66 east installation
Since I'm not going to the UK, I'll be in Holland for a bit longer, which is a good thing, as I'm working on a sound installation at 66 East Gallery in Amsterdam, opening on April 29. It's a collaboration with Seamus Cater, we've been given free reign to do with a room whatever we want. Fun!
At first I was totally conflicted about how to approach it, I know fuck about how to deal with making visual art, and felt the need to bring in an artist or architect for the project. After all, we've got all this space, let's paint it green and pink, or wrap everything in tin foil, maybe make a new ceiling, put in a fireplace and a bar! We've got to do something to keep the people interested in the music...
But now I've gone to the opposite extreme, I don't want to make music as a second-tier prop for visuals. This project is going to be just about the sound. So we're making a small public sound factory: a room with sort of old time-worn white walls, a brown traffic-stained wooden floor, and two podiums on opposite sides of the room, each with a high quality speaker. In the middle of the room, a microphone will hang, with a collection of metal junk, and toys underneath it. The sound is internally fed-back noise subtly mixed and sampled with the sounds fed into the microphone, combined with occasional metal bell sounds, running over a larger time-frame, all sauteed and stirred inside a pismo powerbook. It's a room for people to play with sound, to scream and make their own noise, or create a different sonic atmosphere by playing with a piece of metal junk left out from the flea market down the street.
More on composers feeling stiffed by a predominantly visual society, by Chris Penrose