if not this

There was a lot to enjoy at If not this at Bury Art Gallery on Friday evening. Tony Trehy who curated the show has already blogged about it and you can find his write up here. Update: there's also a good personal take on the evening from Richard Barrett on his blog now.

The first work encountered was probably the most unfamiliar for some attendees and so a good preparation for what was to follow. Helmut Lemke sat in the entrance to the gallery with a bucket on his head. The bucket appeared to have contact mics attached to it which were connected to the speakers around his waist. Not immediately apparent was a bottle of water suspended directly above which dripped onto the bucket. This was a durational piece intended to last through the evening until the water ran out.

There were another couple of buckets nearby, the purpose of which was unclear, and a second chair at a small table with a typewriter. The typewriter appeared to have a contact mic attached to it, and had a till roll fed through. I didn't see the typewriter in use either. Another bucket next to Helmut was for audience responses to his work. On entering the space we were given forms and told to write or draw our reactions to the sounds. The forms were then dropped into the bucket. My form looked a little like this:

As well as the sound of water dripping Helmut made moaning sounds and other vocalisations, including at times laughter and screams. He also had a selection of chalks and some kind of hard stylus that he used to variously mark, scratch and tap the bucket. Occasionally he would take one of the forms from the bucket and interpret the pictures and/or words back into sound. The piece became interactive as well as being durational. I'd also argue it was site and situation specific.

I hope it's also apparent that the work was amusing. One of the things I've enjoyed about the performances I've seen of Helmut's is that he seems unafraid of appearing ridiculous, which is fantastically liberating. I also enjoy the very low-tech, limited materials he uses.

After a while we were encouraged to move upstairs where the other performances took place. This was in the main gallery space for Not at this address, with chairs arranged in rows and the artists set up on tables in front of the back wall with Pat Flynn's work behind them.

Ben Gwilliam opened with what was probably the most low-tech performance after Helmut's. By which I mean that the most prominent pieces of technology were a fridge and some record players.

A while back I linked to the video of an ice record test Ben made - here . The video is well worth watching, but it doesn't especially reflect the performance yesterday, in which he also used ice records. In the video the music is a spectral presence that only gradually degrades, but it is nonetheless a tangible presence. On Friday he performed molto semplice e cantablie also investigating Beethoven's opus 111, piano sonata 32. By contrast with the video the music was nothing more than the ghost of a memory. Instead crackles, interference, and rhythmic thuds formed the main part of the sound. Although briefly when a third ice record replaced one of the first two a quiet, corroded wisp of music seemed to appear.

But despite the description of the piece, despite the presence however scrubbed and effaced of Beethoven, in a sense the music was perhaps not the point. The mode of reproduction of the music, the ways in which we interact with both the music and the vehicle of the music, and the function of memory in how we understand the music seemed more important. All of which are interesting questions within the context of a gallery.

Then Matt Wand performed. If Helmut helped to prepare the audience for what was to follow, and perhaps to put us back in touch with a childish sense of wonder and possibility, and if Ben questioned the function of music, then Matt immersed us in music, perhaps the last thing that might have been expected.

Not that he played any instruments, or sang, or even provided recognisable melodies. He did something different. He started with six, presumably reprogrammed, Gameboys with small portable speakers attached. One by one he started them playing in different parts of the room. This in itself was immediately impactful. The sounds at this stage were clearly the sounds you would associate with games, and mostly the individual Gameboys were audibly differentiated from one another by what they were playing. He then went around again and altered the sounds being produced. Then again, and gradually brought the individual sounds closer to one another. At this stage he introduced the spaghetti jars lowered the speakers into them, altering the sound considerably.

Now it took on a liturgical quality, like being inside an enormous organ playing a vast chord. After some time the speakers were brought out of the jars and placed on top of them. The sounds more closely resembling chimes now. And gradually the piece was wound down until the last Gameboy ceased. It was an extraordinary and immersive experience. And exactly the right time to take a break.

After the break Lee Patterson closed out the evening with his small sounds. Be they bicarbonate of soda dropped in glasses of water, small bottles placed in water, field recordings of water and railings. Even with your eyes open, watching what he did, it was sometimes impossible to tell what was pre-recorded and what was being generated live.

I very much enjoy this refocussing of our relationship to certain sounds, and the concentration on quiet sounds that barely change or display obvious musical qualities. The texture and quality of the sounds becomes important because that's what you concentrate on, because we're not used to listening to such sounds in the way we listen to music. With no learned response to hand we have to find ways of decoding the work.

And yet from talking to people afterwards it seems that perhaps Lee's work was the most familiar, that there was a learned response. I heard it referred to as ambient, and there may be a certain merit to that view. But to my ears it seemed to be more constructed and dynamic than that, albeit over a long period and using very subtle sounds. pre-recorded and apparently generated sounds interacted with each other and blurred. Sounds were introduced, then imperceptibly disappeared, first joined by then swamped by others. Ambient sounds were succeeded by found sounds which slowly changed to more percussive sounds which eventually came back to ambient sounds. This of course is a foreshortened caricature. My point is simply to illustrate that it sounded like structuring principles were at work. A sample of Lee's work is available at The Wire.

That was it, the end of the evening. Or at least the end of the sound art for the evening. It really was an enjoyable and enlightening event, with four distinct experiences, four distinct approaches to the use of sound as art. In the case of Ben and Matt referring to the world of music and music reproduction, and utilising the technologies of reproduction in ways they were never intended. In the case of Helmut and Lee taking sound back before music, to the natural sounds of the world around us, to the human voice, to the fact that most objects in the world make a noise, and to the act of listening and finding ways to make sense of what we hear.