release date: 22 June 2021
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This episode presents interpretations of sound works I developed for participatory performances in the Platform series staged at Articulate project space in Sydney’s inner-western suburb of Leichhardt.
Curated by Tess de Quincey and collaborators including Linda Luke, Marcus Whale and others, Platform is a salon of performances by artists from dance, theatre, visual art, ceramics, performance, sound art, and music. The pieces are curated to flow together, occupying every available space within the three-level building, surrounding streets and nearby urban infrastructure.
At Tess’s invitation I’ve created performances and performance scores for Platform in which the other artists volunteer to be unrehearsed players in sonic events using post-consumer containers from which sound is teased using breath, hand-made mallets, motions, pebbles, gravity, etc.
All performers enact a simple instruction for a loosely determined time. For example: Walk around slowly, hold a small empty bottle in each hand. Blow across the mouth of each bottle to create a tone. Listening to other players, choose when to make a sound and how long it lasts. Continue for ten minutes.
Another performance, for two people, involved making a pair of 4-metre long tubes from plastic water bottles and hanging them between the first and ground floors. Quartz pebbles were dropped into the top to rhythmically rattle down and drop into large water-cooler bottles on the ground floor – one filled with water, the other empty.
These and my other Platform projects explore the production of sonic events through simple gestures. My interest is to explore the intentional production of randomised sound fields that parallel those naturally produced sound fields we experience and respond to as intriguing, emotive or pleasurable, usually involving some captivating stochastic or aleatoric musicality arising from transitory natural processes or aggregations of communicating creatures.
Thanks to Tess de Quincey and all the performers in the Platform series who generously enacted these works.
photos: top right clockwise – Heidrun Lohr, Gary Warner, Mayu Kanamori