Joel Stern Thesis
Joel Stern N5335612
KK51 Masters of Arts (Research)
Creative Industries Faculty
Thesis: Tracing the influence of non-narrative film and expanded cinema sound on experimental music.
Supervisor – Dr. Julian Knowles
ORDER OF CONTENTS
Keywords: Expanded Cinema, Film Sound, Experimental Music, Audiovisual, Synchronisation, Michael Snow, Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock, Film Performance, Field Recording, Montage, Abject Leader.
Table of Contents:
1. Purpose, Scope, Significance and Evaluation of the work (pp. 1-5)
2. The Filmmaker/Composer: New forms of synchronisation in the films of Michael Snow, Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock. (pp. 6-26)
3. Abject Leader: what makes these fields Shiver? Refracted forms of synchronisation in the films performances of Abject Leader (pp. 27-33)
4. Objects, Masks, Props: Hearing, capturing, assembling, disseminating sounds shaped by the aesthetic, conceptual and material influence of experimental film. (pp. 34-38)
Creative works for submission:
1. Abject Leader ‘What Makes These Fields Shiver?’ DVD. A folio of audiovisual screen works and performance documentation made in collaboration with filmmaker Sally Golding.
2. Joel Stern ‘Objects, Masks, Props’ CD. A set of eight sonic compositions made by Joel Stern.
“The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.”
Signature:
Date: One
Purpose, Scope, Significance and Evaluation of the work.
The purpose of this study
This study surveys and interrogates key conceptual frameworks and artistic practises that flow through the distinct but interconnected traditions of non- narrative film and experimental music, and examines how these are articulated in my own creative sound practise. The key task is to trace and unpack the translation / transmutation of ideas that cross between the two traditions, with particular emphasis on the influence of non-narrative film aesthetics and approaches to materials on the field of experimental music. The central concept concerns audiovisuality, the relation of sound to image; how this dynamic / dialectic is configured in the work of key film artists, who also compose music; filmmaker / composers, and how the concept might function in an audio only context. Further questions of the study are ‘how do practitioners of non-narrative film AND avant-garde or experimental music configure and strategize the relation between these two practises, and how do these audiovisual configurations articulate in their creative work? In reflecting analytically on my own practise, the study then asks, how do sound / image concepts from experimental film find articulation in experimental music?
The study draws upon three dialogues with key filmmaker / composers, selected for their idiosyncratic artistic practises and their pronounced influence on my own creative work. The interviews, which function as case studies, seek to reflect on the practise of audiovisuality in key works, investigating how relationships between sound and image are conceptualised in practice; how combinations and configurations of sound and image function in the works. I’ve chosen the term filmmaker / composer as opposed to media artist / audiovisual artist consciously and strategically. I wish to begin from a point of foregrounding the distinction between aural and visual compositional practises in order to highlight strategies and approaches to recombination. The terms media artist / audiovisual artist speak strongly to an a priori conflation of sound and image as interchangeable media practises. The filmmaker / composers interviewed are Tony Conrad, Michael Snow and Phill Niblock. These three practitioners are strongly associated with 16mm film, an artistic medium that captures image independently from sound. The combination of the two elements thus always stems from strategic and conceptual positioning. A conscious ‘approach to audiovisuality’.
This study draws from the analytical tools utilised by contemporary film studies for analysing sound-image relationships, in particular Michel Chion’s terminology for examining audiovisuality in narrative cinema, but speaks also to the need for expanded critical approaches to audiovisuality in the work of filmmaker / composers, and the soundscape / noise musicians whose work bears the influence of this tradition. The creative works examined in the study suggest a
1 need for extended forms of audiovisual analysis.
A key interpretive concept and central node of this study is synchronicity. The study seeks to identify and describe innovative forms of synchronicity, appropriate to work in which abstraction, improvisation, indeterminacy, and experimentation impact on audiovisual relationships in unusual and unpredictable ways. A number of recent surveys, exhibitions, and studies of both historical and contemporary audiovisual work have focused on ‘visual music’, a hugely influential tradition encompassing painting, film, sculpture, installation and other forms, driven by visual artists striving to replicate in the image the formal, temporal and aesthetic characteristic of music. This study diverges from ‘visual music’ based investigations by foregrounding practices that problematise and critique the ‘synesthetic’ or sensory basis of synchronicity in ‘visual music.’
The synchronicities examined in this study are characterised by instability, ambiguity or disarrangement, obtuse structural / material strategies, temporal and spatial dissolutions, and phantom or imaginary correspondences. The works speak to sensory demarcation or disconnect rather than liquidity and conflation. The recombinant audiovisuality observed in the works may be ‘free associative’; a ‘free synchronisation’ that demands of the audio-spectator an active role as interpreter.
As part of this research, I undertake critical reflection on my own practices as an expanded cinema practitioner, sound artist, and a curator / researcher of audiovisual performance. I examine how my own creative work embodies concepts of audiovisuality drawn from both experimental film and music. I undertake close textual analysis of my work as part of the film / sound collaborative duo Abject Leader (with Sally Golding), focussing on the blurring / slippage of ideas and materials central to the projection of images and sound.
In this study I listen closely to my own suite of compositions, ‘Objects. Masks. Props.’ asking how the visual is rendered through these sonic works, how sound can resonate an implied visualisation? Images and visual scenarios are articulated as a manifestation of the aural, conjured into existence through sonic cues and details. A relation is formed between what we hear and our imagination of the visual context; both the physical spaces from which sounds are drawn, and the sequence of visual events implied by the sonic narrative. The analysis refers to the critical reception for the works, citing reviews that describe in detail the visual dimension inherent in the compositions, proposing a reading of the compositions as a form of ‘image-less experimental film’
The scope of the study
The research comprises a folio of creative practice-based work with an exegetical component of approximately 15,000 words.
1. A series of dialogues with three filmmaker / composers, Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock and Michael Snow. Each has produced historically significant works in both fields of film and sound. The interviews interrogate the understanding of audiovisuality, the relation and nature of
2 correspondences between film and sound, and the forms of synchronisation employed with reference to key works by the artists.
2. Abject Leader ‘What Makes These Fields Shiver?’ DVD. A folio of audiovisual screen works and performance documentation made in collaboration with filmmaker Sally Golding. These works embody the key research questions by investigating, problematising and reflecting upon experimental forms of synchronicity. A methodology of reflective practice and textual analysis are employed in relation to the creative work.
3. Joel Stern ‘Objects, Masks, Props’ CD. A set of eight sonic compositions designed to conjure imaginary visual scenarios and spaces through the use of environmental sound, spatialisation, subliminal and direct narrative sound, and temporal manipulation. PA methodology of reflective practice and textual analysis are employed in relation to the creative work.
How does the creative practice intersect with the analytical, textual and reflective research?
In developing a research methodology I have taken care not to compromise aspects of my creative practice that might be characterised as inconsistent with, or unsuited to a process of methodical scrutiny. In specific ways my creative work is principally resistant to formal research methodologies. Artistic strategies including free improvisation, intuitive experimentation, indeterminacy and chance could be accurately described as anti-systematic. My works develop in a range of informal and formal spaces including recording studios, natural and urban environments and lounge-rooms. There is a central uncertainty in the combination of approaches and spaces vital to ongoing innovation in my practise. Whilst it is possible to unpack elements of the creative process using appropriate tools and methodologies, it is ‘the creative work’ produced through these processes that ultimately is fundamentally necessary to draw the many threads into a consistent whole.
The interviews with filmmaker / composers in this study also constitute a degree of practice-led research. I situate the conception, development and delivery of the interviews as creative ‘work’, which can be critically reflected upon. My research methodology situates ‘the work’ and its exegesis within a “fluid, anti-hierarchical structure, which promotes the combination of different research techniques to form new styles of enquiry.” (Ryan 2005) The dialectical relationship between the ‘work’ and exegesis generates ‘problems and interpretations’ relevant to the field of inquiry. This methodology functions as an ongoing process of creative practice, autobiographical documentation of that practice and its context, reflexive inquiry, and broad contextual and critical review.
Analysis of this sort inevitably constitutes an appropriation; a struggle to theorise that which, in some important ways, is untranslatable. The appropriate strategy has been to formulate questions that can be explored through both interviews with important practitioners and new creative artistic works. The key questions include; ‘How do experimental filmmakers conceptualise their practice when it
3 comprises sounds? How do these articulations and explorations inform a critical reflection on my own ‘cinema for the ear’’?
The series of creative works included in this study address the questions through embodiment and interpretation, rather than referring to it directly or offering a definitive answer. ‘The works’ embody and interpret the research problem that is articulated more explicitly in the exegesis.
Additionally, the exegesis interprets and articulates the problems embodied and generated in ‘the works’. In this sense, it is ‘the work’ and the exegesis together which cyclically pose problems and interpretations relevant as research, based on their dialectical relationship. A function of my exegesis then, is to frame the work in terms of “the advancement of knowledge, understanding and insight”(Biggs 2003), to describe how the work approaches these tasks, in a manner which may be applied by other creative practitioners and researchers.
A further function of my exegesis is to ground the work in the more traditional quantitative method of textual content analysis. My own work is informed by a variety of film, music, theoretical texts, fictional texts, and mass media. As a curator of audiovisual art, an understanding of the key theoretical issues and aesthetic concerns in these fields has followed from the gathering and analysing of a broad range of material.
In moving creatively into our practice we are fundamentally concerned to develop new knowledge, to challenge old beliefs and to speculate on the "what ifs" of our concepts and processes. For the arts practitioner, this new knowledge is made in the context of and challenge to the history, theory and practices of the relevant field. (Stewart 2001)
A key issue for this cyclical model, where ‘work’ and exegesis illuminate ‘problems and interpretations’, is the subsequent difficulty defining parameters. This research methodology ultimately may not conform to requirements of traditional models that provide definitive answers to predetermined questions. However, this ‘deficiency’ must be considered contextually; practice-led research is subject to different but related complex cultural pressures to those of traditional research.
There is therefore a correspondingly different set of functions for research in Art and Design which is emergent rather than established, i.e. that of reflecting on, questioning, and re-creating systems of value in relationship to cultural change and new patterns of habitation and production. These inevitably include questioning the function of Art in Culture from the perspective of the practitioner. (Douglas 2000)
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REFERENCES
Biggs, D. M. A. R. "The role of ‘the work’ in research." University of Hertfordshire 2003.
Douglas, A. "Research through Practice: Positioning the Practitioner as Researcher." Working Papers in Art and Design. 2000
Ryan, A. "Connecting Two Research Strategies: A hybrid model." TEXT Vol 9 (No 1). 2005
Stewart, R. "Practice vs Praxis: Constructing Models for Practitioner-Based Research." TEXT 5(2). 2001
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Two - The Filmmaker/Composer
New forms of synchronisation in the films of Michael Snow, Tony Conrad, Phill Niblock.
Dialogues with three filmmaker / composers
This chapter investigates the key concepts, functions and specific configurations of audiovisuality in the work of three key filmmaker / composers operating largely outside the narrative tradition.
The study and analysis of audiovisuality in film has traditionally focussed on narrative models or forms of filmmaking. Key theorists including Michel Chion, Rick Altman, Elizabeth Weis and Philip Brophy have listened closely and productively to film sound primarily to interrogate its ability to produce narrative meaning and development. Chion’s influential terminology outlined in Audiovision, a key film sound text, explicates examples largely through the frame of naturalistic ‘storytelling’; how the mechanisms and versions of synchronisation and spatialisation serve to generate narrative meaning. In the context of narrative cinema, core concepts in audiovisuality can be mapped with a high degree of clarity and confidence that stem from familiarity with key formal conventions. Audiovisual meaning, function and effect can be understood in relation to the sequence of structured narrative events.
Michael Snow, Tony Conrad and Phill Niblock are all key figures in what may be termed non-narrative filmmaking. The specific works discussed here deal with representational and structural modes that depart from narrative convention in a range of innovative ways. Snow, Conrad and Niblock are of course also important figures in the history of avant-garde or experimental music. A key question asked in this chapter is ‘how practitioners of non-narrative film AND avant-garde or experimental music configure and strategise the relation between these two practises, and how these audiovisual configurations articulate in their creative work.
Snow sees the creative problematisation of narrative film-sound convention as an almost moral imperative of his practise.
“The main impetus in movie-making has been towards naturalism and realism, and sound is one of the most effective means of generating belief. When you see those mouths move and the person talks, it’s the most convincing thing. But since it is possible to manipulate both elements (sound and image), it’s kind of called for.”(Snow 2008)
Through a sustained ‘manipulation’, of audiovisuality, constituted through decades of formal, conceptual and practical experiment, Snow and other filmmaker / composers have instituted a range of practices that speak to a radical reconfiguration of audiovisuality. These new forms of audiovisuality cast the sound / image dialectic as a site for testing strategies that range from chaotic and indeterminate to mathematical and structural-material, from freely improvised to
6 the ideo-sensory and synaesthesic. The works discussed in this study perform a rupturing or dissolution of narrative audiovisual logic in favour of something more modular and abstract, a set of ambiguous audiovisual arrangements or correspondences that systematically unpack the conventions of causality, spatial / temporal meaning, and synchronicity. Through these dialogues with Michael Snow, Tony Conrad and Phill Niblock I’ve attempted to map this ‘unpacking’ of sound and image and to examine its strategies and approaches. In addition to exploring the aesthetic and conceptual audiovisual representations of each practitioner, the interviews, as a set, seek to connect characteristic strategies, looking for overlap and continuity between the artists.
The dialogues also approach practical issues in the production of sound and image that feed into artistic representations – how discretely are sound and image separated as technical / mechanical processes? How do these technical processes co-evolve as interlocking systems, feeding back into conceptual and aesthetic outcomes? The three filmmaker / composers are clearly associated with artistic modes of production (16mm film, analogue instrumentation) that are pre- digital, representing a relatively “hand-made” approach, highly tactile, crafted or artisanal in relation to contemporary digital work. The dialogues speak to the variety of programmatic and generative processes characteristic of those tools, and how these analogue approaches produce specific audiovisual outcomes that, in some cases lay significant ground for experimental post-digital audiovisuality.
Beyond the eyes and the ears (the receptors of sensory data), an all-important terminal (the brain) connects the intersecting sense channels, forming a multidirectional web of stimulations and perceptions, none of which are sense- demarcated or isolated from the outset. (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994) This conceptual / physiological premise is a useful entry point in an attempt to outline the contours of the extraordinarily nuanced audiovisual relationships in the works of Conrad, Snow and Niblock. They have each produced work that drives to “reunite the senses through a holistic approach to the representation of human experience on film.” (Jordan 2003) Indeed, Snow describes his film, Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, as ‘a composition aimed at exciting the two halves of the brain into recognition’ via the eyes and ears. (Snow 1977). Alternatively, each artist has attempted to sever the connection, or problematise assumptions about how interconnected the aural and visual functions are. The methodologies and principles underpinning this drive both towards and against sensory unification are a key subject of these dialogues.
Tony Conrad – ‘Ideo-sensory correspondences’
The Flicker (1966) A film by Tony Conrad with homemade synthesizer soundtrack by Tony Conrad, Black and White 16mm film.
Straight and Narrow (1970) A film by Tony Conrad and Beverley Grant with soundtrack by John Cale and Terry Riley, Black and White 16mm film.
Tony Conrad conceived of The Flicker, his first film, as alternately a science
7 fiction film (“but not the kind where people dressed as robots fall in love”), a “disruption of abstract art” and as “ideo-sensory phenomena”, an intrusion into interior spaces “where totally different rules apply.” (Conrad 2005) This emphasis on perceptual interiority links the film with the specific concerns and techniques of physiological art forms including ‘Biomusic’ (Rosenboom and Paul 1986). Yet where Biomusic’ s project is to generate sound from natural processes (for example, EEG brainwaves in the case of Alvin Lucier, or photosynthesis in the case of UK sound artist Michael Prime), Conrad’s work begins with the inorganic, attacking and manipulating the perceptual processes through intense frequencies of audiovisual stimulation. Essentially The Flicker is a series of alternating pure black and white film frames projected in sequences of rapid acceleration and deceleration. Conrad wasn’t the first to explicitly explore the approach; Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960) and Dwinell Grant’s Colour Sequence (1943) are earlier examples. But where these previous films could be described as objects of ‘cool’ minimalist contemplation, The Flicker is deliberately aggressive and confrontational, specifically setting out to distort sensory perception, resulting in the reconfiguration of the boundaries of the (film) frame, a construct Conrad associated with institutional and bland abstract art. An epilepsy warning, faintly satiric in style, stating that a physician should be in attendance, is Conrad’s tactic for weeding out squeamish, uncommitted spectators. In fact, very few audience members have suffered an epileptic fit, although ‘photogenic migraines’, lasting a week, have apparently been more common. (Conrad 2005)
Experiencing The Flicker is comparable in many ways to listening to Conrad’s minimal music of the same period. It is a mesmerizingly complex work examining audiovisual changes and transitions pitched at the threshold of perceptual recognition. Conrad regarded this minimalism as a matter of
…Tactics and approach, if I were a writer interested in love stories, I could approach it in a blunt or roundabout way, it could be Proust or Kathy Acker, but in my choices of the time, the idea of working with a very pared-down palette of resources was the progressive or forward looking way to go, as a reaction to other things in the air at the time, the construction of a minimalist approach was actively in process, this tactic of simplifying and going for basic elements was a good idea, that was good for then, I’m not sure it’s necessarily good for always, although I would say that if you cope with too many issues at one time, people may be amused but they won’t have their faces really rubbed in the most important issues.(Conrad 2005)
The soundtrack was created with a homemade synthesizer built by Conrad (see appendix for an image of the electronic circuit) following direct inspiration from Stockhausen’s 1960 work Kontakte. In The Flicker soundtrack, a stream of metronomic stereo pulses shift in pitch according to the ear’s proximity to speakers and the geometry of the listening environment, creating an acoustical virtual reality to augment and complement the hypnotic and possibly hallucinatory effects of the flickering light. This radical spatialisation of the sonic environment maintains focus for the audio-spectator on the internal processes of perception. Where one listens from, the ‘point of audition’ drastically alters how the ‘auditor’ hears. This formal sonic principal synchronises conceptually with the visual counterpoint of ‘expanded cinema’, cinema which moves beyond the confines of the screen-space into the expanded space inhabited by the spectator, creating a multiplicity of possible receptions. Cosmic film artist Jordan Belson described Vortex, his 1957 Morrison Planetarium audiovisual performances as transforming
8 an entire theatre into an exquisite instrument. (Youngblood 1970). Remarkably, Conrad achieves this visual ‘expansion’ within a traditional model of projection onto a single flat screen. Paul Sharits, the American filmmaker/composer whose stroboscopic ‘flicker’ films have an ‘ideo-sensory’ intensity almost equivalent to Conrad’s, commented on his need to work with “multiple-screen, installation pieces (“locations”); in order to approach the complexity of music’s spatial dimension.” (Sharits 1978)
Conrad applied complementary ‘flickering’ structural arrangements to both sound and image producing a kind of ‘phantom’ synchronicity, a kind of harmonic relation (Mussman 1966) that stems from the interconnectedness of the senses, which Chion describes as ‘transsensoriality’.
“There is no sensory given that is demarcated and isolated from the outset. Rather, the senses are channels, highways more than territories or domains” Michel Chion, Audio-Vision. (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994)
The audio and vision in The Flicker are roughly ‘synchronised’ at a perceptual level of the spectator but not technically on the filmstrip; rather the perception of synchronisation occurs as a result of shared formal (off and on, off and on) and textural (sharp pulses, flashes) conditions applied to both sound and image. Conrad has commented on the perceptions and misperceptions of synchronicity in the film:
People who see that film, The Flicker, which doesn’t have any pictures but is all in some sense rhythm, they hear the sound, a loud vibrating pulse, and tend to think there is a connection between the two. In fact, the visual pulses, the flicker rhythms, get slower and slower and slower, and people think they’re all synchronised and connected, but actually, oddly, the auditory rhythms get faster and faster and they’re completely independent. (Conrad 2005)
Chion’s concept of temporal animation (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994) becomes useful here as The Flicker manipulates our sense of audiovisual time in a variety of unconventional ways. The sonic acceleration overpowers our perception of the visual deceleration, so, in this sense, the sound temporally animates the image. The intense but unstable meter of the rhythmic pulsing, and the detailed high synthetic frequencies create a feeling of temporal free-fall, an inability to precisely measure the regularity of either image or sound due to their extreme dislocation from any stable point of reference.
In The Flicker, the absence of colour or tone in the image is analogous to the absence of tonal or over tonal complexity in the sound, though Conrad’s careful manipulation of order and frequency in both the image and sound produces a phantom sensation of colour and tone. However, In Straight and Narrow (1970), Conrad’s subsequent exploration in flickering audiovisuality made in collaboration with Beverly Grant, this principle of phantom perception undergoes a process of untangling; the audiovisual elements are separated into clearer isolation. Conrad selected a raucous improvisational piece by ongoing collaborators Terry Riley and John Cale, improvising on percussion and keyboard with the effect of producing a “structural film gone funky”(Conrad 2005). In striking similarity with the op art of Bridget Riley, Straight and Narrow uses black and white stripes to produce the visual perception of spinning shapes and colour bursts.
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Straight and Narrow’s audiovisuality is distinguishable from The Flicker’s ‘ideo- sensory modality’, in that its soundtrack complements the image in an almost traditional, emotionally contiguous sense. The Riley/Cale soundtrack generates a flowing, expansive atmosphere, clearly connecting with psychedelic cultural tropes signalling euphoria, elation, and heightened consciousness or lucidity. The images in Straight and Narrow remain unremittingly abstract, yet the symbolic projection created by the sound clearly distinguishes it aesthetically from the Morse-code austerity of The Flicker. The effect chimes discordantly with Chion’s distinction between empathetic sound, which expresses participation in the feeling of the scene, by taking on a visual environments’ rhythm, tone and phrasing, and anempathetic sound which remains indifferent to its diegetic frame. (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994) In Straight and Narrow there are clear rhythmic, tonal and phrasing parallels between sound and image, however the ‘emotion’ is largely projected onto the abstract image by the sound, rather than reinforced empathetically. The strong emotional content is sonically ‘added’ to an emotionally ambiguous stream of images. Whereas The Flicker’s audiovisuality is cognitively manipulative, Straight and Narrow’s audiovisuality is emotionally manipulative.
Interview with Tony Conrad May 20th 2005 at Anthology Film Archive, New York City, USA
TONY CONRAD - In relation to connection between film and sound, I was first involved with film through sound, because I didn’t have any interest or attraction to being a filmmaker, then having some contact with Jack Smith when he was working on his early films, Scotch Tape and Flaming Creatures, I got roped into doing some sound work, and it was funny the way that that happened, I recently did a piece on epiphanies and described the experience I had when I mixed up this record of pop music for jack and showed it in the theatre along with his film Scotch Tape, a 5 minute film, but the way that the sound worked in relation to the picture was so astonishing to me I couldn’t believe it. The way I would describe it is, in the presence of the picture, the sound just went right into my spirit, it bypassed all the critical faculties, and just started talking to me emotionally, in a very direct way that was completely surprising and unexpected, this emotional way was something that I was interested in, because I’ve always been interested in emotional connections to music, I mean, is this not what draws you to music? Why bother if it doesn’t have some emotional connection. I had become very convinced by John Cage that the connection between sounds and emotion were largely up to you the listener, you could pick the sounds arbitrarily and once you got the right attitude the emotion would flow from that, so seeing that film so radically affect the emotional approachability of the sound, made film enormously intriguing to me. What Jack Smith then did, because I’d worked on the last film he wrote me into the next film in the credits, he would give you credits for the last thing you did in the next film, so I had this credit in the sound for Flaming Creatures so I said, “Jack as long as I’m in the credits why don’t I produce the soundtrack for the film”, so following his guidance and direction I produced this soundtrack which was a mishmash of pop records and such. I contributed some of it, but the whole thrust and sensibility was really his. I had become fascinated by the ways that a sound and picture could work together to produce some kind of viable outcome and it was clear on the basis of my modest experience that rhythm had a lot to do with how the picture and sound linked. It was a while after
10 that, in fact, only after I started making my own films and music and putting them together, that I began to realise that this relation of rhythm in the sound and events in the picture, that is, the demarcation of activity in the visual sense, was actually fairly loose, as in it’s not a simple matter where you have a beat in the sound and a beat of image. No, it’s something really quite different, it’s more like there are visual rhythms of some sort, which I’m not going to go into here, go find them out for yourself, and then there are sonic rhythms too. If you have a rhythm in music, like a march rhythm, well you modify that somewhat and suddenly you have a tango. They may be very close together but the way they reach out and engage your body can be very different even with just a slight modification, the basic thing that people register about rhythm is how it engages with the body, with feelings, linking back to the emotion resonance, and that is the crosslink into the picture, some kind of emotional resonance of whether you’ve got an up- tempo feeling or not, and that is speaking very broadly.
JOEL STERN - You are talking about visual and musical rhythms, and The Flicker is an exploration of those things. In fact it reduces everything to pure rhythm without any representational aspect.
TONY CONRAD - People who see that film, The Flicker, which doesn’t have any pictures but is all in some sense rhythm, they hear the sound, a loud vibrating pulse, and tend to think there is a connection between the two. In fact, the visual pulses, the flicker rhythms, get slower and slower and slower, and people think there all synchronized and connected, but actually, oddly, the auditory rhythms get faster and faster and they’re completely independent.
JOEL STERN - Were you interested in having a counterpoint between image and sound, and what sort of perceptual outcome would develop?
TONY CONRAD - No, it was more a situation where I was going from my sense of how these rhythms in the two registers would be legible on some subjective plane, and the actual rhythms, the actual micro details, are really not that important. The fact is if you have some kind of rhythm in the soundtrack it will match up to the rhythms in the picture no matter what you do, even if it’s off. All that is happening on some higher or lower level. There was another element in the particular situation of The Flicker. I was dealing with visual rhythms that happen in between the rate at which the images fuse into one picture, as they do because of persistence of vision. If the images go very fast they fuse into a continuous picture, if they are very slow you perceive the changes clearly, but there is something in between these two perceptual modes where the images is changing fast enough where you don’t separate it but it doesn’t fuse, the brain picks it up as flicker. It does weird things to your head related to the mechanism of how you deal with images in nerve terms. You get around the rate of firing of the nerves in your brain and you get another whole effect that I was very interested in, that’s why it’s called The Flicker. Its natural or whatever, it has to do with the particular rate. The same rate obviously affects the same kind of systems in sound. We perceive individual events like drum beats, you hear them as rhythms just like shots in the visual realm, but if you speed up a rhythm and get it going too fast to follow, like 20-30 beats per second, you begin to hear it as a note, and if you go higher, like if you record a metronome and speed it up as I did when I was a teenager, you get it up high enough it becomes a pitch, and in between the pitch and the rhythm there is an ambiguous region of sound, so what
11 I was doing in The Flicker was coordinating these two things, flicker and the region between rhythm and pitch. Maybe you wouldn’t call this an emotional connection or correspondence, but then again once you are dealing with this sort of input, there are other things you can say. You can say, changing the brain, where you feel emotion is creating emotion. Just like, here hold out your hand..
(Conrad stabs my hand with a butter knife)
I’m sorry I didn’t mean to bring blood out. This knife isn’t that sharp. It hurt though didn’t it? But anyway, this moment of pain, you could think of that as an emotion. An emotion, a feeling, something that happens in your brain? I think all these things have a commonality but it’s not really clear if they are separate. Back to the issue, another way of describing the connection. When you have an experience that affects the way you have experience, it draws your attention the internal processes that your body is involved with. This is a state of condition that hypnotherapists are very interested in, most people know something about how hypnosis works, all that this does is focus the subjects attention on the internal feeling they have about their perceptual conditions, as you think about it you go into yourself and think about the process of your own perception, this ‘ideo- sensory modality’, where you are involved in bringing your attention to your own internal processes is a very active mechanism for leading to a different attentional system like trance, where your relationship to all things can shift. I was very fascinated by the idea that it would be possible to access these areas of perception that would enable people to think about how they're experiencing, that’s the kind of thing I think artists do all the time. Art is largely about this process. How am I experiencing colour? That introspective quality is the key feature that goes into all the processes of art, so in that sense there was an emotional linkage, but a kind of meta-emotional linkage.
JOEL STERN - You mentioned composing in the most minimal perceptual register possible, dealing with minute variations.
TONY CONRAD - That’s a matter of tactics and approach, if I were a writer interested in love stories, I could approach it in a blunt or roundabout way, it could be Proust or Kathy Acker, but in my choices of the time, the idea of working with a very pared down palette of resources was the progressive or forward looking way too go, as a reaction to other things in the air at the time, the construction of a minimalist approach was actively in process, this tactic of simplifying and going for basic elements was a good idea, that was good for then, I’m not sure its necessarily good for always, although I would say that if you cope with too many issues at one time, people may be amused but they won’t have their faces really rubbed in the most important issues.
JOEL STERN - Three of your early films are silent - Film Feedback, Count Flickerstein, and Curried Film - is that an aesthetic choice or something that struck you as necessary for other reasons?
TONY CONRAD - It depends on the point you’re trying to make in the work. Film Feedback was made in the course of a certain process, and that process did not involve sound. That process involved shooting and projecting the film at 1/5 of its normal projection rate, so even had I recorded sound it would have been
12 unusable in relation to the image, so conceptually I regarded the film as what was left over after a certain process had been completed, it owes that to the aesthetics of the 60’s and 70’s which foregrounded process as a justifiable parameter of construction in a work, I thought I could add something on to this.
JOEL STERN - There are sonic analogies you could make with Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a Room
TONY CONRAD - There is a huge reservoir of influence that surrounds every period. The idea of process indelibly brands an enormous amount of work from the era and even today. I guess as I went into the 70s my interest had shifted to making attempts to intervene in the critical framework of film art rather than simply entertaining people. The films from the 60’s in New York were much more broadly linked to the underground ethos, making films, showing them at the co- op, the cinematheque, enjoying them as much as anything. You can see this happening in many of those films; this was the main difference between the underground films and the artists’ films, the artists’ films were critically constructed enterprises, less designed as immersive experience, and more understood as objects of contemplation, whereas the underground film community was much more invested in a sensual and experiential hedonism or Epicureanism.
JOEL STERN - Your early work has both of those modes, very contemplative and austere, but effecting on a visceral level.
TONY CONRAD - That’s what The Flicker and Straight and Narrow were really about. Going to this place where artists claimed an austere and contemplative distance, and erasing that distance, bringing the work into some kind of very different sense of involvement, where its not only fun but also reaches right inside your head and starts sucking away at your soul…
(Conrad laughs maniacally for about 30 seconds)
JOEL STERN - I had just that feeling watching Coming Attractions, it seems exceptional in terms of your own filmmaking, like you moved from minimalism to something densely constructed and overflowing with stimulation.
TONY CONRAD - I think of minimalism as a tactic where the maker has a conscious decision to narrow the field of focus and engagement, and opt for a very limited palette. Ok, but at what level is that choice really binding? Just because I made a minimal work doesn’t mean I can’t do something else. But there is an epic or moral sense that inhabits the cultural system that says, if you are doing one thing, you don’t turn around and do the opposite. That was a mainstay of the modernist ethic. Bound up in careerism and marketability even if it wasn’t defined that way, it certainly colours people's outlook on their own careers. The advantage of film was for me, that it was delinked from the whole market system, like if you are going to be a filmmaker it’s the next thing to being crazy, in fact a lot of them were crazy. You’re spending your money in a way that you’re never going to see coming back, building these shadows presumably for fun or something, it’s a goofy thing to think there’s any kind of gain, there was no eco-niche in the cultural system that conveyed any substantial gain, and that
13 meant you didn’t have to give a shit about modernism. You didn’t have to be uncompromising because there was nothing to compromise with, and that was very refreshing. For me a part of that desirability flowed from my early exposure to Cage. Although Cage was a composer to the last he refused to acknowledge the social consequences of his position in a number of very specific ways – but having said that - his work led up to the brink of and implied a region of cultural relativism where there weren’t any rules, where anything is fine, he goes beyond anarchism into relativism, where you can do anything. And everyone tried.
JOEL STERN - The soundtrack in Coming Attractions is mind-bogglingly complex and layered. Was there a lot of deliberation in how it was put together with the images?
TONY CONRAD - With Coming Attractions, we thought we should make a movie. A real movie. The first thing that happened that took our thinking away from what into how, in other words from content to form, from issues of subject matter to the formal side was, we met a young man, Andrew Clammy, he was in high school and he said, ‘Oh, you’re doing a movie? I’ll write the script’, we stood there and he wrote the script. The script was way beyond anything we could possibly do or wanted to do. We said let’s do it, realising the script was impossible. The challenge was how to realise this script, in the knowledge of course that you could produce Shakespeare and come out with Beckett. The focus was then on the roles, as the producer I wanted to explore what kind of things I could do in producing sound work with the excellent artists I knew who were into sound. I was eager for bells, which is how I met Charlemagne Palestine, but it was very general.
Phill Niblock - ‘Free Synchronisation’
The Magic Sun (1966 ) 17 minutes. A film by Phill Niblock - featuring Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra, Black and White 16mm film.
The Movement Of People Working (1973-1991) A film by Phill Niblock with composed soundtracks by Phill Niblock - , Colour 16mm film.
New York and Ghent-based filmmaker / composer Phill Niblock’s work maps out a idiosyncratic and compelling range of experimental approaches to audiovisuality. Through the organisation Experimental Intermedia, in which Niblock has been active since 1973 (becoming director in 1985), his work constitutes a sustained multi-modal investigation of the conceptual, structural and aesthetic space between film, sonic art / composition, dance and other performance modes.
Niblock’s work as a composer of long sustained sonic works since the 1960s retrospectively earned him the tag the ‘forgotten minimalist’ (Pape, Gerard. 2010), a reputation that has been steadily dissolved through increasing international appreciation for his historical and contemporary work. The compositions are minimal in a classic sense, sustaining monolithic focus and structural stasis, in contrast to the repetitionism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Niblock’s composerly concerns are with expansively complex timbrel patterns, harmonic effects, and microtonal inflection achieved through the layering of
14 sustained acoustic and electric tones. These sustained sounds are severed from any from human-gestural origin through the systematic erasure of all attack and decay articulations in the editing stage.
In Niblock’s music, time feels artificially sustained in endless compressing and expanding moments. The works are structurally organised and meticulously arranged, yet for the listener, unaware of the mechanics of production, they resonate most vibrantly perceptually, as an iterative tuning of the senses over a set duration. Composer Robert Ashley poetically describes the effect as hinging on "not fundamentally a change of pitch: it is a change of what the pitch sounds like" (Gilmore 2007).
Niblock’s work as non-narrative film artist and photographer predates his composing by almost a decade. Where his musical compositions could be described as abstract, or non-representation, Niblock’s early moving image work deals with recognisable forms, environments and spatial relationships, drawing heavily from the documentary and landscape traditions. Concerned with movement, both of objects within the frame, and the various forms of film- movement (slow motion, time-lapse etc.), the films have a literalness that contrasts with the music. My interest is in unpacking Niblock’s understanding of the relation between these two tendencies.
“I saw the two things (film and music) as separate, I was just doing both things. As it turned out, I got known as a composer, and the film thing just never had any real visibility” (Gilmore 2007).
While it does remain instructive to preserve the distinction between filming and composing in Niblock’s practice; the question of audiovisuality is complexities in relation to his approach to film sound, which deviates markedly in style and strategy from that of his standalone compositions. Niblock’s early films utilise found sounds – often non-musical - and sounds collaged or sampled from recordings other artists, set in unusual arrangements of asynchronicity to the image.
The Magic Sun (1966-1968) captures Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra rehearsing in a New York warehouse. The images and sounds are both sourced from the same session. Niblock aggressively treated the film image with various processes of photochemical transformation generating an extreme black and white contrast. This technical manipulation of the image produces the unnerving effect of visual distortion, a fluidity between recognisable figuration and pulsing abstraction. We recognize a trumpet, a hand, the shape of a costume, but these images flash alongside a range of others that remain twitching and unidentifiable.
The camera moves rhythmically, darting through abstracted space, accompanying the erratic swing of the band, as if an auxiliary addition to the Arkestra rhythm section. Niblock is not the composer of this music, but he is the arranger of the audiovisual configuration that radically shapes our experience of it. The synchronisation between sound and image is temporally unhinged. Visual gestures are severed from the sounds they would conventionally generate. The audiovisual dynamic could be described as impressionistic rather than causal, rendered through the sympathetic movement of elements that lurch together in
15 common directions, complementary and related, but simultaneously autonomous. The sounds and images flitter closer and further from one another, producing a thrillingly unconventional audiovisuality that mirrors the liberationist ’freedom’ of improvisation. Niblock’s employs a process of ‘free synchronisation’.
The Movement of People Working (1973-1985) films arrive at a different audiovisual outcome, whilst retaining some of the same strategies of synchronisation / a-synchronisation. Employing Niblock's signature drone based musical compositions as a constant aural presence, these films focus visually on the physical repetition of human labour and its attendant gestures. The labour is abstracted from its outcomes (i.e. the production of a finished object) and instead exists as a kind of eternal repeating movement within the frame. In this way, the subject of the image meets the soundtrack conceptually, as a study of the tension between movement and stasis, and the shifting perception of this dialectic over extended durations. The visual drone of endlessly repeated physical movements, the conceptual drone of endless human labour, and the aural drone of sustained clustered tones, meet here in a complex triangulation of form and content. Niblock’s soundtrack can be listened to acoustically as pure abstraction dislocated from any obvious causal relation. But more productively it can be listened to semantically for its signifying metaphorical content that connects strongly to the image.
“I'd say that I'm very influenced by the visual arts of that period, because I was around when some of the minimal stuff was first being shown. I'd go to galleries and I saw a lot of stuff. Those were very important elements. My films are essentially that too, although people don't see them as minimalist because they're so…figurative as well as active. In reality, the work is really stripped of most of the stuff that makes a film. And so filmmakers look at it and say, shit, what can you do with that? The idea was to strip out most of what film is about. To delimit the structure. I think it's easier to say that the music is minimal, rather than the films. It's a little harder to explain how the films are minimal.” (Gilmore 2007).
An interesting experiment would be to connect Niblock’s minimalist compositions with a visual non-objective analogue, for instance a Rothko colour field painting, and to compare the different semantic meaning of the music in this re-oriented context. Indeed, Rothko’s sense of form - "We favour the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal" (Rothko 1943) - connect explicitly to Niblock’s own compositional aesthetic. Placed in relation to a purely abstract counterpoint, Niblock’s’ work would merge seamlessly with the visual music tradition, a minimal cousin perhaps to the Whitney Brothers fractured kaleidoscopic visualisations of early electronic sound. It is instructive however that Niblock shunned this abstract audiovisual orthodoxy that magnetized other artists working with similar materials.
“One problem with the film "thing" was that most of the experimental filmmakers wanted to make abstract stuff. But I came from photography – I started doing photography in 1960, so I'd had years of doing that, was well into making photography; and the influences there were really realistic. Edward Weston was really a big influence. I never liked Ansell Adams. So I was always interested in real images and found abstract stuff boring. That influenced what I filmed too. So it just happened that I didn't hang out with them, I hung out more with music
16 people and I became known in that world, and never really participated in the experimental scene in film other than tangentially.“ (Gilmore 2007).
Niblock is notorious for his reluctance to speak directly about his work, or to offer an interpretative paradigm for understanding it. Accordingly, my interview with him is brief.
Interview with Phill Niblock 6th December 2007
JOEL STERN - I’m interested to know how you approach the construction of audiovisuality in your films. What kind of relationships do you look for or find between sound and image?
PHILL NIBLOCK - Well, concerning THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE WORKING, none. I don't look for them, and I don't find them.
JOEL STERN - I did ask you once before how sound and image relates in your films and you answered, “as little as possible.” This was a great answer as it suggests the relationship is one of ambivalence.
PHILL NIBLOCK - Well, I'm probably not that flippant. But I do see the relationship as being two things existing in the same time, struggling to fill the space. It's one of the reasons the sound is always played so LOUD. It's not background music. And there is no specific time relationship, no event coincidence.
JOEL STERN - In THE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE WORKING, sounds and images are not linked by any literal or causal relationship of origin. They are linked at an aesthetic level - repetitive minimal movements in the humans relate to static tones and minimal movement in the sound. The sound comments on the human movement; a sonic rendering of its repetitiveness, its 'drone-ness'. How would you describe the transformative effect of the sound over the image in these films? What is added and what is altered in how we perceive these images when sound is added to them?
PHILL NIBLOCK - I make this work so that each member of an audience can perceive them in a different way. So, the removal of the commonest elements of music (rhythm, melody, developmental harmony) is both interesting for me to do, but to further this aim for the audience. A bit simplistic, but that is the idea. I think the films would be somewhat stupid without the music to cloud the obvious. I do play music without the films, often, but not film without the music.
JOEL STERN - In your 'artistic portrait' films – Max and The Magic Sun, the sounds and image are linked by their connection to the artist or group being studied. Both sounds and images are subjected to processes of manipulation and collage, which separate and asynchronise them. How do you see synchronisation functioning in these films?
PHILL NIBLOCK - I don't see any sync. I did not compose the music, so it is
17 related to the images because it (the music) comes from the subject. So, I do not think about these two sets of work (Max and The Magic Sun as compared to MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE WORKING) in any way, in the same terms.
JOEL STERN - Your film Dog Track has a very strange dialectical relationship between sound and image. It combines images of landscapes and manipulated film with the sound of a woman reading a found psychiatric text relating a sexual encounter with a dog. Can you give reasons as to why these two elements have been combined? How would you describe the effect that the two separate elements have on one another?
PHILL NIBLOCK - This was simply an experiment in combining a sound with a very strong visually suggestive text with a disjointed image line, to see if people would remember what they heard as what they had seen.
Michael Snow - audiovisual superimpositions
Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen,
“When you synch something, then you’re sunk.” (Stan Brakhage quoted in Jordan, R. 2003)
Canadian film artist / experimental musician Michael Snow’s work Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, which he describes as, “a sound-film, a 'talking picture' which concentrates on making experienceable the truth that recorded speech is not spoken speech." (Snow, m. 1977), systematically interrogates sound / image relationships through a series of manipulations, dislocation, conflations and transmutations. Over the 240 minute duration of the film we see;
Flickering colour fields, various individuals moving their mouths, scrolling text patterns, the interior of an aeroplane slowly flipping vertically, a group of people reading in a room filled with audio devices, zoetrope like images of faces flashing horizontally past the frame, an empty table, the manipulation of objects on a desk, a triangle being struck amongst other images.
Over the duration of the film we hear; the sounds of chickens, bursts of musical noise, concrete poetry being performed, a commentary on the manipulation of objects on a desk, old fashioned radio comedy by ‘English comedians’, various prepared texts being read, the sound of a triangle being struck amongst many other sounds.
The correspondences between sound and image are systematically unpacked through a process of rigorous examination that takes in as many combinations as possible, exploiting the meaning generated in each. Through this examination, Snow forces us to move quickly from basic questions such as, what do I see, and what do I hear, to more complex questions. What do I see of what I hear? What
18 do I hear of what I see? And how are these perceptions being shaped and manipulated?
Snow’s audiovisual configurations are highly dialectical. The meaning is generated in the space ‘between’ sound and image, rather than residing in either completely. This approach follows in the tradition of Russian filmmaker and ideologue Sergei Eisenstein whose advocating of ‘counterpoint’ in the 1928 ‘Statement on Sound’, co-authored with V.I. Pudovkin, G.V. Alexandrov and Dziga Vertov. (S. M. Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, G.V. Alexandrov and Dziga Vertov. 1928) is of particular relevance. Snow’s counterpoint follows Eisenstein beyond the simple disjunction of sound from image into a more advanced use of sound as an extension of montage technique, with the sound of ‘talking’ as his central focus. In Early Sound Counterpoint (Thompson 1980) Kristin Thompson identifies a number of sound - image functions in early soviet cinema that connect closely to Snow’s use in Rameau’s Nephew.
Most relevantly, Thompson refers to ‘the manipulation of sound quality to achieve a non-naturalistic relation of sound and image’ to describe diegetic sounds, that is sounds heard, or reacted to, by characters within a film, that are transformed or distorted in various ways. This technique, which is linked to Brechtian alienation, is used to jolt the audio-spectator into a reflexive engagement in which the constructedness of sound / image dynamics is critically foregrounded. Snow demonstrates this most radically in his treatment of speech sounds throughout the film, seeking to circumvent assumptions that what we see and hear emerge from common spatio-temporal ground. In perhaps the most overt demonstration of this, in scene ten of the film, Snow creates what he describes as a “polyphony of voice, music and time.” (Snow 2006) The scene is performed in four sections, of which only the first has what may be called naturalistic sound, the sound of the characters speaking to camera. The second section features the recording of the first section played back into the space while new sounds are added in real-time. The third section adds the sound recorded during the first AND second sections. The fourth section follows this structural logic to its conclusion by projecting the recorded sound of the first three sections in space simultaneously while the actors add a fourth live layer. Throughout all four sequences the image remains fairly static, a representation of people in a nondescript room. Snow generates a form of sound driven vertical montage, where complexifying meanings are produced through aural layering within each scene, as a culmination of the temporal disjunction. This technique creates an atmosphere that might be described as productively ‘unreal’.
The characters in Rameau’s Nephew are aware of the ‘playback’ sounds as they are projected into the subsequent scenes. Therefore, the temporally displaced sounds remain diegetic, within the world of the film, despite referring directly to the constructedness of the scenario and manipulation by the filmmaker. Snow asks his audience to observe an experiment in sound / image temporal relations, an experiment in which the actors are knowing participants. The reactions of the actors are not scripted; they improvised quite freely, placing this work in the line of ‘free synchronisation’ (discussed earlier in this chapter, in relation to Phill Niblock). However, Snow stages the experiment within a highly structured formula for progressive sound / image distanciation evolving methodically over four clearly defined stages. An analogy might be drawn to aleatoric compositional strategies in which a primary outcome of a “composed work's realization is left to
19 the determination of its performer”, yet the overall form is structurally predetermined. Snow’s twin interest in structural-material modes of filmmaking, and improvised forms of music, seem to find synthesis in the strategies described here, despite his claim that improvised music and filmmaking “are totally separate in my life and work” (Snow, M. 2008).
Snow employs a number of conceptual juxtapositions of sound and image that also connect with and advance earlier experiments in Soviet film sound. The 1928 ‘Statement on Sound’ strongly attacks the practise of synchronous edits in sound and image, portraying these as serving the establishment of a pseudo- naturalistic diegetic agenda. Snow’s repudiation of naturalism in the sound / image dynamic however, includes tactics which both utilise and undercut simultaneous synchronous editing. Far from producing naturalism Snow’s sound / image syncs generate and explore obtuse conceptual analogies between visual and aural arrangement. Perhaps the most interesting example in Rameau’s Nephew occurs in the ‘English comedians’ section. The soundtrack consists of a radio recording featuring a group of comedians bantering, interspersed by audience noise and record crackle. Snow creates a visual counterpoint to the soundtrack, showing a sequence of discrete images - all featuring three people in an industrial basement overlaid with an alternating colour filter - which changes in correspondence to each element a of the recording. For example, comedian A’s voice syncs to a ‘red’ image in which the characters face one another. Comedian B’s voice syncs with a ‘blue’ image in which the characters face the screen, while the audience sound generates an image bathed in bright white light. Snow constructs sound / image correspondences which are conceptually linked around colour, space, voice and time, but does so in a way that diverts from both visual music traditions and the soviet dialectical traditions. In diverting productively from the two key traditions informing avant-garde film-sound Snow finds a distinctly idiosyncratic space from which to conduct original experiments. The rough, uncompromisingly poetic and complex yet explicit delivery of these experiments has proved profoundly influential on my own practice, as explicated in chapters three and four of this study.
Interview with Michael Snow Friday 20th June 2008 at Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney Biennale
(Commenting on William Kentridge’s animated homage to George Melies ‘Trip to the Moon’)
MICHAEL SNOW - .The imitation of early cinema in experimental film, we’ve seen so much of it in a way.
JOEL STERN - You mean like Guy Maddin for instance?
MICHAEL SNOW - Well that is what he’s doing.
JOEL STERN - It’s nostalgia for the spirit of experimentation and innovation found in early cinema…
MICHAEL SNOW - Its also a way to get a kind of materialism that current cinema wouldn’t get because it’s all about naturalism and realism.
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JOEL STERN - How could that materialism be achieved now without being nostalgic?
MICHAEL SNOW - In many ways. Imitating the look of high contrast early film is one way, what Guy Maddin does in a sense.
JOEL STERN - How do you feel about performance and cinema in relation to one another? Is it something you’ve considered in your own work?
MICHAEL SNOW - I haven’t thought about it and I haven’t really done anything that uses performance. Well, I have done a couple of performance pieces, one of which is called Right Reader done in New York in the 1960’s and again in Toronto in 1996, but it’s so rare in my work its kind of pointless to talk about, it’s just not there.
JOEL STERN - In New York in the 1960’s you would have encountered expanded cinema, did this work attract you?
MICHAEL SNOW - My first installation film, Little Rock, made in 1964 was partly because of the expanded cinema festival that Jonas Mekas organised, well more or less organised, it was a place where people just arrived and did things, so I was influenced by some of those ideas in a way, but in this case my film was projected onto a white cut-out. It’s not a performance but a film installation. It was done on 8mm film.
JOEL STERN - You’ve spoken about the film New York Eye and Ear Control and the kind of sound-image relationships articulated in that film, involving simultaneity. Do you see experimental film and experimental music as parallel but separate initiatives, or as traditions with many points of contact and overlap?
MICHAEL SNOW - New York Eye and Ear Control was the first film that I made in recognition of the possibilities of sound-image relations, I have gone into this in other films and there is still plenty left to do in my opinion. My later film, Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, is incomparable in a way, as far as what can be done with image-sound relationship, particularly to do with recorded speech.
JOEL STERN - It’s probably your most focused study on the possibilities of sound-image relationships.
MICHAEL SNOW - Especially with speech, the things that can be done besides sync-sound. I hope I included everything in it.
JOEL STERN - Are there possibilities you didn’t cover that have cropped up since?
MICHAEL SNOW - There are some other ideas that come from that time that I didn’t use that I hope to eventually, that have to do with the possibility of manipulating a sound, you can do so many things to the sound, now because of
21 video, and the image and sound being of the same system, I think people are less attracted now to the idea of working with the sound then they were when the sound was made separately, recorded onto a separate tape.
JOEL STERN - Does that material separation create more possibilities in the sense that the artist has to deliberately bring the elements back into some sort of contact with one another?
MICHAEL SNOW - The separation in film of the sound and image pointed out that these are analysable simultaneous mediums for simultaneous senses, but of course the main impetus in movie-making has been towards naturalism, realism and sound is one of the most effective means of generating belief. When you see those mouths move and the person talks, it’s the most convincing thing. But since it is possible to manipulate both elements, it’s kind of called for. In fact I made a film called Corpus Callosum which is a 90 minute digital film shot on betacam and the reason I did it is because I realised there are things that couldn’t be done with film, or if they could it was too laborious, almost impossible to do, so I’m attracted to technical aspects that can produce a new aesthetic, and certainly with digital media the manipulability is something very different from traditional cinema.
JOEL STERN - In your material based work, there is a focus on technology, form and medium. But I want to ask about improvisation; which is a recurring concern in your music. In improvisation the focus is on the impulse and creativity before the material level. I wonder if sonic improvisation and film materialism are two entirely separate concerns for you or whether there is some overlap.
MICHAEL SNOW - They are totally separate in my life and work. I started to be involved with improvised music, jazz, when I was in high school, and I’ve continued with that ever since. There are lots of recordings of me that are not improvisation, but I’ve been involved with absolute free improvisation for at least 30 years. Free improvisation is not an idiom, it’s a method, and it can produce anything.
JOEL STERN - Derek Bailey described ‘free improvisation’ as non-idiomatic.
MICHAEL SNOW - Yes that’s a nice phrase; it’s a good thought that it isn’t a style but a method. In my other work there is very little improvisation. I’ve basically confined it into music and I’ve always been able to grow within that and have found more and more out about that.
JOEL STERN - In New York Eye and Ear Control a clearly improvisational soundtrack meets a mode of structural-material filmmaking.
MICHAEL SNOW - I hope that’s clear, it might not be clear to everyone, but yes the music is totally improvised. I gave them some instructions which are that I wanted it to be as much ensemble playing as possible, with no tunes, and no solos. I didn’t want a solo to personify the figure in the film.
JOEL STERN - How much of an influence was the music made by Albert Ayler’s group (which provided the legendary soundtrack to New York Eye and Ear Control ) on you at the time?
22
MICHAEL SNOW - It was influential on my music but not on anything else. I had already started to fool around with playing freely when I went to New York in 1962. A couple of bands I had were playing the blues in a free way, so the idea or desire to move away from using song forms and playing changes was already there when I got to New York. I made my own loft space and had a piano in it, which I bought from Roswell Rudd. I started by playing New Orleans and Dixieland jazz and made my living from that, and for two years I played in the band of a guy named Mike White, so Mike Snow played with Mike White, and we played in one place for a year, a typically scruffy place, but we were popular with the art crowd, and did TV shows and stuff like that. Mike had the idea to have guest stars, so every month we had people join, and this way I played with some of the greatest musicians of the time. The trumpet player Buck Clayton, two of Ellington’s greatest trumpet players, Rick Stewart and Cootee Williams, Jimmy Rushing - the blues singer who was with Count Bassie for years, Vic Dickinson the great trombone player, Dickie Wells who was another great trombone player, Pee Wee Russell the great clarinettist and many others. New Orleans or Dixieland Jazz has more ensemble improvisation that any other style and in a way playing free was a return to that. In an ensemble situation it’s inevitably linear because there’s no prior agreement as far as harmony goes.
JOEL STERN - Is music making for you primarily a collaborative process?
MICHAEL SNOW - Free improvisation is music at its purest, because you play the music that is for and comes out of that occasion, and it depends on the whole situation, the acoustics and everything. Music coming out of that situation is always an individual thing even if it’s someone playing a prior composition, Mozart or whatever. Where you are determines what you hear, the performances will always be different, but the essence of that is in free improvisation where the music is made for ‘now’. For this ‘now’.
A year ago I finished a DVD called ReverBerlin. This was the first time I’d been able to use the music of the group I play with, CCMC. The only prior agreement was that we’d start with solos, John Oswald on alto sax, Paul Dutton on voice, me on piano, and the rest of the playing would be ensemble. There was a bit of an echo and only the sound was recorded. I have hundreds of recordings of our concerts, and maybe this wasn’t the best ever, but nonetheless I decided I wanted to use it as the fundamental basis for a film, a DVD. So the music is fifty- five minutes, totally unmodified, and the image is made from selections of footage of this same trio over the past ten years from many different concerts in different locations. So I matched these; If John Oswald is playing sax, I would mix this sound with previously made footage of him playing. But it doesn’t quite match. So you have simultaneity, especially with the piano. We used a lot of superimposition, Foley sound and reversing, we played with the music to a certain extent, but we always feature the musicians themselves. Anyway, I think it’s pretty good. After all this time I’ve found a way to bring my music and images together.
JOEL STERN - Because a methodology has become accessible?
MICHAEL SNOW - Yes, the ease of video editing. I worked with a guy who is an
23 expert. I could say ‘What would that be like slowed down?’ and he’d do it. ‘Make that stronger, longer’… etc. All these things in film would take weeks. Superimpositions; I remember when I’d be trying these things with film, I’d make a test and it would take a few days before the results would arrive, but with video editing you just do it immediately.
JOEL STERN - So do you see the speed and ease of video largely in a positive way?
MICHAEL SNOW - Oh yes. Absolutely.
JOEL STERN - Do you miss the waiting and reflection involved in working with film?
MICHAEL SNOW - Well it was ok for what we were doing. Or what I was doing. But I wouldn’t do that again because things are different now.
JOEL STERN - As someone who has grown up with video and is familiar with its characteristic qualities, when I look at avant-garde film predating video, the 1950’s and 1960’s work, and the time it took to produce the films is clearly manifested in the thoughtfulness and handcrafted-ness of the work itself.
MICHAEL SNOW - That was an important thing it’s true. Now you can shoot anything anytime you want. It was expensive, even though it was not as expensive as one might think in New York in the 60’s, you could find cheap but even so you did think twice about whether and what to shoot. I worked with things that are particular to cinema.
JOEL STERN - You described free improvisation as a purist form of sound. But your definition of purism in cinema would be at the other end of the spectrum from free improvisation.
MICHAEL SNOW - Yes it would. Composition is susceptible to change, but free improvisation is not. The films are compositions; you can edit them, you can say “I don’t like that, I’ll make it shorter.”
JOEL STERN - Is free improvisation composition in real time?
MICHAEL SNOW - Yes, but there’s no alteration you can make at the time, mind you when it’s recorded then that recording can be altered, but that’s no longer the original moment.
I made a collaborative two-screen film with Carl Brown called Triage. It was after making Corpus Callosum which took me about 10 years to make, an eternity, so I was in that world for quite a while. Carl is a filmmaker who I’d admired for quite a while, and he suggested a collaboration in the style of an ‘exquisite corpse, thirty minutes in which each of us would not know what the other was doing. I also asked a musician that I’d played with a lot, who Carl also knew, to make two soundtracks to the films, which he’d never seen. The first time it was shown in public, we had never seen it before.
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After working with the computer animation of real images for a long time, I hoped with Triage that I could find something connected to the whole business of single frames in cinema, that is, put something different on each frame. I hope you get it see it some time, it’s very good! The two sections are so different, and yet they’re like two different languages happening simultaneously – and the sound occurs on two tracks that are antiphonal, moving from one side to the other. I see this as very pure. Carl works with the chemistry; he is one of the pioneers of doing everything – the developing, durations, chemicals, temperatures. There are some other artists in Germany working this way, but Carl is fantastic. So his screen is all these chemical modifications, and mine is ‘ch-ch-ch-ch-ch’, a flickering change in almost every frame.
JOEL STERN - Your films create relationships between the eyes and ears. The information may enter through these portals but there is a sense in which the meaning is received somewhere beyond the eyes and ears?
MICHAEL SNOW - I’ve really been working with a separation, an effort to make a concentration of the difference between the senses, not so much to have a synaesthesia. In Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, there is so much variety that it’s hard to generalise but its more concerned with separation than with any kind of unity or even exchange between the image and the sound
JOEL STERN - That’s interesting in that there is a tendency in experimental audiovisual work to move towards either a synaesthesic unified approach, or alternatively a separated, demarcated approach – does it say something about the artist, when they choose one direction over the other?
MICHAEL SNOW - It probably has some psychological significance, it must have.
25
REFERENCES
Chion, M., C. Gorbman, et al. Audio-vision : sound on screen. New York, Columbia University Press.1994
Conrad, B. G. a. T.. Straight and Narrow. 16mm film.1970
Conrad, T. . Artist Talk - Liquid Architecture Brisbane, Australia.2005
Conrad, T. Interview by Joel Stern New York City, Anthology Film Archive. USA 2005
Gilmore, B . Phill Niblock - Paris Transatlantic 2007 http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/interviews/niblock.html
Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, G.V. Alexandrov and Dziga Vertov. “Statement on Sound” 1928 http://soma.sbcc.edu/users/davega/FILMPRO_114/FILMPRO_114_SovietMontage/A_Statem ent_on_Sound_Vertov_1928.pdf
Jordan, R.. "Brakhage’s Silent Legacy for Sound Cinema " Offscreen Journal Volume 7, Issue 2 2003
Mussman, T. . "An interview with Tony Conrad." Film Culture(41). 1966
Pape, Gerard. Phill Niblock: Timbre as Space in Suspended Time. 2010 retrieved from http://touchshop.org/product_info.php?products_id=115
Rosenboom, D. and D. Paul . "Biomusic and the Brain." Performing Arts Journal 10(2): 12-16. 1986
Rothko, M. Brief Manifesto by Mark Rothko with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. edition of the New York Times. New York 1943
Sharits, P. "Hearing : Seeing." Film Culture(65-66): no. 74. 1978
Snow Michael. Notes for "Rameau's Nephew"October , Vol. 4, (Autumn, 1977), pp. 43-57. 1977
Snow, Michael; Dompierre, Louise. The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, WLU Press. 2006
Snow, M. Interview by Joel Stern. Sydney Art Gallery of NSW. 2008
Stern, J. The composer-filmmaker. RealTime Arts Issue 86 Australia. 2005
Thompson, Kristin. Early Sound Counterpoint Yale French Studies , No. 60, Cinema/Sound (1980), pp. 115-140. 1980
Youngblood, G. Expanded cinema. New York,, Dutton USA pp. 162. 1970
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Three - Abject Leader: what makes these fields Shiver?
Refracted forms of synchronisation in the films performances of Abject Leader
This section of the study is a critical exegesis of collaborative works I have produced with film artist Sally Golding using the name Abject Leader. These works, produced between 2006-2010 function as a creative practise-led investigation of the core research questions of the study. The Abject Leader works seek to explore in practise new possibilities for the staging of audiovisuality in expanded cinema, and to trace how aesthetic, material and conceptual aspects of expanded cinema form feedback into sonic outcomes.
Face of An Other
“In the inky surrounds of a completely black theatre, audience eyes are struggling. all they can hear is their own breathing and the air is thick with anticipation. Suddenly a loud noise - the fizzing pop of a strobe, and the room is strafed with light. The strobe sets up a slow but coruscating beat, periodically revealing the empty stage floor and softly shirring black curtain behind. Audience eyes strain as the entire space shudders, flooded in sudden illumination, then darkness, then light again. The pulsing beat of the strobe explosions develops into more sophisticated sonic textures: cracking, bubbling metallic noises whizzing through the venue and across the empty plain of the stage. Then from behind the curtain a white hand appears, followed shortly after by its owner. Clad in a white knee length shift, her russet hair swathed in bandages, performer Sally Golding materialise. Her motions frozen by the strobe, spectators glimpse her capering advance and sidelong glances as a series of abrupt still frames. Golding present her white sponged face to the 16mm projectors set up at the front of the stage, and as the flickering projection - a decaying skeleton - appears and maps itself over Golding’s pale flesh, we realise she is not to be an actor in front of the screen but the screen itself. Joel Stern’s layered soundscape accompanies and accentuates this dark apparition, creating a delicate tissue of manipulated science fiction sounds which chime with the regular electronic pulse of the strobe, and are grounded in the grinding drone of the projector.”
Danni Zuvela - Stirrings in the Undergrowth: Notes on audiovisual live performance in Brisbane. Eyeline 68
The above description is of the opening passage of a live performance of the Abject Leader work, ‘Face of An Other’. The work stages a number of specific audiovisual dialogues and configurations that I will explicate and critically reflect upon. I wish to demonstrate how the work connects with innovations pioneered and explored by the filmmaker-composers featured in chapter 2 of the study, and to subsequently trace the impact of these ideas on my own practise as a sound artist.
‘Face of An Other’ begins with sound / image correspondence manifested through a technical / electrical connection. A strobe light flashes periodically, accompanied by a simultaneous percussive ‘crack’ heard through the speakers. This synchronous energy flash is achieved through the placement of an electro-
27 magnetic suction microphone directly onto the body of the strobe light. With each light flash an electrical charge is ‘captured’ by the microphone and sonified as a simultaneous staccato noise. The visual and aural outcomes are generated electrically in tandem, with the strobe extended to become a light and sound- producing machine.
This technique both reinforces and complexifies Chion’s notion of synchresis, where a mental fusion occurs between a sound and a image that appear at exactly the same time for the audio-spectator. (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994). Chion uses the concept, a merging of the words synchronous and synthesis, to explain how sounds and images from different sources and spatio-temporal environments can be psychologically merged at the point of reception. A large body of audiovisual work, in which sound and image are produced independently and connected at outcome, functions in this way. In ‘Face of An Other’ however, a sonification of the electrical activity intended only for visual production of light, generates a machine synchresis that operates not just psychologically, but also technically. The electro-magnetic suction microphone resembles a stethoscope which reveals and amplifies internal activity, exposing what is already there; a synchresis born of revealing inherent correspondences rather than produced artificial ones.
The stethoscope metaphor can be extended into discussion of the physiological effect of the audiovisual ‘flicker’ on the spectator. Here the work draws influence from Tony Conrad’s equation of ‘flicker’ experiments as studies of ‘ideo-sensory phenomena’ (Conrad 2005) in which attention is directed toward the audience's own perceptual systems rather than the content of the work. In ‘Face of An Other’, the flicker of sound and image is temporally linked, occurring simultaneously, as opposed to Conrad’s asynchronous audiovisual arrangements. Where Conrad’s configuration can produce confusion, disorientation and in extreme cases epileptic seizure, the steadier, consistent pace of the ‘Face of An Other’ flicker, brings to mind the heartbeat derived euphoric pulse of rave and club culture.
The theme of externalising the internal is further explored through the amplification of the 16mm projector using contact microphones. Foregrounding the projection device itself has been a trope of historical and contemporary expanded cinema practise. Works such as Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder’s installation ‘Light Spill’ (2006), in which “a 16mm projector without a take up reel spills thousands of feet of celluloid - films recently de-commissioned by local schools and libraries - onto the floor” (Walley 2011), explore the materiality and mechanism of projection from a sculptural standpoint. Morgan Fisher’s, ‘Projection Instructions’ (1976), on the other hand, foregrounds the projectionists usually silent role as an agent of production through a set of printed and narrated projection instructions which remain visible to the audience, whether they are followed or not. The amplification of the 16mm projector device, using contact microphones, in ‘Face of An Other’ follows prior works that reflexively draw attention to the processes of production. However, in the Abject Leader work, the outcome is sonified. In similar fashion to the amplification of the stroboscopic electrical pulses, the amplification of the projector’s mechanical sounds, constitutes a transmutation of non-aural processes into sonic outcomes, revealing potentialities for synchresis that were previously muted.
28 The main section of ‘Face of An Other’ consists of a series of projections, focussed directly onto the body of the performer / filmmaker. The projections find clearest focus on the face of the performer, mapping a stream of ‘temporary’ projected faces onto an actual face. The sound for extended section consists of two sound effects records, played alternatively in fragments determined by the performer. The sound effects records are 1950’s BBC collections themed around ‘death and horror’ and ‘audience’. A dialectic is generated between the two sound sources, which speak to drastically different meanings and listening modes. The ‘death and horror’ sounds, consisting of screams, heavy breathing, whimpering and violent fleshy hacking, exist within a familiar and understood space of diegetic horror sound. The ‘audience’ sounds, consisting of laughter, cheering, muffled chattering and exuberant applause, exist in the space of non-diegetic sound, associated with the act of spectatorship. We are familiar with the use of these sounds (i.e. canned laughter) in the reception of pre-recorded material (i.e. television sitcoms) but their use in the context of live performance generates a reflexive Brechtian alienation effect. The constant interplay between ‘horror’ sounds and ‘audience’ sounds forces the actual (as opposed to simulated) audience to constantly shift listening modes from the causal diegetic listening to semantic non-diegetic listening that must be critically decoded. The playback ‘audience’ sounds connect asynchronously to the image, combining appropriately and inappropriately with the image from moment to moment. The simulated audience produces reactions that superimpose over the real audience. This radical displacement of emotion is unsettling but also easily assimilated. As Slavoj Žižek points out;
“...before one gets used to canned laughter, there is nonetheless usually a brief period of uneasiness. The first reaction is of mild shock, since it is difficult to accept that the machine out there can “laugh for me.” Even if the program was “taped in front of a live studio audience,” this audience manifestly did not include me, and now exists only in mediated form as part of the TV show itself. However, with time, one grows accustomed to this disembodied laughter, and the phenomenon is experienced as “natural.” This is what is so unsettling about canned laughter: My most intimate feelings can be radically externalized. I can literally laugh and cry through another.” (Zizek, S. 2003)
In ‘Face of An Other’, the two playback sound-sets enter into dialogue with one another, generating meaning through a sonic montage technique. When considered however as a unified soundtrack, accompanying and adding value to the visual dimension of the work, the sound accumulates other complex meanings. The sound offers alternative models for understanding and interpreting the image, while remaining asynchronous and to it. The conceptual framework that drives the image, an exposed performer functioning as a passive screen rather than an ‘active’ body, gives the sound a platform through which to conduct various transformations in meaning. In a manner that connects with Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew, sound functions as a generator of interpretive possibilities rather than set modalities. The sound probes the spectator, asking them to adopt an alternatively voyeuristic position (watching the performer, hearing the scream / crying sounds), and a self-reflexive position that interrogates the dynamic of spectatorship.
The aesthetic quality of the sound work here also connects with early the Soviet cinema utilisation of obvious sound effects in place of naturalistic, synchronous sound to create an atmosphere of audiovisual disjunction, whilst the fragmented organisation and transparent editing of the sound work recall Musique concrète
29 experiments that follow the thread of early film sound innovation.
Yellow Polly
The 16mm experimental film ‘Yellow Polly’, by Abject Leader, assumes the more traditional cinematic form of a fixed single screen visual projection with a pre- recorded, rather than a live soundtrack. The audiovisual relationships explored in the work continue to connect strongly with early Soviet experiments in film sound and the works of filmmaker / composer Michael Snow, whilst also drawing influence from acousmatic approaches in Musique concrète.
The images in Yellow Polly consist of scratched colour fields, flickering clear film, black and white landscapes cast in a ghostly hue, the sky with moving clouds, animals staring or scattering, and a series of ambiguous symbolic images of hands digging the dirt. The shots flow together, arranged in a dreamlike logic, fragmented and stuttering. There are various kinds of movement shaping the image; The movement of the handheld camera, circling, flipping and swinging in a wildly gestural manner as through drawing rough outlines around the forms of observed light, the dance-like movement within the frame of objects in the field of view, advancing along their natural path, and the shuddering movement of the film-frame itself, speaking to the materiality of celluloid pulled roughly through a hand cranked camera, exposed frame by frame, imperfect and marked by surface cracks and dust. These fields, metaphoric and literal, seem to ‘shiver’ or vibrate and pulse in an uncanny manner.
As with ‘Face of An Other’, the soundtrack to ‘Yellow Polly problematizes distinctions between diegetic and nondiegetic sound, by introducing sonic elements that are at once ‘within’ the film, and also external to it, occupying the space of the viewer. An erratic mechanical clattering plays throughout the film, at times accelerating and decelerating, but always present. The sound is once again an amplified 16mm film projector, although in this case it has been treated to become more causally ambiguous. This connects with Tony Conrad’s technique of using acousmatic sound to “to accentuate certain spatial and atmospheric qualities, to get a kind of timelessness and a removal from ordinary environmental circumstances. To do this I wanted a sound that would lend itself to more than one level of interpretation just as did the film. The sound can be interpreted representationally variously, as motor sounds or a tractor or a locomotive” (Conrad quoted in Mussman 1966).
The mechanical whirring functions on multiple levels in relation to the image. In common with other industrial soundtracks, it draws attention to the nature of film production itself, an industrial art form born of mechanical processes, motorised cameras, cranks and chemicals. The choppy, discontinuous image track connects with the messy, noisy, cantankerous soundtrack to foreground an imprecise, idiosyncratic melding of manual labour and artistic production.
The constant projector sound also reminds the audio-spectator of home viewing situations in which the projector is present in the viewing space as opposed to the cinematic standard of hidden silent projection. The home viewing scenario conjures another form of spectatorship, in which films are explicated or narrated by someone present in the room. ‘Yellow Polly’ playfully adopts this formal trope
30 by introducing a narrator who attempts to describe and explain the film images. In this way, the film functions as a kind of avant-garde travelogue.
The narration, performed by Brisbane sound artist Adam Park, was recorded over four takes, each improvised whilst watching the projected images. Adam had not seen the film prior to the first narration take. The film images served as stimulation for an automatic verbal response, and in the case of the abstract images, these function in a way analogous to a Rorschach test. The four narration takes were subsequently re-edited into a single unified narration that draws on each take for fragmented samples. The reduction of the four takes into one track is a process of stripping from narrative polyphony a fabricated singularity. In this way, the process reverses that employed by Michael Snow, in ‘Rameau’s Nephew’, in which four dialogues are successively overlaid to produce an increasing fabricated polyphony.
The temporal connection between narrated description and projected image is displaced in order to create a disjunction effect. This strategy connects the work to the ‘unreliable narrator’ literary model, in which the act of narration has an embedded function within the text, rather than an explanatory role external to it. The function of sound in relation to images in ‘Yellow Polly’ becomes complex due to the external manipulation imposed on the narration from outside. In one sense, the narrator performs the traditional role of explaining images, describing what is seen. However, the soundtrack also evidences an experiment conducted on the narrator, a psychological probing of the narrator by the image. This ambiguity prompts the audio-spectator to experience the narration as a kind of floating automatic poetry, triggered by, but not hinged to, film images. The narration becomes a form of experimental sound, explicitly generated from the key aesthetic, material and conceptual aspects of experimental film.
Bloodless Landscape
In ‘Bloodless Landscape’ a non-diegetic music soundtrack accompanies non- narrative film images arranged in a dual screen format. This configuration recalls Phill Niblock’s ‘Movement of People Working’ series of films in both formal structure and aesthetic sensibility. The relationship between sound and image is essentially asynchronous, both elements evolving as discrete parallel streams, finding common long-form structural and aesthetic correspondences rather than hard synchronous contact points. The sparse, minimal pulse of the soundtrack acts as a temporal counterpoint to the image, which is multilayered, rhythmically erratic and narratively discontinuous. The audio-spectator encounters an aural slowness and visual rapidness simultaneously. The musical composition maps out a relatively consistent (although still human), ponderous marking of time, a minimal beating that recalls the slow, steady pattern of the heart or breath, a musical auscultation. The image flickers, stutters and switches in a manner recalling the temporality of thought, or electrical impulses, flashbacks and complex pathways, a filmic MRI scan. Neither the sound time nor image-time achieves hierarchical dominion over the other, temporalizing the other, in Chion’s terms. Rather than sustaining a dialectical tension rooted in separation, sound and image merge in the form of a metaphorically embodied, multi-temporal Intermedia composition. The elements of sound and image move in “concert or slightly at odds with each other, in the same manner as two instruments playing simultaneously”. (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994), articulating momentary
31 connections and disconnections according to a logic of ‘free synchronisation’, an audiovisual analogue to the sonic ‘free improvisation’.
The visceral nature of the soundtrack, it’s grounding in body rhythms, speaks to another function of sound in avant-garde film identified cogently by Fred Camper in ‘Sound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinema’ (Camper, F. 1985); the sense of sound used “to suggest that the images are more than merely images, but are meant to have the power to effect literal changes in physical reality.” This effect is heightened through the use of intensely abstract sound in conjunction with symbolic imagery, enacting an aggressive psychical restructuring of the viewing experience. The dynamic is classically anempathetic in Chion’s terms (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994), displaying a ‘cosmic indifference’ that ‘has the effect not of freezing emotion but rather of intensifying it, by inscribing it on a cosmic background”.
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REFERENCES
Camper, Fred. “Sound and Silence in Narrative and NonnarrativeCinema” Film Sound: Theory and Practice. Eds. John Belton and Elisabeth Weis. New York: Columbia UP 1985
Chion, M., C. Gorbman, et al. Audio-vision : sound on screen. New York, Columbia University Press. 1994
Conrad, T. Interview by Joel Stern New York City, Anthology Film Archive. 2005
Mussman, T. "An interview with Tony Conrad." Film Culture(41). 1966
Rees A.L. , Duncan White, Steven Ball and David Curtis. Expanded Cinema, published by Tate. UK 2011
Walley, Jonathan ‘Not an Image of the Death of Film’: Contemporary Expanded Cinema and Experimental Film in Expanded Cinema, published by Tate. 2011
Žižek, Slavoj. Will You Laugh for Me, Please? (7.18.03) retreived from http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/000330.php
Zuvela, Danni. ‘Stirrings in the Undergrowth’ Eyeline Magazine Issue 68, Australia 2008.
Zuvela, Danni ‘Crystalline signs of the small and poetic.’ Artlink » vol 29 no 1, 2009.
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Four Objects, Masks, Props.
Hearing, capturing, assembling, disseminating sounds shaped by the aesthetic, conceptual and material influence of experimental film.
The final section of this study is a critical reflection on my suite of sonic compositions, ‘Objects, Masks, Props’ created between 2000-2007, investigating and exploring the profound influence of both visual and audiovisual concepts and processes articulated in experimental film on my work as a sound artist. I argue that the specific influence of experimental 16mm film sound on my work, citing the innovatively crude approach by key artists to the organisation and production of sound, constitute an influence on my work that remains distinct from experimental music traditions. In this chapter, audiovisuality is explored in its sonic context as a layering of sound and imagined visual spaces, as a generator “providing rich enough musical material to actually evoke specific imagery” (Joseph 2008). 16mm film sound fidelity, a medium specific roughness grounded in the use of ‘optical sound’, is also discussed as an influence shaping the aesthetic of my work.
“With a strong grounding in the beauty of naturally occurring sounds and simple acoustic instrumentation, Objects, Masks, Props could well be the future of pop music in a post- apocalyptic, electricity starved world.” Andrew Tuttle – Cyclic Defrost
Consisting of eight compositions, edited together without gaps to form a conjoined sequence, Objects, Masks, Props is constructed using a vast range of materials. The sound sources include car radios, empty pipes, bulbul taring (an Indian classical string instrument), no input mixing desk, doors, electronic devices, rubbish, rain sticks, music box, bells, singing wires, bees, rusty gates, barking dogs, mbira (Zimbabwean tuned percussion instrument), melodica, megaphone and various other items. The collection of these objects and props over a long time period constitutes an ongoing scavenge for aural possibilities outside the scope of traditional instrumentation and musicianship. The visual character or impression generated of this array of sound-making objects connects strongly with the experimental Mise-en-scène of ‘aesthetically delirious’ films including Tony Conrad’s ‘Coming Attractions’ and Ira Cohen’s ‘Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda’. In these works, props have a symbolic function as triggers generating subjective responses in the audio-spectator. The poetic arrangement of objects in visual space maps against a virtual tapestry of symbolic objects in psychological space. The sonic objects of Objects, Masks, Props inhabit an imagined visual space, constituting an “aural painting” (English, L. 2008) that is both otherworldly and grounded familiar, both created and ‘found’. The implied listening space produced by the work could be described as ‘meta- diegetic’, “Sound imagined, or perhaps, hallucinated by a character.” (Milicevic, M. 1995)
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“The album dissolves specific spaces, replacing them with oblique audio narratives of places that are part reality, part imagination” Matthew Wuethrich -The Wire
This spatial dissolution is designed to create an impression of rapid (ear) movement, a passage through morphological territories of sound, or as Leighton Craig puts it, “a psychotropic travelogue of an unmapped realm between Jon Hassell's fourth world and Pierre Henry's laboratory..” (Craig 2008) The ‘part reality’ described by Matthew Wuethrich in The Wire stems from the albums basis in ‘field recordings’, captured environmental sounds that, heard in isolation, evidence existent physical spaces and events. We hear verifiable traces of the ‘real’ throughout all the compositions on the album. However the ‘real’ sounds are situated in an impossibly ‘unreal’ acoustic environment, made from multiple recordings layered together. In this sense, the compositions connect with and complexify Chion’s idea of a ‘point of audition’, the aural equivalent to the ocular ‘point of view’. The ‘point of audition’ concept can be understood spatially: From where do I hear, from what point in the space represented on the screen? It can also be understood subjectively: Which character at a given moment of the story is hearing what I hear? (Chion, Gorbman et al. 1994). In Chion’s lexicon it is the image and narrative that defines the ‘point’.
But what happens when we subtract the actual image, leaving only sound to conjure ‘oblique audio narratives’ and ‘dissolved spaces’. The listener still hears from someplace within the imagined, or visualised space, and still assumes a subjective listenership in relation to the audio narrative. However, that ‘space’ and listenership is diffused and multiplied. The superimposition of a number of audio spaces on top of one another generates multiple ‘points of audition’ from which the listener simultaneously hears. This schizophonic, or multifocal, audition creates the impression of many ears feeding back into a singular receiver. A multiple subjectivity, that Evan Rhodes describes as an “experiment in 360º editing” in which “the temporal sense ... is constantly swallowing its own movement”. (Rhodes 2009). We are familiar with the merging of multiple listening points in audio production environments where many microphones capture separate instruments that are then merged together. However, this practise generally sets out to neutralise the discrete environmental characteristics of each element in favour of a unified mix. In Object’s, Masks, Props I attempt to preserve and amplify the multiplicity of audition points, by emphasising the distinctive spatial and environmental character of each layer.
“A cougar is loose in the aviary... Release the mice, for soon the end will come and the colour of the end will be pale orange or possibly a light brown... In the forest, a woman with a violin bow in her throat talks to the birds, the birds.” John Wilsteed - Media Culture
My approach has been informed and heavily influenced by analogous ideas in experimental film works, specifically in this case by Michael Snow and Harry Smith. Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew (1977) contains long passages of audiovisual polyphony, in which multiple subjectivities and environments are layered to generate outcomes that are ‘part reality, part imagination’. Smith’s Late Superimpositions (1965) arranges multiple layers of image within a single frame, using experimental in-camera techniques to create a diffuse, distended visuality, a “cinema for the third eye” (Craig 2008)
35 “It comes across as a ramshackle radio play, as if some genius lunatic outfit were given permission to fuck around in the INA-GRM studios.” Aquarius Records
16mm film is the central format historically for experimental and avant-garde film movements from the 1950’s onwards, and has continued to be used by film artists, despite the growing scarcity of facilities and services. The preservation of the format has in fact been largely artist driven. As Tacita Dean writes “My relationship to film begins at that moment of shooting, and ends in the moment of projection. Along the way, there are several stages of magical transformation that imbue the work with varying layers of intensity. This is why the film image is different from the digital image: it is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics but something deeper – something to do with poetry.” (Dean 2011) 16mm film is the central visual format for works by Abject Leader, my expanded cinema collaboration with Sally Golding, discussed in chapter 3.
The specific visuality of 16mm film; the ‘look’ of particular stocks and the overall medium specificity of the format is central to any historical account of experimental filmmaking practises. The structural-material approach, articulated in the works and writings of filmmakers associated with the London Film-makers Co-op in the 1970’s, most notably Peter Gidal and Malcolm Le Grice, explicitly foregrounded the material characteristic as the central of artistic production. This interrogation of inherent qualities of the medium has produced work that looks, with intense, sensitivity, at every aspect of the projected image.
Less attention and study has gone into ‘listening’ to the inherent sonic qualities of 16mm film. Since 2004 I have been programming 16mm film screenings as part of the artists’ collective OtherFilm. Over the course of more than 100 screenings the sound of 16mm film has made a deep impression on me, influencing my practise profoundly. As discussed in chapter 3, in relation to Abject Leader, I have amplified and manipulated the sound of the projector device itself as a means of reflexively foregrounding production mechanisms. In ‘Objects, Masks, Props’ my engagement with film sound centres on the output ‘effects’ attendant to the technology.
The 16mm optical sound system involves a number of stages in which energy is transformed from one form to another. As it passed through the projector gate, light is shone through the film soundtrack area, passing onto a photoelectric cell. Variations in the printed pattern cause a fluctuating voltage, which is converted into sound. (Sherwin 2011). The limited dynamic and frequency range produced from this process generates a highly compressed and spectrally shallow, mono signal. The tendency for film to degrade psychically over time, warping in shape and accumulating surface damage, usually adds a pervasive layer of ‘noise’ or interference to the auditory signal. This auditory ‘damage’, produces a range of inadvertent ‘sound effects’ including crackling, distortion, amplitude modulations, sonic fogging, erasures etc. The combination of 16mm optical sound’s uniquely limited timbrel quality and its specific playback artefacts (or glitches), allied to the crude aesthetic and conceptual sonic sensibility of many experimental film artists, has produced an extremely distinctive alternative ‘tradition’ in experimental sound, that is part intentional, part accidental.
In Object’s, Masks, Props, I’ve attempted to channel the influence of 16mm film ‘noise’ into my compositions. In the piece, ‘throat priest’, a field recording made in
36 Ethiopia of a roughly amplified religious sermon, is periodically disrupted with bursts of static interference closely modelled on the clattering sounds produced in the optical soundtracks of sprocket damage 16mm film. In the piece ‘panda box’ aggressive fluctuations in the spectral range of the audio are modelled on the sonic effects of 16mm film warping, in which the shrinkage and expansion of the optical strip generates an analogous frequency fluctuation. In ‘wake in fright’ a series of staccato vocal noises, interspersed by fragments of silence, mirror the effect of interruptions to optical sound caused by splicing tape interference. Although these distortions, manipulations and glitches are part of a familiar lexicon of sounds in experimental practice, connecting strongly to the critical tradition outlined in Caleb Kelly’s Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Kelly 2011) there is an identifiable disparity in their nuanced articulation, stemming from the medium specificity and the grammar of experimental film sound. In my creative practise as a sound artist, I’ve attempted to synthesize discrete aesthetic, conceptual and material concerns of experimental film, utilising, recontextualizing and channelling the influence into a purely sonic outcome.
This nuanced diversion from experimental musical traditions, identifiable in experimental film sound is in need of further study and consideration, by both scholars and creative practitioners. In the past decade a number of new festivals have emerged specifically exploring audiovisuality; the relationship of sounds to images. These include my own OtherFilm Festival, alongside international contemporaries including Kill Your Timid Notion (Dundee, Scotland), AV Festival (Newcastle, England) and Netmage (Bologna, Italy). This curatorial tendency is a positive for both artists and audiences, bringing into sharper focus a vast area of research and practice, informed equally by avant-garde traditions in film, music and visual art, and grounded in the creative engagement with both old and new technologies.
37
REFERENCES
Chion, M., C. Gorbman, et al. (1994). Audio-vision : sound on screen. New York, Columbia University Press.
Craig, Leighton (2008) notes on CD Object’s, Masks, Props by Joel Stern. Naturestrip Recordings 2008
Dean, Tacita. ‘Save celluloid, for art's sake’ in The Guardian, UK, 22nd February 2011.
English, Lawrence. Objects, Masks, Props review in Signal to Noise magazine 50 / SUMMER 2008, USA
Joseph, B. W. (2008). Beyond the Dream Syndicate : Tony Conrad and the arts after Cage : a "minor" history. New York, Zone Books.
Kelly, Caleb. Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction. published by The MIT Press. USA 2009
Milicevic, Mladen. "Film Sound Beyond Reality," Croatian Film Journal, Volume I, No. 3/4, Zagreb, Croatia. 1995.
Rhodes, Evan. Objects, Masks, Props review on Foxy Digitalis Website. 19th January 2009. http://www.digitalisindustries.com/foxyd/reviews.php?which=3969
Sherwin, G. Optical Sound Films 1971-2007.. Published by Lux. UK. 2006 pp. 98
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