Music for Stairwell 2002
AIRSPACE
Curated by Andrew CliffordARTSPACE is pleased to present AIRSPACE 2002, a programme of audio works inhabiting the Karangahape Rd entrance shared with the New Zealand Film Archive and Beautiful Music. Every two months AIRSPACE will offer a new ambient soundtrack, often specifically created or adapted for its stairwell setting, to experience in the time it takes to traverse the space. The programme exploits the overlap between experimental music, ethnographic recordings, sound art, or film audio, either historic or new, to activate and explore the intermediate zone between the street, the gallery, the music store and the film archive.
The AIRSPACE programme is curated by Andrew Clifford, a freelance broadcaster and music journalist. The focus on experimental music aligns strongly with ARTSPACE's annual new music festival, Alt.music, as well as continuing a strong tradition of involvement in the sonic arts.
2002 SCHEDULELen Lye (1901 - 1980) - March/April 2002
Oliver Penny Mutatis Mutandis - April/May 2002
Michael Hodgson Transmission from the Scanner - June 2002
Shawn Feeney (with Hatim Belyamani) Blue - August 2002
Rachel Shearer Squall - October/November 2002
Lisa Reihana & James Pinker 57B - November/December 2002
Len Lye (1901 - 1980)
Recorded and produced by Wayne Laird
Music and rhythm played a pivotal role in the career of Len Lye. He was a devoted jazz fan with a fascination for ancient images and rhythms, and he often spoke of producing "figures of motion" in the same way that a composer would create music.
In his films he used jazz and tribal rhythms, not merely as accompaniment, but as an integral part of audio-visual arrangements. Exploring relationships between sight and sound was also popular amongst the early avant-garde filmmakers that Lye came into contact with, including Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger and Hans Richter.
Lye went on to make kinetic sculptures like built instruments, programmed with counter-rhythms, dramatic arrangements, and complex harmonics. Undulating metal elements pirouette and duet with each other, shuddering, shimmering and crashing in counterpoint to the eerie electromagnetic hums and gyrating gears that drive them. Composer and producer, Wayne Laird, has taken on the challenge of capturing these compositions while leaving all their nuances intact. A complete CD of recordings will be available later this year.
The works are reproduced courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation with assistance from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth
Oliver Penny (aka Field Audio)
Mutatis Mutandis: with respective differences taken into consideration, and having substituted new terms, the necessary changes have been made 2002
In Mutatis Mutandis Oliver Penny employs compositional methods to sonically displace modernist architectural spaces. He has artificially supplemented this stairwell's acoustics, using technology to mix and match room dynamics. In a similar manner, architectural echo effects like reverb and delay enhance modern music. Penny's desolate echo conjures up brutalist stairwells, sterile lobbies, and sleek barren plazas - abandoned cultural voids that have increasingly become a popular source of minimalist album cover art.
His ongoing Field Audio project examines relationships between aural and visual information, exploring the overlapping cultures of art, architecture and music. He experiments with visual manifestations of invisible phenomena, or vice-versa, and frequently uses digitally mediated field recordings to invoke physical source material. These recordings are presented using a range of installation or performance strategies. This line of enquiry made Penny an ideal candidate to be involved in the installation of AIRSPACE. With additional consultation from media artist, Eugene Hansen, Penny devised the modular infrastructure that each AIRSPACE contributor works within.
http://fieldaudio.net/
Michael Hodgson
Transmission from the Scanner, 1995
Transmission from the Scanner is an audio representation of planet cycles over a month, created by mathematically assigning aural values to cosmological phenomena. Hodgson collaborated with Ross George and Bill Lonsdale on the project. It was commissioned by ARTSPACE in 1995 for The Fourth Window, a six-month project in which six local sonic meddlers of various description exhibited sound installations in a specially constructed project room.
Hodgson has always been more interested in raw sound than music. His first release, in 1986, was a run of seventeen cassettes of mangled audio debris. Working with fellow Christchurch boffin, Angus McNaughton, he formed Tinnitus, which issued thirteen D.I.Y. albums and produced multimedia extravaganzas like Rotate Your State.
Moving to Auckland, Hodgson adopted the role of VJ, lending his expertise to art events and working with bands like JPSE, Headless Chickens, MCOJ and Rhythm Slave, as well as Auckland's emerging rave/club scene. In the early 1990s he released two dub-infused remix albums as The Projector, and has recently concocted sparse abstract sound-scapes as Misled Convoy. Together with programmer, Ross George, he developed a video sampler that enables real-time triggering of video from a keyboard. He spent the rest of the decade creating multimedia experiences, including Soliton and the massive millennium night event in the Auckland Domain. He is best known for his work with Paddy Free as half of the electronic duo, Pitch Black.
Shawn Feeney (with Hatim Belyamani)
Blue, 2002
Blue is an experimental collaboration between artists Shawn Feeney and Hatim Belyamani. To create the work they decided three elements: a duration of 30 minutes, a rhythmic relationship of 3:2 (Feeney’s piece is at 135bpm and Belyamani’s is at 90bpm) and a theme (the color blue). Also, an image was generated by an mp3 player’s visual plug-in to function as a graphic score. After setting these guidelines they worked independently, Feeney in New Zealand and Belyamani in the USA. On completion, their respective mono components were spliced into a stereo composition, creating an interplay of synchronicities and fluctuations of dominance.
For Airspace, each collaborator’s contribution plays from a separate CD player, gradually drifting out of synchronisation throughout the duration of the installation. Belyamani can be heard on the installation’s western side whilst Feeney can be heard to the east.
Feeney is a New York born artist who recently spent a year working towards an MFA at Elam School of Fine Arts’ Intermedia department, which he is now finishing in Texas. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Music at Harvard University and has studied electronic music and traditional Irish music in Dublin and London.Rachel Shearer
Squall, 2002
Squall's sample sources are as traditional as an electric guitar (courtesy of regular collaborator, Sean O'Reilly) or as unlikely as a bowling ball rolling across a stereo field. Mostly from acoustic origins, these snatches of sound have been digitally dissected and transformed until their origins are almost imperceptible. Shearer's sound worlds dissolve the superficial characteristics of audio to zoom in on its underlying grainy textures. These ghostly aural effects drift around Airspace's installation in a twenty-minute quadraphonic loop.
Shearer's recording pedigree begins with Port Chalmers band, Angelhead (Xpressway), and Auckland girl-rock group, Queen Meanie Puss (Flying Nun/Siltbreeze). Armed with equipment won at a Music Expo she left for Germany in 1992, where, isolated from her usual influences, she was able to explore a more individual and less song-based approach. Returning three years later, she established Lovely Midget and began experimenting with sound for film. She still works with Stella Corkery (from Angelhead and Queen Meanie Puss), and released her first album on the Port Chalmers label Corpus Hermeticum in 2000. Squall has been distilled from Lovely Midget's forthcoming second album.
Lisa Reihana & James Pinker
57B, 2002
Anywhere we live can be characterised by distinct sound ecologies, which become so familiar that they only inhabit our subconscious. Whether it's the intermittent hum of a refrigerator, the daily passing of a freight train, or the monthly roar from a nearby speedway, your brain finds ways to filter out such aural routines. 57B is quite literally house music. It explores the sonic landscapes inherent in the home that James Pinker and Lisa Reihana have just moved to.
Reihana has represented New Zealand at the 2002 Asia Pacific Triennial, Brisbane and at "Toi Toi Toi" in Kassel, Germany in 1999. Last year her work was simultaneously featured in two exhibitions, "Purangiaho" at Auckland Art Gallery and "Techno Maori" at City Gallery, Wellington. She is best known for her video animation work and teaches Moving Image at Manukau Institute of Technology.
Her partner and frequent sound collaborator, James Pinker, who also teaches at MIT, once played in local post-punk groups, The Superettes, The Features and Fetus Productions. Moving to Australia and then England, he worked with SPK, Dead Can Dance and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan before returning to New Zealand and forming Mesh.
