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Re: [microsound] the landscape/z of microsound: tangents

On Thursday, January 15, 2004, at 10:27 AM, tobias c. van Veen wrote:
The sound-artists who arrive from the previous generation (Phill Niblock,
for example, La Monte Young, for example) or any practitioner who works with
field recordings (GAL, for example, Derek Holzer, for example) encounter
space directly in ways both via sound / field recordings but also
conceptually through thought [which could manifest as writing, theory,
manifesto, process, software, programming]. Lustmord and Biosphere also come
to mind as musicians considering the conceptual arrival of space in their
work. So does Carsten Nicolai in many of his installations (standing water
in bass canons). There are many others. 

This is an excellent summary

What has always fascinated me beyond field recordings is the ability of
electronic sounds to conjure vast hallucinations of space, be it desert,
ice, ocean, wind, mountain or outer space in the innerspace of the mind and
the tingling of the body affected by powerful, lound sound, be it sinewaves,
processed, feedback, ambient, drones, noise, beatless or beat-driven, etc.
There is a relation to affect in electronic sound that occurs when language
is broken down, like poetry, like mantras, like theory.

A really good read for theorising this phenomenon is Denis Smalley's article 'Spectromorphology: explaining sound-shapes' . The phenomenon you have described above, he would call 'third-order surrogacy' - where electronic sound textures (often abstract) imply that they have their origins in gesture, objects, spaces and so on.... The illusion is that you are listening to something 'known' or which has its origins in the acoustic/physical word. or where the resonant morphology suggests some form of human agency (performative, gestural etc...).

In my own work I have been interested in landscape, but also the synaesthetic properties of sound, in particular the crossing of aural/visual boundaries. Smalley's theories have been very useful in terms of articulating some of the processes which are in operation in terms of composition, sound design and so on... The other crucial aspect is that they are useful in locating the notion of 'gesture' in sound itself, as opposed to its more traditional use in reference to embodied movement (physical gesture). As a (so-called) laptop performer, I have been embroiled in the debate surrounding laptop performance, but have always pushed the notion of 'sonic gesture', ie that notions of performance are embedded in sound gesture, beyond visible human agency and that the composition and listening context determine whether this approach is successful, rejecting the notion that there is something inherently wrong with performance which lacks visible human agency, or visual spectacle.




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