Obsolescence, atrophy, rupture, metamorphosis, forgotten songs and marginalized histories all refer to discursive practice. There is an intention in these works to avoid ‘seriousness’ – the history of novelty records, cheap sound effects, and traditional theatrical sound devices are often deliberately pushed aside by those seeking to consolidate and expand sound art discourse in favour of the ‘higher works’ of Russolo, Cage, Schaeffer et al. These inherited dialectical differentiations are used for specific purposes, and do not in any way reflect any inherent ‘quality’. Rather, artist’s statements (here meaning work itself, or commentaries, articles, interviews etc.) are kept in, or kept out of, circulation by distinct identifiable entities. My aim is to cast my own sound art practice outside ‘mainstream’ sound art discourse, with the aim of revealing that same mainstream sound art discourse in all its strangeness.
This work is probably best described as a thrift-store noise opera. It tells the fragmented tale of George the Puppet, a jazz musician who began sound experiments sometime in the 1920s. He discovers a virus that originates in early electronic circuitry. Through George’s experiments, the virus evolves and learns how to spread to humans through the ear. George’s sound modulations also irreversibly alter the nature of time. Well, that’s George’s experience anyway.
The work features audio-visual archive material selected from the 1920s (Metropolis (Fritz Lang , Germany, 1927) Things to Come (William Cameron Menzies, US, 1936), The Testament of Dr Mabuse (Fritz Lang , Germany 1937). This free appropriation of material is problematic, but vital to the work. Easy access to a decontexualized past allows a mercenary plundering of historical material available from the public domain. The footage is used purely on its merits and its possible usage within the performance. In some ways, this approach is a reawakening of lost and/or marginalized audio-visual texts and provides an unofficial bootleg representation of the past, updated through active play in the present.
In my play with notions of time, non-linearity and rhizomic theory I am hoping to explore the space proposed by Attali in his predicted shift in musical practice from an era of repetition, to an era of composition. While technology has greatly empowered me as an artist, questions remain over the latent dependencies inherent in this relationship. A central aim in this work is to remove themes of technology and control, and instead to offer the audience an experience more sensory, more personal, funnier, gentler and more terrifying, perhaps more humane, than my previous explorations of performance. The narrative itself is highly fractured as a result of George’s experiments, and this ability to move through eras is reflected in the use of modern technology, digitised film-stock dating from the 1930s, circuit-bent instruments and primitive audio equipment like the contact mic. This is to say, our tools are located both in the past and present and aim to suggest a strategy for practice in the future. The original brief of this work was based around circuit bending, and I hope that we were successful in extending this concept to a metaphorical level as well as using it as a purely technological technique. |
