Dialoguing with Space: artists of sound
From the Editor:
Does an “aesthetic response” make dangerous places safe? In describing his project, Sounds from Dangerous Places, Peter Cusack says that little harm comes to people who make short visits to threatened environments; the harm is to ecosystems and to the people who have no choice but to live there and whose livelihoods depend on that environment. “Dangerous places,” Cusack writes, “can be both sonically and visually compelling, even beautiful and atmospheric. There is, often, an extreme dichotomy between an aesthetic response and knowledge of the ‘danger’, whether it is pollution, social injustice, military or geopolitical” (Sounds-from-dangerous-places.org).
The listener can find what the artist has discovered through what he calls a process of “Sonic Journalism,” and like a journalist, Cusack leads by questions, primarily: “What can be learnt about dangerous places by listening to their sounds?” Listening can be a kind of dialogue with place, “getting information from sound recordings of an event or place without too much speech” (CDM, 2013).
In this issue of Angime, we dedicate our space to artists whose main occupation is sound or for whom it is an important preoccupation. They are artists whose works are interdisciplinary, experimenting with the aural relationships between people and environments, between cultures of music and, of course, between disciplines.
Sound can be a bath for ears that are ringing from “too much speech.”
Theater-sound
The theater collective ORTA was founded in Almaty in 2015 by director Rustem Begenov and actress Alexandra Morozova. It is made up of a core of artists and researchers who invite collaboration from beyond their own community. As Begenov explains, the collective’s experiments with sound represent invitations to the spectators to bring themselves fully into the space as collaborators.
sound-Arrangements
Chance encounters with students from Kazakhstan led composer and musicologist Werner Linden to Kazakh traditional music. He became intrigued with the geography of the country and its many borders. Diving into the music also introduced him to the geography in Aqtoty Raiymkulova’s Aral Muny.
Here he describes his process that he refers to as Surrealist arranging, specifically for his orchestral piece-in-progress, Qazaqstanda.
field recording- sound
The field recordings of the Aral Sea by musician, field recordist and sound artist Peter Cusack result from a kind of dialogue with place. In 2013, Cusack began his trips to the Aral Sea and to the Naryn River to listen to what can be learned about one of the greatest human-made environmental catastrophes on earth. He recorded the evolving geographies.