“Technology must be looked at as a comprehensive human-led practice akin to domestic culture or democracy.”. Darsha Hewitt, a Canadian based in Berlin, is an artist that works with media and sounds, but her interest that most describes her duty is technology. She’s interested in the recollection of old electronics for posthumous rework and experimentation.
Before meeting her, I imagined her as an introvert that avoids contact with humans, always surrounded by wires and antique gear from the ’50s and ’60s. but, impressively, she appeared to be the opposite – she’s cheerful, funny, very active. This aspect changed my perspective towards this underground area of music and sound. now I look at hacking technology as something fun and satisfying.
Above all this, it is Darsha’s capacity in looking at raw materials like old technology and gives them a new life almost deranged from the previous they had. For example, her electrostatic bell choir is a genius piece of art and seems for me very unique. She empowered one little aspect of old tv’s, that most of us probably already noticed it and our grandparents house or somewhere else – the electrostatic phenomena that they possess when switched off. She added to that a pre-technological apparatus that was used in the 1700s to show the potential use of such type of electricity. Together, they produce a relaxing sound, but yet very electrical, provoking, and incredible atmosphere. Yet, visually, it looks cyberpunkish – cheerful punk is a good term to describe Darsha modus operandi.
Darsha Hewitt has this peculiarity of making something negative and concerning into a more positive and engaging belief – she turns garbage, which is environmentally bad, into art, which is theoretically and practically good in every way and has a very lasting meaning. This is present in another work of hers where she takes a deep understanding of a socialist-communist german generic lawnmower from the 70s. The looks are very robust. She dived into the history of that machine and came out with another astonishing piece of art. She exponentiated the capacities of a particular piece of it – the casket – and turned it into an exhibition and later in a compilation of speakers.
The only person I’ve seen doing similar things was another digital and technological obsessed (are an enthusiast? passionate? obsessed? – interesting question about the relationships that we have of things), the one and the only devon Hendryx, also known as Jpegmafia. Hope to get my hands in the wires soon as long as I can afford electrician gear.
(starts at minute 11:00) jpegmafia hacking a nintendo switch for percussive purposes
When I first left my country in 2018 I had bad connections with it. I wanted both emotional and physical relations linked to my country to disappear completely. I didn’t even want people to recognize me as apart of my country. I didn’t felt Portuguese. I didn’t want to be it. I wanted a fresh start as someone with no roots. during those years, coming back home to Portugal was strange. All these ideas crossing my head like imperative guidelines for my existence and all the memories of places and people and family striking back at me in every street I recrossed. Whenever I went back to Madrid, people would ask – how’re things back there? How’s your family? How are your friends? I would always answer in an avoiding way: “It’s all good”. But, as soon as I started to note differences between my hometown and Madrid, I started to talk about Portugal more carefully – I would say “people talk differently in Porto”, “people act differently”, “people don’t do this in Portugal”. Little by little, I started to look at my country as a place that I esteem and care for. Little by little I looked at it as it was my responsibility and my duty to protect. Since then, everything looked different and I was no longer denying my identity.
However, I would look at Portugal as a place that it’s dying. Its people are disappearing. Its voice is becoming weak. As it always was in our history, people are fleeing to other places, looking for a better life. Now I feel that my duty, inside the capabilities of art, is to maintain our torch alive for more years. Therefore, I will expose one of those people that tried to inlight that torch.
Its name is Michel Giacometti, a french ethnologist that dedicated his life and work to Portuguese culture. When he was working in the Musée de L’homme, in the ’50s, he passed most of his time in the archives section. One day, he came across the underground Portuguese traditions, that most of the world didn’t know about and certainly was dying because of the impact of globalization. He fell in love immediately. He moved into the coast of Lisbon (Cascais) in 1959, in a country that was living one of the least talked dictatorships, with concentration camps, wars in Africa and India, prosecutions, oppressive police, and all everything else that a fascist influenced regime has. Michel went to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to seek funding for his Trás-Os-Montes sound collection project. The investment was denied and the minister of propaganda now knew about him. He decided to do things on his own. In 1960, he founded the Portuguese sound archives and started recording material for Emissora Nacional (Portugal), Radio France, WDR (West Germany), and Sveriges Riskradio (Sweden). People started to notice his work and became very interested in the perception he had of Portuguese culture. By the end of the 1960s, he had the whole intellectual Portugal following him everywhere he went. In 1970, RTP (Rádio e Televesião Portuguesa – Portuguese Radio and Television) invited him to present his work on a program called “O Povo Que Canta” (the people who sing) for 4 years, where he showed the songs people would sing during their labor spontaneously.
“A Carapideira”. This poor woman sings what is called the “the chant to the dead”. When Giacometti met her in Soajo, she refused to sing without the intention to cry. She said it was fake. “a few years back, a foreigner asked me to do the same. He took everything I sang to a box and went back to Lisbon without saying anything else. I’m never doing that again not even for money”. But, suddenly, Giacometti found her crying and singing spontaneously. He later asked, “why did you sing when you explicitly said you wouldn’t do it?”. She answered, “How can I not cry when my life is like this and the pain is paid”.Cantinela da Pedra (meaning the “singing of the rock”) – this is a non-performative act that happens spontaneously among the rock workers. These men would carry themselves the weight of these huge rocks. they believed that if they sang to the rock, the same would become lighter and move towards where the song was being proclaimed.
For many, this wasn’t only recordings of the people singing while working, this was a political movement against Salazar’s dictatorship. Michel was telling the world how people lived in poor conditions, how the state was oppressive against them, how hopeless people sounded. Michel looked to these people as if they were carrying with them a superpower. That superpower was their voice, their arms, their shoes, their labor, their tears, their strength, and their resilience. Michel carried about these people as much he carried about the sound they were reproducing while working.
At the end of those 4 years with RTP, in 1974, the 25th of April happened, also known as the carnation revolution. It wasn’t because of Michel Giacometti certainly, but the echoes of his work most probably struck those who still had a small hope for freedom of speech. When I first saw myself with his legacy I felt the same. I felt a need to expand the voice of my people, their struggles, and their history. But I will always expose the toxicity that lies in many of them, that retrogrades Portugal and its progress. Nowadays, Portuguese fascism is reverberating again in a different form in our people. In 1930, it was called União Nacional (National Union) under the hands of António Oliveira Salazar. In 2020, it is called Chega and the voice is André Ventura.
Last week it was brought to my hands a little instructional book called “A little guidebook for home listening (2020)” by Ruth Anderson, Sam Auinger, David Behrman, Katrinem, Annea Lockwood, Bruce Odland, and Liz Phillips. It was meant to be a guide for sound artists to find their space inside the sonic world and their motif, followed by a list of practical exercises to do at home or outside individually.
ruth anderson (1928-2019), american composer
The first exercise was called “sound portrait: hearing a person” and was developed by Ruth Anderson, an American music composer, orchestrator, teacher, and flutist. Ruth suggests that music can explain a person, and vice-versa if we put ourselves in a darkened room, in a comfortable positing, with a song picked by us and by forcing the image of a loved person of ours. she says that if you complete this procedure:
“(…) you will find after, an understanding of the person you did not have, and a personal relationship to the music. the music, too, will be known.”
boy harsher – pain (2014)
Lately, I’ve been listening to Boy Harsher’s lesser man EP (2014), suggested by my sound artist friend Inês França (@in.fra.es on Instagram), and decided to pick one of the songs of this project (“pain” – track no. 3) to do my “hearing person experiment”
The result: a weird experience in unveiling a person that I know and care about. now I strongly believe that i don’t know her. The whole experience felt like a video clip – strong and vivid images crossed my mind of something that may not be the reality. I think that i’m not able to say that this song changed or revealed explanations of this person, but I definitely can say that it changed her hues and textures, the feelings and emotions attached, and her characteristics. Music didn’t create/explained the person I know. Instead, it created a new one.
sam auinger (1956) sonic thinker, composer, and artist.
The second exercise that i liked the most was “my personal sound space – an exploration by ears” designed by sam auinger, an austrian sonic thinker. sam suggests the exploring of space through sound using a pebble to answer the question “why we hear what we hear and how it makes us feel?”. The experiment is tripartite with the following tasks: pebble meets objects (touch different materials in your room with the pebble and find interesting patterns, differences between textures, etc.); pebble falls on a surface (let the pebble fall in the ground and let the sound absorb the room. Try different surfaces); pebble meets an arranged situation (combination with the previous two tasks).
“it is essential that our imagination leads us and that the game forecasting the change in the sound is part of this exercise. by doing this, we will develop a kind of an inner ear and the ability to hear the sounding properties of objects and spaces and to feel their inherent atmospheres in advance – which allows us to act more according to our needs.”
My response: this experience indeed opened some windows in my sound perception. It feels like a mindful experience through space and sound, because suddenly you can only care and think about the different sound that the pebble can produce. trying to identify different types of sound textures and tones. It feels the same as looking at a forest and trying to decipher all types of green there are according to each tree. or looking into grains of sand and try to identify as many colors as one can. I think I’ve underestimated the sound qualities and let the visual world dominate my senses From now on, objects have both sound and visual silhouettes.
liz phillips (1951) american sound artist
Lastly, Liz Phillips, an american sound artist, appeals to our selective memory to remember the sounds that we recollect from a determined place and time and from that create a sonic world with the sounds that we most love and appreciate hearing. this was, by far, the exercise that put me more in a sound perspective.
our senses tell us so much if we are present and still and open.
my response:
I grew up in the Portuguese city of Porto and its surroundings, and now that I think about my selective memory I do hold in my hard disk loads of sound memories of my hometown and its different textures. as an example, the other day I was searching sounds for fun in freesounds.com, I come across myself with a zoom h6 field recordings of Porto. This same mysterious recordist named 20020 had +100 recordings of the city in different sound landscapes. I thought to myself “these recordings out of context could be somewhere else”. I later heard a recording of Porto’s bus 600 line, the bus that I would take from school to my house – it was the most nostalgic experience that I had because the sound that the bus produced was exactly the way I remembered it. it was not only the sound of the engine but the sound of the walls shaking, the deteriorated pavement, people’s voices. this reflects the importance of sound. the 600 line bus sound is unique because of its patterns – human, technological, and environmental – and, for me, the emotional connection I have
600 bus line empty (Oporto,Portugal) by 20020
I also remember my walks with my grandfather near the river of his village and we would hear this strange animal sound that we couldn’t decipher it was a reptile or a bird. Fifteen years passed and my ignorance towards that noise was maintained. it was a peep sound similar to a cuckoo but yet more rhythmic and electrical like a commutator. this year, during quarantine, I began doing research on this sound by talking with the people from the village. no one knew. as a birder, I knew that it couldn’t be a common bird, so I decided to give a shot at the reptiles. at end of 3 weeks, I discovered the sound and I immediately fell in love with that sound, becoming one of my favorite sounds. It was a midwife toad.
midwife toad sound only appears at night and near rivers
Introducing the topic with the great animal orchestra, a project commended by the Foundation Cartier, where the united visual artists were invited to collaborate, to perpetuate and celebrate Bernie Krause’s work (musician, bioacoustics, and scientist). In this project, the main figure is Bernie, who has been recording animals for 45 years and has compilated more the 5000 hours of sound recordings and over 15 000 individual species in their natural habitats from all over the world. The work was followed by an exposition where the spectator is surrounded by soundscapes, spectrograms. the spectrogram creates an abstract landscape that folds very smoothly in the environment of the exhibition.
Animals are indeed natural instruments that hold unique sounds and we might not notice the importance they have in landscape, because, maybe, we take natural life as something pre-acquired. this makes me think about the possibility of one day humans stop to listen to the sound of the earth moving as its inexistence is something that no one knows what it feels like. Imagine one day, you wake in New York and all you can hear is a loud murmur reverberating in the tall walls of the city with no sign of technology and life. Although, I feel that Bernie was not recording nature with this ideology. It seems that he was chasing textures and hues, denying the presence of the artist and with a very classic approach. Bernie Krause’s intention is not to lie to you about what you are hearing. In fact, what you hear is reality itself, but from the perspective of the recordist. I consider that I relate a lot to Bernie Krause’s personality. 5000 hours means a passion for something. 5000 hours means patience and knowing how to live with it. Since I was 15 I’ve been observing birds with perseverance and now that I am a young artist I know that I can use this passion of mine for something big. When art touches the most natural things, it explodes with clairvoyance.
On the other hand, Izabela Dłużyk, a polish nature recordist, seeks a feeling when she records her pieces. She makes the presence of the artist more real, as she lets you know where she points her microphone. Her work is selective but yet with no filters. The connection that she has with nature is described by her encounter with it and not the opposite. In her project “soundscapes of summer”, recorded in the forests of Zywkovo (Poland), Izabela shows us what she seeks in a constant movement to find the perfect sensation/spot – in the track “dawn with the white storks” you can notice this elliptical movement of the microphone, where sounds fade away and reappear with a purpose. Compared to Bernie Krause’s recordings, Izabela has a more modern approach to sound, but yet without unrevealing nature itself. The stork’s calling feels to be rotating and the listener is constantly changing positions in terms of space.
Lastly, Jana Winderen’s work is the least realistic, however, it is the most conscient of the post-production capabilities of audio. Jana is a Norwegian sound artist that, for now, has been focusing her work on the unreachable water world, either on the deep sea or even inside the ice. She studies and records wild places that have particular importance in our understanding of the complexity and fragility of marine ecosystems. Her album “energy field” is a great example to describe her work both sonically and artistically: you can notice the presence of the artist in many different ways – microphone selection and position, editing frequencies, and sound structure timeline – and you can point the mood intentionality in terms of feeling and state of mind. in the track “aquaculture” I personally felt a spoonful of seasickness and a very dark and unreachable environment that wasn’t meant to be reached by humans.
Related to the previous showcased works, I would recommend xeno-canto, a website made by ornithologists, and for ornithologists. It is dedicated to sharing bird sounds from all over the world. Whether you are a research scientist, a birder, or simply curious about a sound that you heard out your kitchen window.
Last week, in the visiting practitioner session, I had the opportunity to understand better the work of Lisa busby. She’s a Scottish vocalist and improviser, either with the body and vocal instrument. She’s intrigued with small artifacts and fragments of sound and noise. She’s also an experimental turntablist and sampler. Her work is very diverse between performance and composing, making her projects intangible, as she mentioned to hardly pre-meditate a performance before its execution. The project that I found to be more fascinating to me were “proposal of a song” – a musical piece inspired by Kim Gordon’s “proposal for a story” poem:
This poem, to my eyes, reflects a dirty realism vibe as well as an automated and surrealist poem that touches the exquisite cadaver type of lyricism. In “proposal for a song”, we get the same sensation, once the style is very related to the plunderphonic genre and everything sounds related and not related at the same time. Although, you get to feel some very interesting percussion patterns and melancholic harmonic sounds.
This type of production really absorbs me as it provokes some real good brain chemistry – good vibrational synapses. You feel engaged and connected to the organized and yet trashy elegance of the music. Her voice reminds me of Mimi Parker (Low’s vocalist) and Björk (Björk), which made me formulate these two questions to Lisa:
1) Q: Do you think of voices, and their timbre, as something sampleable? A: yes! I’m very interested in small sections of things and how they can be repeated and can that power be affected.
2) Q: Do you see your vocal instrument as a DAW? A: No and that’s because I’ve never thought about it before.
To be frank, I’m not very happy with the outcome that my questions took, but I’m happy to know she looks to the vocal instrument in the way I thought about them. I was imagining that she would take the timbre of a specific voice and try to manipulate it afterward. In addition to this topic, I highly recommend Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica (album). It is a plunderphonics record made out of samples of American ads from the 80s and the 90s. The album talks about “The idea of the replica in culture as a way we deal with the decline of knowledge, or human knowledge going to waste because we’re not immortal”.
Ah! don’t give me sympathetic intentions!don’t ask me for definitions!don’t tell me: “come this way”!my life is a whirlwind that broke loose,it’s a wave that rose.it’s one more atom that ignited…I don’t know which way I’ll go,I don’t know where I’m going to– I know I’m not going that way!
José Régio
Cântico Negro “Black Chant” by José Régio on Poemas de Deus e do Diabo “Poems from God and the Devil”. Interpreted by João Villaret (1955)
I consider this poem my modus operandi at this right moment. So many doubts. So many anxieties. The only thing that is clear for me is where I am heading and it is definitely not in that way. As ambiguous as it is, for now, there’s no need for objective definitions of what is happening.
