The first thing you notice tonight is the imposing austere funkiness of the architecture. We’re in the basement of the RMIT school of design and it’s self-conscious industrial cool, kind’ve Leni Riefenstahl meets Hello Kitty, yet it’s a kitty that has been on a steady diet of early Nine Inch Nails records and now likes to indulge in a spot of S&M. We wait in a lobby that is smooth concrete, rubber and metal grills. It’s a space screaming for colour, but of course we’re in Melbourne so everyone’ dressed in black.
Colour doesn’ appear until we’re ushered through what we previously thought was a wall. With more smooth concrete, the walls and roof are wooden with regular holes that look like polka dots. The most immediate concession to colour are the pink chairs, arranged in rows of three on either sides of the space, facing each other. This room is bleak, minimal and intense, and that’s before any music has started. There are speakers in each corner of the room, and Irish sound artist Barbara Ellison lurks behind a bright yellow console in grand Liquid Architecture tradition not acknowledging the crowd.
Ellison gathered her material from the electromagnetic radiation from trams, trains and other electrical items, using an induction coil pickup microphone, the results of which she mixes live during the performance. Her sounds seem to be about trying different elements together and hearing what sticks. Whilst there’ definitely a predilection for mid to high frequency pitches, at times bordering on discomfort, it never really gets too difficult. In a wide ranging flowing set, she slowly builds intricacy from simple ingredients, creating and manipulating these unstable feeling structures that threaten so much, yet are always carefully controlled. Perhaps most interesting was the clarity of the sounds and Ellison’ ability to layer her them across the frequency spectrum, having them interact yet still remain quite separate, never descending into muddy undefinable noise. Whilst she builds in intensity and density, in truth the most compelling moments were when she really stripped things back to minimal ingredients, as she did towards the end of her performance, and then manipulated the volume. It was an approach that handed some responsibility back to the listener, where you’re never really sure what you’re hearing or even whether you’re hearing and as a result would strain your ears for even the minutest detail.
Following a 30 minute break we return to find the room reconfigured, the chairs in a circle facing outwards, with Spanish field recorder and sonic manipulator Francisco Lopez in the centre. He tells us that he will so his best to create an immersive sonic experience, and that blindfolds are optional. Regardless the room will be darkened to assist with the immersion.
So the lights darken, we put on our blindfolds and for the next 40 odd minutes we’re in Lopez’ hands. Tonight’s performance was Sonopolis, a piece that Lopez has gathered from urban environments, in fact over a hundred cities in five continents over the course of 15 years. The reality is though with Lopez, such his desire for audio manipulation that the source material rarely seems to matter, often retaining only unidentifiable elements of the original recording. He begins with these gentle pulses that reverberate across the 4 speakers. The sound seems to flow inward, these gentle explosions of soft low frequency that still feels immensely powerful, like an underwater volcano slowly shuddering. It’s probably the warmest moment in his set and a beautiful way to begin. In the dark behind the blindfold it’s a signifier to let the mind off the leash. He works the peaks and troughs, building textures to the point of ferocious noise before cutting abruptly and beginning a new construction again.
What’s fascinating is that despite his desire to manipulate his sounds to the point of abstraction the material presented tonight contrasts dramatically with his previous performances in this country. There’ a coldness here where the heart should be, and despite some periodic elements that feel uncontrolled and unpredictable – colliding in random patterns, nothing feels alive, nothing feels organic. At his best Lopez’ desire to obscure hides numerous organic creatures, elements of water, wind, rain and thunder. Restricted to the urban environment however there’ none of this uncontrolled inexplicable and unidentified life. There’ no connection to earth. Perhaps this is the point of the performance, in this bleak room with the lights turned low and blindfolded spectators staring silently into the darkness, it’s hard not to feel like a participant in some kind of strange science experiment. Despite the concession of faint birds at the end, which emphasised the real disparity between the two worlds, these were sounds that connected much more on an intellectual than on an emotional level. To the point where as soon as we removed our blindfolds and the lights came up a few of us couldn’ get out of that room fast enough.
