L'Oeil
ecoute (The Eye Hears) 1970; dir. Bernard Parmegiani
LIQUID ARCHITECTURE
4: OVERVIEW by
Simon Sellars
Liquid Architecture
4 featured the work of 30 Australian and
international artists, including French
musique concrete/acousmatic pioneer, Bernard
Parmegiani, and San Francisco noise merchants,
Scott Arford and Randy HY Yau. Another highlight
was the soundtrack/video extravaganza, 360
Degrees: Women in Sound.
Parmegiani's presence was a real coup, bringing
into sharp focus the rich heritage of sonic
art, but could the festival deliver on its
claim that we would "hear the world
through a different set of ears"?
This article originally
appeared in RealTime
no.56. Thanks to Open City for permission
to reproduce it here.RMIT
University's underground car park hosted
performances from Randy
HY Yau and Scott
Arford, along with Australian
sound artists Philip
Samartzis, Laurence
English and Bruce
Mowson. The night began with
a set by Machina
aux Rock – Philip
Brophy on drums and Nat
Bates on electronics –
a loose, percussive attack reminiscent of
Krautrock legends Ash Ra Tempel. Amusingly,
a couple began to dance at the back of the
car park, only to be stung into submission
by the segue into Yau's solo performance.
Yau played the "MegaMouth", a battery
powered children's toy "rewired for maximum
overdriven output". In this altered state,
the toy becomes a potent conduit for scorching
feedback, transforming simple vibrations and
movement into fierce electronic overdrive,
a banshee wail apparently erupting from Yau
himself. His performance was intensely physical
as he caressed the MegaMouth against speakers,
against his mouth, against the concrete floor.
With each twist and turn of the device, a
different, dissonant timbre emerged, seemingly
catching Yau by surprise, jerking his body
into spastic contortions; if a man could willingly
subject himself to high-powered electrocution,
it would look and sound like this. But even
so, Yau's effort was surprisingly musical,
with some melodious moments among the throbbing
squall.
During all performances, the car park's sonic
signature came into its own as frequencies
bounced crazily off the rear walls –
punters up the back could be seen turning
their heads around, as if unseen speakers
were propelling startling, unearthly tones
in and out of the mix.
Bernard
Parmegiani's vast, elegant
body of work was presented in various forms
over the festival weekend. First up was
a wide-ranging discussion, including an
overview of his acousmatic ("listening
without seeing") theories and his work
with Pierre Schaeffer in the 1960s. When
asked about his earliest sonic influences,
Parmegiani needed clarification: did his
interrogator mean after birth, or before,
he wondered? Listening to his mother's body
in the womb, he wanted to make clear, was
his earliest sonic influence.
On Sunday afternoon, there was to be a selection
of seven GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales)
film shorts scored by Parmegiani, curated
by Jim Knox and presented at the Australian
Centre for the Moving Image. (The GRM, a
movement dedicated to the study and development
of electro acoustic music, was led by Schaeffer.)
But most of the prints were damaged or were
unable to be secured in time, and only three
were ultimately screened.
The pick was "L'Ecran Transparent (The
Transparent Screen)", a bizarre 19-minute
work from 1973, directed and scored by Parmegiani.
With a set design resembling 70s sci-fi
films like THX 1138, it featured an earnest,
bearded intellectual dressed in black and
offering McLuhanesque theories on the "electronic
human, who lives faster because he is forced
to see and hear everything at once".
Then, as the film dispensed with the increasingly
shell-shocked narrator, it spiralled into
an extended synaesthetic exploration, with
flaring video effects and heavily warped
sound design amplifying the film's central
tenet: "The eye can see what the ear
cannot regard. At the point where the senses
meet, there is a kind of no-sense".
On Sunday night, Parmegiani presided over
a "Multispeaker Diffusion" presentation
at RMIT Storey Hall. Playing his impeccably
prerecorded works from CD, Parmegiani flung
his soundscapes all about the hall, using
mixers and a battery of strategically placed
speakers. Sounds "ticked" and
"scrunched", some "flipped",
some "scribbled" and some "cracked";
all edged in and out of consciousness. Realistically,
there's no adequate vocabulary to describe
how Parmegiani psychologically sculpts the
sonic qualities of everyday objects –
never has a rolling ping pong ball sounded
so terrifying. The performance capped off
a memorable weekend, and Parmegiani was
deservedly rewarded with a standing ovation.
360 Degrees:
Women in Sound was a series
of installations created by women sound
artists, held at first site and Westspace
galleries and curated by Arnya
Tehira and Sianna Lee. According
to Tehira, 360 degrees's gender focus was
necessary to highlight "that in a male-dominated
environment, women are highly under-represented
in sound art".
Ros Bandt's
"Silo Stories" was the pick, with
recorded snatches of conversation echoing
around and inside windy rural wheat silos.
As an "audible mapping of a changing
culture", "Silo Stories"
offered an evocative reminder of a diminishing
lifestyle; stylishly presented, the installation
was accompanied by barrels of overflowing
wheat and mysterious photographs of silos
adorning the gallery walls.
Another standout was Thembi
Soddell's "Intimacy",
utilising surround-sound speakers in a curtained-off
space. For the gallery-goer sitting on the
low stool within the pitch-dark enclosure,
the effect of Soddell's layered, peak-and-trough
waves of sound was absolutely cathartic.
Other installations featured minimal visuals
and "computer chip" music, and
there were enigmatic, immersive quadraphonic
presentations using found sounds and ritualised
street textures.
And so it went that, as I emerged from the
first site gallery, the sounds of the street
became enhanced, super-real: creaking doors
took on an extra dimension, as did the flushing
of a public toilet, the snippets of conversation
stolen from passersby and the groan of a
tram as it rounded a corner. All seemed
slaves to a system of weird harmony, conformation
of some uncanny, grand design; I wandered
the city centre for a good two hours, listening
to my no-longer familiar world with a "new
set of ears" – as Liquid Architecture
had promised I would.
And that, surely, is the measure of the
festival's success.
