sonic surrounds

Over the easter weekend, Metasense (Somaya Langley and myself) played 3 sound sets in the massively reverberant Gunpowder Gallery at The Great Escape festival. The festival site is Newington Armory and our venue was one of three bunker-like chambers originally used for storing explosives and masterfully set up by Lynda Roberts and her crew of artists.

Room one hosted an array of photographic projections from strobes housed in ammunition boxes, firing flashes of image across the chamber walls and arched ceiling; triggered in apparently random sequence by an old drum machine; accompanied by thin, eerie drones. Room two exhibited colour data projections of human body volumetric data, the architectonic arrangement reinforced by odd surface angles and grids cutting the projected image into polyhedral pixels. Room three housed sound performances for several hours each evening, with fantastic gobo lighting creating a cone and two scanning fans of light across the length of the room towards the entrance, so the viewer walks into the sound chamber approaching this point of infinity at the centre of the beams.

photos: Somaya Langley

Over the three nights, Metasense played two sets of field recordings and a set of bangin’, lush, delay-saturated detroity beats…. all great fun to adapt to the long reverberation of the chamber (5+ seconds?). Any fast sounds were blurred into each other, so drones, blips and earth-shaking bass drops were particularly satisfying to play. A highlight of our sets was the use of anti-war rally recordings: appropriately dissonant to the building’s former purpose. Our audience was mainly transitory, as expected given the gallery presentation of the space, though we had many people stay and listen for quite a while, laying down, sitting up against the walls, or playing with the light. Placed on the floor in the centre of the room, away from the desk of equipment, we also found the performance nicely interactive, with punters checking out what we were doing and asking questions or just flaking out in their charming festival wastedness. It was an enjoyable way to perform.

photo by Etienne Deleflie

Other highlights of the sets - by a collective of 5 or so other soundies - were the lovely use of glitch and loud micro snippets of cds in a set by Dan Conway; an incredible set of long toned singing by a mens choir brought in also by Conway; also a set by Kerry and Lynda of great vocoded drones with bleep and radio transmissions run through a roland space echo. All up, the space was totally inspirational, and the reverberation massive fun to play with, to inform the selection of sounds and production.

a catch up post: some pix from the recent demux audiovisual (dvd) label launch at sydney’s magnificent new carriageworks venue, which included some particularly pleasurable work by peter newman, who superimposed his visuals onto the already deeply layered patina of the ex railway workshop walls, adding constant textural movements such as the sublime shimmers of continuous gas flows across the projection… very nice work by all the artists who performed new live works on the evening.

Some other recent and impending events I’m involved with:

A new version of my Sound Transit radio composition was commissioned by ABC Radio National and went to air on 11th Feb 2007. The piece includes wonderful narrations by some of the internationally-diverse field recording artists whose sounds I included. Some information and the podcast is available for a few more weeks here. Update: Derek Holzer has kindly hosted the file on sound transit servers here, along with several other compositions of sound transit material listed in a sound transit forum post.

On Monday at the Feb 2007 issue of Dorkbot Sydney, I’m doing a talk about building and using my DIY ambisonic microphone, and maybe a brief performance.

On Wednesday I’m doing a live improv performance at the first 2007 Loud Is Boring at the Front Gallery in Canberra. According to the blurb I wrote, I’ll be “processing field recordings of a stochastic nature, influenced mildly by the chaotic logic and flux of the Shanghai metropolis”. Expect to hear the sounds of the tourist tunnel under the bund, demolition of buildings, taxi and window recordings, and other snippets of random audio along the themes of china and random textures. I’m not going to be totally purist about my sources for this, although all sounds will be based on my own original recordings, played and processed in my own Pd patchwork.

 Sound Transit commissioned piece for ABC Radio National, by Nick Mariette with additional production by John Jacobs: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

An article by Stephen Jones in the latest RealTime magazine on the recent Engage symposium at Creativity and Cognition Studios has a nice mention of my paper (which was presented by Somaya Langley).

Other problems that disrupt the illusion are more technical. For example, Nick Mariette has been exploring the Audio Nomad system (based on work by Nigel Helyer). Sound is superimposed on objects in the gallery or public space and the question becomes how well the received sound relate to the visual sites upon which it is superimposed; ie how good is the tracking and the sound rendering for source position fidelity. Here the science enters; Mariette is involved in experimental work in psychoacoustics within virtual sound environments.

Premiere of One If By Will - a new film by EOR Media (Matt Fallon and Marisa Martin) - at Electric Shadows cinema in Canberra this evening, with music by MetaSense (Somaya Langley and Nick Mariette)

(via criticalsenses blog)