The title of sound artist Jamie Drouin’s ‘A Three Month Warm Up’ refers both to the time taken to collect the 124 individual sound recordings, taken from a public square in Drouin’s home of Victoria, Canada, which make up this work, and to its inspiration: the ‘atonal cacophony’ produced by orchestral players before commencing a performance. Drouin’s work relates more specifically to the tuning up phase, ‘where a single tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices’, as that is what happens here: the essential features of these 124 elements are flattened, smeared into one vast, shimmering haze, a 77-minute amorphous drone, endlessly in flux and from which it is impossible to discern its components.
It sounds like Thomas Koner, only thicker, and the approach is like that of Jacob Kirkegaard’s ‘Four Rooms’, in which Kirkegaard recorded the sound of four now empty public spaces in Chernobyl, played the recordings back in these spaces, and rerecorded the results. If Drouin’s work necessarily lacks the – literal – air of alienation and abandonment present in ‘Four Rooms’, the density of his sound more than makes up for it. Layer upon layer of hiss, din, noise, and clamour constantly jostle for attention, all futile; tones creep in and vanish, but its the full mass that’s always heard, endlessly shifting, endlessly surging forth. Its deeply, beautifully unsettling, a perpetual approach with no end in sight, like Edvard Munch’s infinite scream; the chaos of modern urban life packed into a public square and let loose.
Jishua Meggitt
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