Had the very great pleasure to enjoy a day and night of cutting edge sonic arts practice and performance yesterday as part of AV10. Spent the day with Jamie Allen and Will Schrimshaw at the Resonator workshop, followed by an evening of performance at the Star and Shadow cinema and bar in Ouseburn.
During the day, I was able to hear Kanta Horio and Ann Rosen discuss their work. I was struck by the deceptive simplicity of what they had to say, which enveloped some very profound thinking about sound. Kanta spoke about found objects, reducing parameters, how this led him to naming sound-without-sound, sound as an energy driving objects. Ann spoke about how sound can be used against itself, like sound to negate sound to produce a variety of silence. Both presentations of work and ideas were thought-provoking and whet my appetite to spend the rest of the day creating a simple square wave oscillator, built as a simple harp. With either copper speaker wire or polymer pick-ups, you can vary the tone sent to an amp chip and on to a speaker. What will be interesting over time is how this output might be sent to a software visualisation tool or music playback system.
In the evening, we gathered to see Kanta perform, which he did with incredible deftness and without artifice or obfuscation, using a wide range of sound making materials: speakers and solenoids on brushes, springs from microphone stands connected to a hand drill above a ceramic dish, ball bearings inside glass bowls. The parts were mesmerising, and the sound beautifully subtle, like small streams or tributaries making their way into a meandering river of sound. I enjoyed it enormously.
He was followed by Atsuhiro Ito, performing light and sound, via effects pedals and Marshall amps. This was brutal mathematics, rich stuttering techno tones, washing out, bursts and fragments of light to which you were drawn but had to sometimes look past. Balancing often on one leg, barefoot, hood covering his concentration, there was as much concentration from this master musician of his material even though it seemed a monolith. Both he and Kanta before him showed that improvisational electronic music has an amazing force, expressed this night in two very different ways.
