In this blog post, I want to explain the pathways in which I am keen to explore post-graduate. Whilst I am keen to pursue music, a constant that has been with me through out my life, this course and the exposure to a wide variety of artists and practitioners through the Sound Art Guest Lecture Series, I have discovered interests in writing, experimental music and sound for film (such as foley, composition, etc)
I would like to try and be multifaceted in order to be able to pursue these interests semi-equally. At the moment, I am doing most of these things by myself, in order to not only being able to practice with no judgement and expectation, but also because i don’t yet have the opportunity to apply these practices for an institution.
On Thursday the 15th May, Julia Eckhardt, an organiser in the field of Sound Arts visited LCC for a guest lecture.
Julia Eckhardt is a musician and organiser in the field of the sonic arts. She is artistic co-director of Q-O2 workspace for experimental music and sound art, and of Oscillation festival in Brussels. She has performed and released internationally, and has been engaged in a number of artistic collaborations, among which extensively with composer Éliane Radigue. Julia is (co-)author of books such as The Second Sound – Conversations on Gender and Music, Grounds for Possible Music, and Éliane Radigue – Intermediary Spaces/Espaces intermédiaires, among others. She is a researcher at the philosophical faculty at VUB Brussels, and has been teaching and lecturing on topics related to sound, music, gender, and space.
After this guest lecture, i took time to file through Julia’s works, particularly on her soundcloud. One piece that i found myself returning to was this viola piece titled ‘Mother Viola Study 1’, a piece consisting of viola, and the voices of others (Edyta Jarzab, Youjin Yeon, Angharad Davies, Ioana Mandrescu, Ensieh Maleki) scattered through out, delivering spoken word performances on top of the viola.
Another piece that i became quite interested in was ‘//2009// – what do you make of what I say?’.
The project //2009// – what do you make of what I say? involved ten sound artists who created a 7-minute piece in response to a composition by an unknown precursor. They were given no secondary information in the process, since the intent was to explore how exactly we perceive sound information when taken fully in isolation. The project was carried out at Q-02 throughout the year 2009; the works are by Julia Eckhardt, Chiyoko Szlavnics, Mieke Lambrigts, Manfred Werder, Annette Krebs, Tim Parkinson, Olivier Toulemonde, Manu Holterbach, Aernoudt Jacobs and Anne Wellmer. The aim was to investigate how we perceive music, in a more precise way than ‘I liked it’ or ‘it spoke to me’ and whether it is in any way possible to ‘understand’ experimental music. The proposition of the research-part of the project was that mis-understanding could lead to creative interaction, presupposing that there is an active and open listening.
I thought that this collection of pieces was great. It feels like an experiment for both the artists and the audience through the way in which we perceive music, and specifically experimental music. It feels like an ode to personal creative practice and the fact that despite everyone being given the same stimuli (a composition by an unknown precursor) the outcomes are all wildly different.
Last Thursday (22nd May), George Lynch visited LCC to give a guest lecture on her practice, a practice which prioritises writing. This lecture actually inspired me to prioritise writing myself in both my practice and my life, since then i have been spending time writing for personal projects and also about cultural and artistic subjects; with no aim to publish officially but as a form of practice.
George Lynch is a writer. Recent publications of her work include: Oxford Poetry, Fieldnotes Journal, Sticky Fingers Publishing, Datableed Journal. Her work involves performance — she has given performances internationally, most recently Galerie Molitor (Berlin) CCA Glasgow (Glasgow), and Cafe Oto (London), and programmed & produced numerous performance events at The Horse Hospital (London). She was a recipient of the 2023 Fieldnotes Development Grant. She is the founder of The Horse Hospital Collective.
I found George to be a very interesting guest to research and look into after the lecture. On the RCA website, an institution where she studied, there is a statement by her criticising the RCA:
‘The RCA is a failed institution. If an institution cannot provide job security for its teaching staff, chooses to outsource its maintenance staff, but is able to provide year-on-year pay rises to its rector, it is a failed institution. If an art school tells its international students that it will report them to the Home Office for failure to pay fees, in the middle of a global pandemic, while capitalising on claimed proximity to radical thinkers of the border, the violence of the nation-state, and anti-imperialism, then it is not only a morally abhorrent institution, it is a failed institution, too. If an art school which charges tuition fees vastly in excess of the government postgraduate loan offers no support to students who face financial difficulties while studying, allows classes to glut to sizes which fundamentally compromise the viability of its tutorial- and seminar-centric teaching model, and structures timetables with no consideration of students’ need to hold down jobs, then it is a failed institution. If the RCA cannot recognise the irony of its public espousal of “Black Lives Matter” coincident with its hiring of a white man as its head of ‘inclusivity’, and the dismissal of its casualised Black teaching staff, then it is not only an embarrassment, it is a failed institution. The RCA may well long continue on the path that it is on, but it ought to made clear that it is a fool’s errand to go looking for art in the direction of capital.’
Coming to the end of my experience at University, studying my degree in Sound Arts, it felt like a good time to utilise this module as an opportunity to brainstorm and externalise my future aspirations when it comes to the idea of living as an artist; discussing and reflecting upon the past three years and how it shaped my experience.
In second year, during my ‘Personal Creative Project’, which involved re-designing the sound and composing a new soundtrack for Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’, I discovered that I had a real interest and curiosity regarding sound for film; using foley techniques and also composing for a specific atmosphere. Below is a snippet of this project:
This project allowed me to become exposed to the idea of sound for film, as well as composition for film; both elements in which i practiced in this unit.
As time has gone on, I have explored a number of different films and their sound and soundtracks. Soundtracks, in particular have piqued my interest, particularly the works of Daniel Blumberg.
Above is one of the tracks composed by Blumberg and a number of musicians that he holds high regard to.
Over the years, my interest has shifted between a variety of different artistic disciplines, styles of music and ways of expressing these. I cant explain for sure the catalyst for losing interest in one subject and gaining interest in another so quickly, but a benefit of this was exposure to a vast array of different styles of art, music and writing; some of which have had a profound effect on my practice.
In this post I want to discuss some of my most dominant influences over my practice and also explain the extent to which these figures / ideals have impacted not only my creative practices but also the way in which i live my life.
I’d argue that one of my biggest influences over the past year is the work of artists such as Blackhaine, Richie Culver, Florence Sinclair. In my head, these artists all share the same values and approach to music and art by choosing not to dwell on creating art based around nostalgia, but choosing to reframe their experiences and therefore memory into new contexts, whilst maintaining their strong roots in origin and place.
Thie Blackhaine piece was formative in influencing my practice, the sonic manipulation of his raw vocal/lyrical performance struck a chord with me; i really liked how the effects reflected the industrial bleakness of his work. With Blackhaine, everything links back to place, particularly the North, and everything feels so intensely considered. The use of text-to-speech voice contrasting with soft drones is both brutally raw and intimate but also a great sonic interpretation of a dull, prolonged, numb pain.
Richie Culver’s website was also a great source of inspiration throughout the years. His works, either visual or sonic, also evoked this bleakness and sense of place as Blackhaine’s work.
In a spoken word piece, performed at The Haggerston in London for Adult Entertainment, Culver, deadpan, describes how there is a ‘fine line between jealousy and hatred’ which himself, or the character ‘snorted with a blood-stained five pound note’, a harsh symbolism of the struggles of being creative.
On Thursday (20th February), Kwame Phillips visited LCC to give a guest lecture.
‘Kwame Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at the Winchester School of Art, specialising in sensory media production, mixtape scholarship and critical media studies. Phillips’ work uses multimodal and experimental methodologies, often grounded in remix and repurposing, to focus on resilience, race, and social justice. He is co-author (with Dr. Shana Redmond) of the chapter “‘The People Who Keep on Going’: A Radical Listening Party” in The Futures of Black Radicalism (Verso 2017). He is also co-creator (with Dr. Debra Vidali) of the multi-sensorial sound art work, “Kabusha Radio Remix: Your Questions Answered by Pioneering Zambian Talk Show Host David Yumba (1923-1990),” and the resultant co-authored article, “Ethnographic Installation and ‘the Archive’: Re/Dislocation, Reverberation, and Aspiration” in the “Bodies of Archives/Archival Bodies” special issue of Visual Anthropology Review. He is part of the Visual Scholarship Initiative.
Phillips’ work often involves teaching in underserved communities and he has taught workshops in Thailand, The Maldives, Pakistan and Palestine. His recent interest is in ‘mixtape scholarship’, a curation and reprocessing of sensory media to convey sonic narratives in a manner not bounded by academic tradition or traditional form. This has led to the visual mixtapes The Imagined Things: On Solange, Repetition and Mantra and Lovers Rock Dub: An Experiment in Visual Reverberation. His upcoming publications include “Dub, Ecstasy and Collective Memory in Lovers Rock” in ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen (Edinburgh University Press) and “Creating an Ethnographic Exhibit” in The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook (Routledge).’
This guest lecture exposed me to the work ‘Lovers Rock Dub’, which is a an audio-visual dub remix of Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock, exploring the lingering and tugging resonances, echoes, hauntings, associations and traces of diasporic memory. Described as an experiment into ‘visual reverberations’