Dialoguing with Space:

Editorial by Patricia Coleman

“Too much speech” is what first drew me to Sound Studies. As a student of theater, I found myself most often at productions that experimented with the relationship of the seen and the heard, creating intentional gaps between them. Sound was not a background to create a non-perceptible reality, but was dissected to allow the viewer/listener to identify what their “realities” are composed of. While pursuing my PhD in theater, I had to look elsewhere, outside of theater, to research the disembodied voice in the avant-garde, and I found myself in Sound Studies most often.

Any foray into Sound Studies leads the listener in many directions. A couple practices can help us begin, if they are not treated as prescriptive:

  • John Cage’s oft-repeated restatement of the artist’s role as “imitating nature in her manner of operation” reflects on what happens in nature, theater, music and sound. It offers a way of reviewing the metaphor that theater holds a mirror up to life and theater’s relationship to “nature.”

Director Rustem Begenov and actress Alexandra Morozova, founders of the ORTA Center in Almaty in 2015, likely have the practices of Cage in mind in their approaches to performance. Cage is featured as one of the artists in Begenov’s program for Kazakh Radio Classic, “New Genuises of the First Rank.” On ORTA’s website, “portals” are mentioned twice: the collective “creates special ceremonial events, called Performative Portals, which reveal the Higher Dimensions and nurture the Inner Genius of everyone involved in the creation of the Portal.” A portal suggests that on a stage or any other performance space, we have access to different modes of experience, not one that exists around a single or spoken perspective. This practice is haunted generally by Cage’s restatement above and more specifically by works such as Cage’s Theater Piece (1960):

A composition indeterminate of its performance, it is one of Cage’s earliest works to use time brackets. These time brackets indicate a period of time within which an action may be made. The actions are taken from a gamut of 20 nouns and/or verbs chosen by the performer. The compositional means were the materials of Fontana Mix. Parts are provided for 1-8 performers, which may be used in whole, in part, or in any combination (https://www.johncage.org).

A second practice, which for many Sound Artists is very present, is elucidated in the writings and research of R. Murray Schafer:

  • Schafer’s Acoustic Ecology or “eco-acoustics” is a movement credited to his World Soundscape Project founded at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960’s. Reiterations of this project and his book Tuning of the World (1977), reissued as The Soundscape (1994), are present in the many aural returns to the Aral Sea, driven by whatever desire: to document, to mourn, to profit or…

Although not a part of the Dangerous Places Project, Cusack’s Aral Sea Stories evolved from questions in the shape of listening that unfolded over three years and three trips to the Aral Sea in 2013/14/15 and also one to Kyrgyzstan in 2018.  He began in conversations with his guide, Serik Duissenbayev, and stretched from these conversations to other people who live and work by the great lake as well as along the Naryn River. These interactions form part of the acoustic eco-system that Cusack records of aural geographies as they evolve.

When I spoke to Cusack, I had the impression of an artist coming at the place from more directions than only the one of the field recordist: from the perspective of an improviser, a scientist and a story-teller. He brings the listener to the Aral Sea from all these standpoints and thus his recordings read as an on-going conversation.

The first electronic music festival that took place in 2018 in the desert on the Uzbekistan side invited young crowds to listen in the desert, rather than to it. One of the organizers cajoled the crowd: "Let's fill the Aral Sea with an ocean of sounds. If we cannot fill it with water right now, let's start with the sounds" (Uzbeks attend first electronic music fest). That command rings like a post-apocalyptic war-cry.

As a musicologist and composer, Dr Werner Linden’s practices are a dialogue with places and their traditional music; he hears the music, learns the geography and defines his process of composing as Surrealist arranging. Linden found himself inside the Aral Sea through his growing engagement with the traditional music of Kazakhstan. He had become intrigued by Kazakhstan through a series of happy accidents (in Germany, meeting a colleague and also students who were from Kazakhstan) that led to an ever-evolving relationship with its music. He has created a series of radio programs on the music scene of Kazakhstan, arranged 7 pieces, using Kazakh traditional songs, and in 2012, lectured at the Kazakh National Conservatory in Almaty on “The Development of Contemporary Music in the West from 1945 to 2000 from Schoenberg and Webern to Cage.” When he heard Aqtoty Raiymkulova’s Aral Muny küyi for the Qyl-qobyz, he was inspired to create a rearrangement of her piece that can be heard here, accompanied by his own assemblage of footage. His process of Surrealist collaging of traditional music creates a dialogue between those tunes and the composer’s relationship to the place and its music. He reveals this process, which he applies to his orchestral piece in progress, Qazaqstanda, in his contribution to this issue of Angime.

Other artists working with sound, not included as contributors in this issue, have sought to make work that evokes the youngest desert on earth. The Aralkum, the name given to the location in 2014 after the main southern basin had entirely dried up, is also the title of the 2020 album by Galya Bisengalieva, a British-Kazakh composer and violinist. She released her debut album, and dedicated it to the desert, Aralkum. From Bisengalieva’s liner notes on Bandcamp: “The album is split into three parts: pre-disaster, calamity, future.”


Artist Almgul Menlibayeva brings her spectators from a distance to the Aral Sea through a mixture of media. In her project Transoxiana Dreams, begun in 2011, Menlibayeva creates a film (shot onsite and with no script) that is the product of a young girl’s “projections”:

We are caught in a girl’s post-human world of hybrid reality inside her dream with the disturbing body experience of our possible futures of environmental social injustice. All-day and all-night, fishermen circle along the bottom of the dried Aral Sea.  (Menlibayeva)

Spectators are led into a trance that results in part from the video’s tenuous relationship of sound to image. There are centaurs, children with fox hats and women with four legs and egg yolks as breastplates. The sounds created by OMFO (Our Man From Odessa, or German Popov) are sometimes “diegetic” (directly tied to the film’s story), sometimes associative  (non-diegetic). Regardless, image is never exactly synced to sound--there is always a lapse between the two (or, more often than not, there is a lapse), as for example, the feet walking in sand with the sounds of sand crunching under foot. Alone, OMFO’s soundscape, an assemblage of the sounds of the desert--wind, bells, footsteps in sand, camels’ braying-- weaves through his composition that also echoes these relationships. 

As co-editor of the visual arts of Angime with Arlyce Menzies and a newcomer to Astana -Nur-Sultan, at a time when all places are dangerous to us and to themselves and there is an abundance of speech on screens and in headphones, I am delighted to introduce myself, and perhaps you, to artists working with sound in and about Kazakhstan.  

Some Further works with sound in Kazakhstan: