Kehrer Verlag has published a long and interesting list of books on sound art over the years, ranging from genre-defining theoretical works and extended exhibition catalogues to artist monographs. These publications discuss different aspects of sound art, from those found in silent or nearly inaudible expressions, to clearly articulated and strong attacks on our auditory brain. Germany has a particularly strong tradition of sound art, and Kehrer plays an important role in developing and presenting discourse that springs from the genre.
From Kehrer’s catalogue, five recent books have reached Organised Sound. The books present the work of five artists: Peter Ablinger, hearing LISTENING, published in conjunction with a Berlin exhibition at Haus am Waldsee; Christina Kubisch, Electrical Drawings, published for a retrospective exhibition shown in Bremen in 2008 and Marl in 2009; Bernhard Gál, Installations; Douglas Henderson, playback. no rewind button; and Kristof Georgen, Sound, published on the occasion of three recent exhibitions. The books are richly illustrated, well designed, delicate to the touch, and are published in both German and English. Three of them (Gál, Georgen and Henderson) also contain CDs with excerpts of the artists’ works.
Ablinger, Henderson, Kubisch and Gál are all professional musicians and composers, while Georgen’s biography shows a fine arts background. These artists have all reached beyond the constraints of the common concert situation to be able to focus the audience on qualities of sound other than timbre and rhythm, and on different modes of listening. Their projects are in many ways related to the electroacoustic project of listening within the sound for timbral and structural experiences outside of the pitch-based paradigm, but their interest in context, reference and the act of listening itself has moved the sonic constructions away from the specifically musical arenas and into galleries and other spaces for installation. The artists share an attention to ‘non-musical sound’, and use this focus to interest the listener in complex auditory situations in quite different ways.
The book on Peter Douglas Henderson is edited by Ingrid Beirer, and features texts by Frank Gertich and Louise S. Milne. Henderson emphasises the sculptural aspects of his works, objects that occupy space while at the same time producing sound. Several of these works are concerned with strings and rock culture, and it is tempting to believe that Henderson draws on his background in punk bands in the 1980s and 90 s described in the biography. These references are particularly clear in the works Stop, What Could Replace Opus? and playback. no rewind button. Henderson has also been an active acousmatic composer, as Louise Milne refers to in her essay when she writes that he ‘restages’ the human subject’s experience of itself in the world. Sculptural elements are paired with this sensitivity, and the perhaps most extreme example is found in the work pages of illustrations, where he constructs the sound of wind flowing through a tree, from individual recordings of rubbing leaves. His approach is one of composing with the found sounds rather than leaving them relatively untouched, which is so often the case in soundscape works. However, Henderson has chosen spaces more conducive to listening than normal concert venues. His works are also structured differently from most music: they have no fixed duration, thus opening for a listening experience more controlled by the visitor than the producer of the event. The accompanying CD provides exquisitely produced excerpts from his works, and the hyper-realism resulting from his recording and production techniques appears to be a significant part of his work. While migrating the sounds into a listening situation, and altering their significance through removing their context, the sounds keep their clear identity through the production process, resisting the alienation that often, willed or unwilled, follows from electroacoustic signal processing.
The book on Berhard Gál is also edited by Ingrid Beirer, and features two texts by authors Barbara Barthelmes and Stefan Fricke, who respectively take up aspects of Gál’s musical production from architectural and spatial perspectives. In his interview with Fricke, Berhard Gál explains that he prefers to have his works discussed as music, and a CD with excerpts from the works is included. Gál interests himself in particular sonic environments, records them and then composes with the material he has gathered. However, it is neither the material nor its origin that attracts the listener’s focus, it is Gál’s compositions – his abstracted formal developments. His intention is often transformation of certain environments rather than representation of them, and consequently his works often border on programme music, where there is a topic, a perspective, and a particular interpretation or perception to which the composer wants to bring attention. Gál works in an abstract manner, and with the combination of objects and light, in gallery and outdoor exhibition settings, this programme intention is often difficult to follow, leaving the sense of abstraction to become dominant. In this sense, his works are not tied to the notions of site-specificity and creation of place that one often finds in sound art. Gál sonifies musical ideas, and chooses visual accompaniment that encourages focus on the music rather than the acoustic ‘biotope’. Perhaps paradoxically, this also runs through his works for architectural spaces, an ongoing collaboration with the architect Yumi Kori, where existing or pre-existing architecture is lit with both sound and music, again with the intention of interpretation.
The book hearing, LISTENING is edited by Katja Blomberg and gives the reader an interesting presentation of Peter Ablinger’s oeuvre. In addition to the customary documentation of works, it contains an interview by Trond Olav Reinholdtsen, and essays by Chico Mello and Christian Scheib. Ablinger states in his interview with Reinholdtsen that he is not interested in the sound itself. He tends to lean more towards issues of perception, investigating how sound brings the listener into being through the meaning-making processes that listening entails. Thus art becomes a window into both experience and realisation for Ablinger. An example of this approach is his work Weisslich 36, described by Christian Scheib, where microphones are mounted to headphones, and the microphones’ output is piped directly into the ear. Ablinger makes us aware of the act of listening, and that listening itself is a filter that allows appreciation. As such, sounds are more meaningful as frameworks and conditions for perception than having particular significance because of their spectral surfaces and sounding qualities. Author Chico Mello explains in his text that by getting close to the sounds, Ablinger seeks to annul their representational function and focus the installation experience on underlying issues of identity, representation and perception.
Listening Pieces similarly suggests Ablinger’s interest in context, in an installation of 25 white folding chairs placed in a 5*5 grid in settings such as parking lots and beaches. He pointedly focuses our attention on the listening situation more than on a particular soundscape experience, and the ‘institutional’ aspect suggested by this type of structured listening is not insignificant. So instead of providing the visitor with fixed objects, Ablinger provides a relational experience of sound. A sociocultural perspective is important to Ablinger, which entails an interest in the use of technology as a mediational means. For example, the timbral surface of his work Quadraturen mimics the human voice through an abstraction achieved through signal analysis and a mechanically played piano. Thus, the piano stands for something else, and leads to another issue that attracts Ablinger’s attention: the issue of representation, and consequently mimesis, where success in turn depends on perception and the signifying process of meaning making. In his Weisslich series, this is his strongest focus.
Electrical Drawings is the name of an exhibition of Christina Kubisch’s works, as well as the title for the accompanying large-format book edited by Wulf Herzogenrath. The publication describes the development of Kubisch’s works for more than thirty years, from 1974 until 2008, and focuses on different areas of interest through four essays by Ingmar Lähnemann, Karin Seinsoth, Uwe Rüth and Christoph Metzger, and an interview by Helga de La Motte-Haber. The book, and particularly the interview with the artist, delivers a thorough view into Kubisch’s artistic development during her many years as one of Germany’s most interesting sound artists. The topics for the essays are Kubisch’s performance work with experimental music and video art, her work with spatial modelling through light and sound, and her mapping of urban environments and constructed surroundings through induction caused by the electromagnetic fields – ‘electrical walks’. Given the number of texts and the time span that is covered, this book provides an impressively thorough discussion on the thoughts and works of this very influential European sound artist. However, a documentary DVD would have provided additional depth to the discussion.
In the mid-1970s Kubisch composed a number of pieces called Emergency Solos, instrumentally based in experimental flute techniques, such as playing the flute wearing mittens or with thimbles on her fingers, and so on. Her focus on performative aspects resulted in her performing person becoming an important part of the works’ identity, signifying a break from the contemporary music of the time and common expectations of what a musician should and should not be doing. In many ways, this type of experimentation was typical for the 1970s, but in Kubisch’s oeuvre two threads emerged – a transgression of genres, and an interest in engaging the audience as creative participants in the works. For Kubisch, the last thread aimed to downplay her personal intentions, and to position her more as a facilitator, providing frameworks for the active participation and meaning-making of visitors.
This interest is developed in her future installations with sound and light, and the catalogue documents a large number of works in which fluorescent pigment is used for creating a place, or more precisely augmenting characteristics of her installation sites. Often, her works are site-specific, as in the Clock Tower Project at Mass MOCA previously discussed in issues 10/2 and 14/1 of Organised Sound. The use of fluorescent pigments facilitates an important aspect of her recent installations of sound and light, which can also be found in her numerous, well-documented electrical constructions and electrical sound walks. By augmenting and visualising characteristics of space generally concealed from attention, Kubisch provides an opportunity to reconsider our environment, and to reflect anew on our relationship to it. Her sociocultural perspective reveals our individual experiences as situated in larger contexts – experiences might be individual but there are patterns of preconditions. Her electrical walks, for example, require activity from visitors, and thus site-specificity is supplemented by action-specificity – we are still the composers but only with the materials she makes available to us through her method. Without movement and action there is no work – the action defines the site.
The monograph Sound – produced on the occasion of three exhibitions, and edited by Brigitte Digel and Bernd Künzig – presents works by Kristof Georgen since 2002. His works often have a documentary aspect, aiming to retain sonic environments and reconstruct particular spaces, past and present. Through his compositions, he processes memories of places and the activities that took place there in much the same manner as Kubisch’s project from Mass MOCA mentioned above. Georgen employs surround techniques for both recording and presentation, and makes it clear to the visitor that his works entail listening in a space rather than to a work. An energetic example is his work Leerstand. His environments evidence a quite careful touch, recomposed with flat dramaturgy rather than grand gestures and leaving a sense of some sort of unfinishedness.
Georgen’s toned-down dramatic profile points to slower consideration than in real time, perhaps most clearly evident in the work Nr. 26, an excerpt from which may be heard on the CD that accompanies the book. The underproduction of the sonic material also points us in this direction; the sounds are to be considered as they are in themselves, or as near to that as the artist has wanted them to be. The work The Sound of Reality aims to be heard as containing representations of reality, and this is a hazardous project, since in principle recording and production, presentation mode and venue, all change their objects. Nonetheless, Georgen’s approach is in touch with artists and composers such as John Cage and Bill Fontana, where the content lies in the listening to the sounding material and not in trying to second guess the artists’ intentions. From this point of view, his works are not site-specific; they are reality-specific, relying on recognition and a shared cultural context not to become fiction.
Henderson, Gál, Ablinger, Kubisch and Georgen are artists who use sound in order to assist us in reflecting on the situations and sites in which we find ourselves, and the corresponding perception processes we enter into in everyday as well as gallery and concert situations. These are not new issues, but the way in which the respective artists stage these issues brings relational perspectives to the foreground: from Kubisch’s sonification of invisible electromagnetic fields and fluorescent amplification of past events to Ablinger’s problematisation of sound as a representation of something other than itself. Henderson and Georgen stage sounding details that would otherwise go unnoticed, Henderson through amplifying them, and Georgen in encouraging visitors to amplify their sensitivity. In this sense, they recompose sonic instances or contexts, and share the approach of Gál, who leans further in the direction of traditional composition.
The installation works presented in these five books transform visitors into composers, through the individual processes that we all go through while making sense of our experiences. And, naturally, these impulses resonate in us only when they strike something, when there is something there to absorb the impression. This is a common denominator for the artists presented in these five books, and perhaps most striking is nonetheless the diversity in approaches used. These works point to representations of artistic ideas where no image or movement can go – where sound art comes into its own as a genre. In sum, these books from Kehrer Verlag are valuable for any perspective that reaches beyond music as a compilation of spectral variation over time, because from a musician’s point of view they encourage us to reconsider what our organisation of sound impressions can bring of awareness and reflection.
