif is perhaps in The Tracker, with Tardif as composer and de Heer as lyricist for songs performed by indigenous performer Archie Roach. This not only adds an extra layer of narrative to the film, but also personalises the de Heer/Tardif working relationship and gives it a new voice. After much experimentation, de Heer claimed the songs needed to be performed by an indigenous performer in order to “attach” themselves to the film (11). The songs comment on the action, putting a sympathetic white man’s words into a black man’s mouth for a tale of revenge, and thus emphasising the most potent themes in the film whilst retaining the concept that this is a tale of a group of individuals. Again the silences carry the greatest emotional tension in this film, allowing the outback to speak for itself, similar to the way Jon “Dingo” Anderson’s trumpet speaks for the outback in Dingo. This, in addition to the use of paintings by Peter Coad, makes this film an important combination of artistic media – perhaps a direct result of the film being an arts festival commission (by the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts under the artistic direction of Peter Sellars). Roach later performed the songs live with the film in Melbourne and Adelaide, almost in the spirit of the silent movies – demonstrating how much narrative and emotional power the songs themselves hold.

In The Quiet Room, the atmosphere is more that of a radio play, where a narrative is used to create a world and direct our attention to different parts of it. Here the binaural set is used again, this time to record the narration of the child protagonist (Chloe Ferguson) and differentiate it from her onscreen speaking voice. As the images move slowly around the screen, the child’s narration is always up front and close, and her parents (Celine O’Leary and Paul Blackwell) can be heard arguing in different parts of the house, creating a strange “eavesdropping” effect – a technique mastered in The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). The speechless child is filmed alone in her room for the majority of the movie – not unlike the suffering PS (Nicholas Gledhill) in an earlier Australian film, Careful, He Might Hear You (Carl Schultz, 1983) – giving the audience a second experience of overhearing (12). In The Quiet Room, the volume of voices changes dramatically – as in Dingo where the arrival of the aircraft bearing Billy Cross (Miles Davis) is almost deafening in comparison to dialogue later in the film. The arguments of the parents in The Quiet Room vary from anguished discussion to aggressive yelling, the latter contrasting beautifully with their dulcet tones when speaking to their daughter. These volume adjustments create a canvas which sound designer Peter Smith uses to shape the moods of the different scenes. And as in most of de Heer’s films, it is what is left out, more than what is included, that holds the power. Taking on a subject such as withdrawal from producing audible communication indicates de Heer’s attention to the importance of sound in our daily lives and how vital it can be to the understanding and malfunctioning of our relationships.

Incident at Raven’s Gate also has a special aural focus: the policeman Taylor (Max Cullen) has a hearing aid and listens to sounds as he searches a house, and makes good use of it for a bit of his own eavesdropping. But when it is taken away from him, he swims in a silent world. Sound is used as the first sign that something is “wrong” in this film – when the car cassette tape players start to play up we know something weird is going on. As in Bad Boy Bubby, music is also used to define the characters, as when the opera the murderous policeman Felix (Vincent Gill) loves so much – and sings alone in the most tragic of moments – is contrasted with the ’80s rock of the main character, Eddie (Steve Vidler). As in the films to follow, sound pushes the action forward and is used to accentuate events and manipulate our reactions to them.

The fact that de Heer prefers to shoot in sequence could be an important factor in the way his films are put together sonically. Whenever possible he gets his actors to act “with the music” – as Colin Friels does when he is cleaning his trumpet to the music in Dingo, or as Gary Sweet must perform in front of the video running on the television in Alexandra’s Project. His preference for using the same crew may also aid the smooth realisation of his sonic concepts; de Heer cites the collaboration with a composer as the most challenging of all required in the making of a film, and acknowledges that ongoing collaborations create a trust between the artists which allows for a free exchange of ideas.

Ideas for the sound begin in the writing of the script, de Heer claims, whether they be explicitly written in or take the form of instinctive imaginings of a certain performer or mood for the soundtrack. De Heer has commented that “instinct is education you are unaware of” (13) and recounts many times that it has led him forward. For the first test screenings of Incident at Raven’s Gate, he had an instinct that sound would pull the rough unfinished movie together. When it was shown again later to the same executive producers, they refused to believe that no frames had been changed, so crucial was the imprint the sound left on the movie (14). The album notes provided with the soundtrack for Dingo similarly demonstrate the intensity with which de Heer relates music to narrative.

De Heer’s films seem to reflect a need to understand the minority, whether it is a disabled person, an indigenous Australian, an alien or a child. Perhaps sound can be seen as the marginalised but essential ingredient in our visual culture. De Heer’s use of sound design to manipulate our sentiments and impressions in his stories testifies to the power of the medium. Maybe, as Jake Wilson suggests, de Heer has a “habit of using a struggle over spoken language as a central plot device” (15) but the power of sound in his films does not stop there. This article has just skimmed the surface: each of de Heer’s films merits a detailed treatise on the way they feature innovative sound ideas in the scripting and production stages, resulting in some of the most challenging and exciting cinema made in Australia today.

This paper is also available on line with images at
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/sound_design_rolf_de_heer.html

The Sonic Image: Exploring the relationships between the sound and visual worlds.

Perth, Western Australia, 27th – 29th April 2007

The THNMF Conference, held in conjunction with The 8th Totally Huge New Music Festival, is a forum for artists from diverse areas of practice, along with critics, commentators and academics, to discuss the ideas which underline contemporary New Music and Sound Art—the histories, methods, theories, approaches, techniques and dreams which make up the modern world of music and Sound Arts. The THNMF Conference offers opportunity for presentations of refereed and non-refereed papers, performances, demonstrations and workshops.

The Conference is presented by Tura New Music, in association with the Faculty of Education and Arts, Edith Cowan University, including the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and is supported by the School of Music at the University of Western Australia.

Theme

Sound and image have traditionally been seen as opposing concepts; a separation of eye and ear. Yet visual methods of transcription and recording have been part of standard musical practice since the invention of notation, through to the later development of waveform analysis and visualisation in the 20th century.

The focus of the conference is how have musicians and theorists—particularly in Australia—approached this dialectic between sound and image? How have composers/improvisers/sound artists drawn on visual languages, metaphors and techniques in creating their music, and how have they collaborated with practitioners in the visual arts and cinema to produce new sound works and new ways of thinking about the act of composition? Can visuality exist in contemporary pure music works?

Suggested Topics and Themes:

The 8th Totally Huge New Music Festival and the associated Conference are inclusive events, devised to appeal to both practitioners and academics, audiences and artists. As such, the Conference Convenors welcome proposals involving any aspect of Australian New Music, international Sound Art, composition and sonic creation. We are however particularly seeking papers and sessions which address the principal themes of the Conference. Suggested topics for papers include (but are not limited to): -

- Image in Australian composition in the 21st century

- Cinesonics and other intersections between screen culture and music/sound (film score, sound design for screen, installation, music video, musical composition for web-pages, gaming culture)

- Performance and projection (VJ-ing, A-V art, projection and sound in theatre and dance, the musical performer as a visual focus)

- The gap between visual scores and musical performance, improvisation and the score, conventional notation as visual art

- Visual metaphors in music (the acousmatic image, composition as
landscape, visualising space in music, the use of the descriptor “cinematic” in popular music criticism, waveform in Sound Art)

- Synaesthesia and the translation of visual perception into music or sound, and vice-versa (Futurist and Surrealist synaesthesia, colour in music, the close-up and extreme focus in music, operatic composition as a total art of sound and image)

Guidelines:

1. Individual or joint paper presentations should be no longer than twenty minutes. Panel organisers are strongly encouraged to enforce times.

2. Performances should be no longer than thirty minutes and may include a short lecture component.

3. The Convenors encourage proposals from artists, academics, composers, performers, sound designers, critics, instrument makers and students alike.

4. Following the conclusion of the Conference, presenters will be encouraged to submit their papers for publication in Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the THNMF conference. The journal will be refereed to DEST guidelines and will be published before Jan 2008. Style guides are available from the Conference Convenors.

5. Although encouraging submission of papers for formal refereeing, the Convenors are also calling for non-refereed paper presentations and performances, especially from practicing artists. Papers which are not presented at the Conference itself may also be considered for publication in the Proceedings. Priority will however be given to authors who present at the Conference.

6. Presenters are required to register for the entire Conference program Additionally, presentation at the Conference will automatically enrol the presenter in the Music Research Group of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, at no extra charge.

7. Performances and paper presentations will not be remunerated.

How to submit a proposal:

1. Abstracts and proposals are due by 1st October 2006. Please submit via email to: conference@tura.com.au

2. Proposals for papers should include an abstract of approximately 500 words. Please insert the abstract text into the body of the email and also send it an attachment file in rich text format (RTF).

3. Attachments should be named as follows:
THNMFC_Surname&initial_date(ddmmyy).rtf E.g.: THNMFC_SmithS_060706.rtf

4. Proposals for papers should clearly state if you are or are not applying to be refereed.

5. Proposals for papers should also include notes on any technical and/or spatial requirements for presentation (i.e. any audio-visual needs, use of PowerPoint, PA, etc).

6. Proposals for performances, artist talks and master classes—with or without a lecture component—should also include supporting material, such as an audio CD or score. Supporting material can be sent to: Tura New Music, Suite 10/1 Rokeby Rd, Subiaco, WA 6008.

7. All submissions should be accompanied by a THNMF Conference Submission Form (downloadable at www.tura.com.au).

8. The THNMFC Committee will acknowledge receipt of submissions and communicate its decisions via email by 1st November 2006.

9. All inquiries regarding the Conference should be addressed to:

Kate Parker
Tura New Music
conference@tura.com.au
(08) 9380 6996

————————————————————-
The 8th TOTALLY HUGE NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL
runs from 20th April to 6th May 2007.

The Totally Huge New Music Festival is a biennial exploration of New Music and Sound Art, featuring musicians from Western Australia and around the world.

The Totally Huge New Music Festival provides a captivating showcase of new chamber music, electronica, installations, improvisation, radiophonics, multimedia and Sound Art in metropolitan and regional Western Australia.

For program updates go to www.tura.com.au

Tura New Music
Suite 10, 1 Rokeby Rd
Subiaco WA 6008
Australia
Ph: 61.8. 9380 6996
Fax: 61.8. 9380 6997
Email: info@tura.com.au
web: www.tura.com.au

This paper examines the role of sound installation and music composition practices in addressing the relationship between sound and telecommunications devices, in this case the mobile phone. The popularity of mobile phone artworks is rapidly increasing, with handsets readily available, artists excited about sponsorship opportunities, and the general push in the “electronic arts” area.
This role will be addressed primarily through the discussion of a work by Perth mobile phone sound art collective, Metaphonica, who explore many issues raised by this art form. “Phonebox” (2005) is a site specific sound installation where phones are called from a remote computer presenting a synchronized composition featuring sounds created by the artists installed on the handsets as ring tones; subverted by visitors to the exhibition location.

1. Mobile Phones in Art

John Cage: “I am here / , / and there is nothing to say / . / . . .”(1)
The use of telephones in art is not new. Lazlo Moholy Nagy is considered to be one of the first artists to experiment with telephones to create a so-called ‘telepresence’ piece in 1922, using a telephone to transmit directions for fabricating paintings. Similarly, in 1969 the Chicago Museum of Contemporary art organized an exhibition entitled “Art by Telephone” where artists would call through to the gallery staff and instruct them as to the creation of their artworks. British group The Disembodied Art Gallery has created several telephone-based works. “Babble” (1993) was a telematic art installation that received over 70 voice contributions from the public to an answering machine, later replayed into a gallery. “Temporary Line” (1994) was a telephone sculpture that activated the sound of whispering voices through handsets whenever a member of the public walked close to the sculpture (Figure 1). In 2005, “Zhong Shuo” Ian Mott, Ding Jie, the Chongqing Art Collective and the Li Chuan Group uses a the telephone for the collection and telling of stories from different locations around China.
Mobile phone works are a genre of electronic art which Frank Popper defines “communication art”. He describes the six main characteristics of this genre: it stages physical presence at distance; it telescopes the immediate and the delayed; it focuses on the playfulness of interactivity; it combines memory and real time; it promotes planetary communication and it encourages a detailed study of human social groupings. (2)
All mobile phone works could also be considered ‘telepresence’ works to some extent. Stephen Wilson defines telepresence as “a technology for a person to be present in some form in a distant place” (3). Mobile phone works can transmit a person in the form of thier creative idea and its content.

The focus of this paper and the projects it discusses is on sound art using mobile phones. Sound content in mobile phone art can be divided into two general areas: pieces using “real” sounds recorded by or stored in the phones; and pieces that use the pre fabricated sounds inside the phones (monophonic and polyphonic arrangements of MIDI sounds, pre set ring tones).
Mobile phones have been used in musical works as musical instruments in their own right. In 2003, Bernd Kremling, conductor the Drumming Hands Orchestra in Wuerzburg, Germany used mobile phone ring tones in orchestral works, set off by the musicians or by backstage hands a predetermined moment during the performance. Other projects, such as “Artones.net” (2002) by British mobile phone artists The Phonebook Ltd, commissioned compositions using the sounds available in the phone handset software. “Dialtones, A Telesymphony” (2001) by Golan Levin is a well-documented example of a large-scale performed ‘composition’ that uses ringtones downloaded to visitors phones as they arrive to the concert hall. It used this as source material to create a composition. In “Pocket Gamelan”, by Greg Schiemer and Mark Havryliv, Java interfaces were developed to allow performance of music using mobile phone ensembles, with the intention of allowing large groups of non-expert players to perform music based on just intonation using their own phones. In “Mandala 3”, Schiemer and his collaborators swing their mobiles in bags in the air to create a interesting spatialisation effect.

“Telephony” (2000) by Alison Craighead and Jon Thompson (Figure. 2), is an installation where gallery visitors are invited to dial a wall-based grid of 42 mobile telephones, which in turn begin to call each other creating an arrangement of the prevalent NokiaTune.
Handsets have also been used as transmitters for live phone tone composition; Tim Didymus conducted a live concert in 2003 featuring music and sounds generated entirely on-the-fly using a mobile phone application called Intent Sound System (iSS), a suite of audio technologies that makes it possible to relay music composed live on the phone to another in real time.
Each of these works uses the sounds inside the handsets in a different way, determined to some extent by the amount of interaction the public has with the work. The recording of real sounds offers different possibilities for the mobile phone to take on more of a locative role. A predecessor to real sound recordings, voice mail has offered many possibilities for artists working with sound and telephony. The Disembodied Art Gallery created a CD compilation entitled “Answering Machine Solution” (Staalplat, 1996) of tracks created by artists to be used as answer machine messages. Ian Pollock and Janet Silk created “The Museum of the Future” (1997), a work that accumulated texts from callers using a phone tree where participants can listen to and leave messages. Jim Pallas created “Phoney-Vents” (1973), where he played works to people he chose to call, and “Dialevents” (1978), where people could call in to listen to sounds of his creation.
“Placing Voices” (2005) by Brian House is a mobile-sound-blog software which uses the built-in sound recording feature of mobile phones and MMS messaging to place sound fragments on a web-accessible map of the sounds as they arrive. The use of the Internet in mobile phone art is becoming more common as the phones themselves have increased accessibility to the Internet trough GPRS and WAP functionality.
Uphone is an internet project that archives calls to its web site. In 2003, the “Uphone Sparrow Report” by Kate Rich uses the mobile phone network to record and collect live data on the vainisheing population of sparrows in New York and London. Zoe Irvine created the “Dial-A- Diva” project, which coins the term “phonecasts”, described by the artist as “a person attending concert who uses their telephone as a a microphone to broadcast the sound” (4). The project invites and broadcasts songs made into phones over a 24 hour period.

Perhaps the most interesting artist working in the area of sound and mobile phones is Usman Harque from the UK. His piece “Sky Ear” (2004) is a one-night event in which a glowing “cloud” of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air. People can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky, which includes sounds of the atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena that are the audible equivalent of the Northern Lights. His piece “Japanese Whispers” (2000) was an experiment into the way sound changed when being digitally processed and transmitted through electromagnetic space using feedback loops created by the phone sounds (Figure 3). Both these pieces work within the premise of the phones as transmitters and receivers of sound as a primary, fundamental idea and use it to create and control other elements of the works.

Sound may also be used to help users use their phones better, a premise explored in “Social Mobiles” (2002), a collaboration between design company IDEO and artist Crispin Jones (Figure 4). To quote the artist; “the phone requires the user to play the tune of the phone number they wish to call. “The public performance that dialing demands acts as a litmus test of when it is appropriate to make a call”. (5)
Mobile Phone art is alive and well in Australia, through digital art organizations such as dLux Media Arts, whoc feature mobile phone art through programs such as Future Screen Mobile and d>Art.05 Exhibition program. It does have a visual focus, however.

2. Metaphonica

Meta (Greek: “about,” “beyond”) is a common English prefix, used to indicate a concept that is an abstraction from another concept. Metadata refers to data about data, information that describes another set of data. A metaphor, according to I. A. Richards, in his The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), consists of two parts: the tenor and vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed, the vehicle is the subject from which the attributes are derived. Metaphonica is a title created by Western Australian sound artists Rob Muir and Cat Hope for their sound art for mobile phones collective, which aims to embody these concepts in their artworks.
Metaphonica create installations that are informed by the works cited above. They use handsets as networkable portable music players, loaded with the artists’ creations – digital storage chips with antennas and speakers. The sonic experience of the installation is in the listening, not the calling. They play the stored compositions no matter where either artist or object may be located, and they allow the audience to be part of the work if they choose.
Sounds are created and then systematically arranged into a composition for each Metaphonica installation. The component sounds may recorded directly onto the phones or other devices such as mini discs, then processed on audio software to achieve optimum audibility or other effects before uploaded to the handsets. These handsets are then called from a computer operating specially scripted telephony software (scripted by media artist Dave Primmer), according to the preconceived composition (Figure 6). The artists and visitors phones may also call the installation and interrupt this sequence, as all these numbers have so called ‘ring tones’ (i.e. sound works attributed to caller numbers)– artist 1, artist 2, computer1, computer2, unknown number etc. A landline calling a mobile from one network to another would ring for around 30 seconds. A mobile to one of the installation phones, no matter which network, would ring for around 60 seconds. The phones have no diversion set so simply ring out. No call cost is required to participate in the installation, for the artists or visitors, since the phones are never answered. The sounds just ‘are’ – they are no longer alarms symbolizing the need to answer.
“Phonebox” (2005) was Metaphonica’s first installation, a work that lamented the loss of the physical Phonebox on the Australian urban landscape (Figure 5). The handsets were placed in museum box style recesses in a wall, behind glass doors in a busy corridor at the Swanston Street Artspace at RMIT University, in the centre of Melbourne, Australia. Sounds were chosen thematically and equalized for maximum audiabitility through the thick glass in the busy area.
“Phonebox” was devised out of a challenge – the offer of an installation space 6000 kilometers away that was made up of cabinets with glass doors, without power, in a thoroughfare. The mobile phones as installation objects provided an excellent foil to this challenge; they are compact to post, rechargeable, lasting around 24 hours without charge, do not require the artists to be present to operate them (most people understand the operating basics of a mobile phone), and can have sounds shaped to travel through glass.

Challenges aside, a major source of inspiration for using mobile phones as transmitters for sound art came from the writings of Duchamp, credited as conceptualizing and producing the first ever ‘readymade’ artwork:
“It is very difficult to choose an object, because after a few weeks you start to like it or to hate it. You must approach a thing with indifference, as if you have no esthetic emotion. The choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the complete absence of good or bad taste.” (6)
This explains the position the artists took when sourcing the model of mobile phone handset. “Phonebox”, and indeed all Metaphonica works, encourage people to hear rather than see, hold or use their mobile phones; so their visual aesthetic is superfluous, and the handsets have their screens turned away. Mobile phones have limited audio quality, and this has become a feature to work with for the artists, rather than a hindrance to overcome. It provides an opportunity to make new timbres and contexts for sounds.

People can interfere and interact with a Metaphonica work from any location; provided they have access to a phone line. Those who call from remote locations only have the knowledge that they are disrupting the composition (or maybe they just find the calling card provided at the installation and call the numbers to ‘see what happens’(Figure 7) as the number they call rings out. In this way, the audience becomes part of the composition by the very act of disrupting it. They become physical performers in the installation when they stand in front of it and call, or even when they call from elsewhere. Visitors to the exhibition can imagine the place the phones are being called from, or think about the sounds and the way they interfere with their environment. adding elements to the work that are not always immediately apparent. Locative issues are particularly useful for the artists – they need not be present with the installation. They and their pre set computer may call it from any location. This complex relationship between audience, creator and performance lead to interesting questions about the creation and control of artwork, and are new platforms for a sort of accidental improvised participation.

Metaphonica aims to encourage people to think of these very personal devices in a different way – simply as sound speakers to listen to – remote receivers for a music composition that anyone can add to as it runs its course. They use affordable, readily available technologies to do it.
“Phonebox” was one of the top five picks from the Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Arts in which it was featured. The public truly engaged with the work and were generally surprised by hearing mobile phones, for many a necessary evil, used this way.

3. Building Sounds for Mobile phones

There are several important audio considerations when using mobile phones for sound installation. Primarily the sounds are quiet, as the handsets are built to sound best at very close range (i.e. on the listeners ear) unless you have a pre set speaker phone function. The range of frequencies produced by the compressions and speaker ability is very particular. So sounds must be carefully equalized using audio software outside the handset to achieve clarity and volume tailored to their installation location theme.
Different handsets have varying audio possibilities. Many handsets have only MIDI (7) capability, and are only able to play monophonic or polyphonic compositions using a preset sound library. Many handsets now have mp3 and live sound recording and playback, using audio compression formats such as such adaptive multirate codec (amr) formats, although software companies such as Beatnik (working with Nokia) and Tao Multimedia are working with new platforms and ideas. Most of the scriptable mobile phone software uses Java programming, which operates as a plug in giving extra options on the handset menu. Sounds are uploaded from computer and phone-to-phone using Bluetooth, Infrared or cable, depending on the handsets functionality.

4. Future Developments

As part of funded research, Metaphonica are working with VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) models to make more lines available using less computers; up to now each calling line out to the phones has required a separate computer running the telephony software. However, without additional hardware, there is currently an issue with caller identification (caller ID); a vital part of Metaphonica’s system, as each sign belongs to a “caller”, and most VOIP providers do not provide caller ID to the outgoing calls from their service.
The artists have also been discussing with members of SIGGRAPH in Perth, considering the possibilities of making specific phone software, new plug ins, and Bluetooth possibilities to enhance the locative elements of the installations.
In late 2005, Metaphonica create a new installation, entitled “Conning the Text”. It is a work using similar principles and processes as “Phonebox”, and is based on an adaptation of poet Edith Sitwell’s work “Façade”. This work, originally performed in 1923 from behind a curtain with the aid of a megaphone, is a series of abstract poems where rhythms counterfeited those of music. The poetry in Façade is considered an important study in word-rhythms and onomatopoeia, making it an ideal text for adaptation to Metaphonica’s techniques of organization meeting interruption. Narrator Julia Moody records excerpts of Sitwells’ work that are then processed by artists and stored on the phones, then sequenced and interrupted in the same manner as the compositions in “Phonebox”.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to thank her collaborator Rob Muir, the ArtsWA BEApworks research grant program, Liquid Archtecture Festival of Sound Arts, WAAPA @ ECU and Dr. Jonathan Marshall.

REFERENCES

(1) John Cage: “Lecture on Nothing” Incontri Musicali, August 1959. [In: Silence. Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, pp. 109-126.
(2) Frank Popper, “Art of the Electronic Age”, New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (1993) p. 127
(3) Stephen Wilson, “Chapter 6: Telecommunications,” in “Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology*, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2002) p526.
(4) http://www.dialadiva.net/sing.html (accessed November 2005)
(4) http://www.ideo.com/case_studies/Social_Mobiles/SoMo3-1.html accessed 10/8/05
(5) Marcel Duchamp: “Apropos of ‘Readymades’.” Art and Artists, 1, 4 (July 1966). [Lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961.
(6) Musical Digital Interface

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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This paper has also been published in the “Sound Scripts – Proceedings of the Totally Huge New Music Festsival Conference 2005″ ISBN 0-7298-0618-9