04/11/2006

This year's instalment of Tone Deaf, curated by artist Matt Rogalsky for the Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, had an eclectic line-up of practitioners, including performance artists as sound artists, video-sound investigators, guitarists as noisemakers, electro-digital gurus, and other cross-genre performers.

Kathy Kennedy's Hmmm / Soundwalk was performed outdoors at Little Cataraqui Conservation area at night. Radios and performers were spaced evenly along a wooded pathway, and the audience was provided with candles to light their way as they participated in the soundwalk. Radios were tuned to receive and transmit a humming noise, and the performers hummed quietly on the same or different tones, or improvised on other sounds and words. The audience was invited to listen to the combined human and radio sound output as they walked along the path. In this piece, the human voice integrates with nature. The radios are a commonizing, unifying element; as well, expressing the physicality of the natural sound as determined by natural acoustics. One had the sense that people truly enjoyed the sound walk. There was an interesting interplay between radios and the humming of the people, as well as the hum of the distance city and highway traffic. The use of candlelight within a surrounding veil of darkness was magical, encouraging one to listen to the ambient sounds and the encompassing acoustic landscape.

Montreal-based Christof Migone led his audience into a participatory, yet bureaucratic, process. Occupying over fifty seats in a circle, the audience was invited to systematically circulate objects and documents (mostly of a stationary-tactility or office-supply sort). Messages were written on sheets of paper or recorded onto dictaphones, which were passed around the room from hand to hand. Words and bits of phrases circulated like a clock, sometimes forming a coherent message, yet often interrupted. Despite its systematic, cyclic and organized nature, paper airplanes, personal notes (e. g., "I love you"), and other "deviant" gestures became audience interventions within the artist's over-determined choreography. The sounds here are those of paper being passed and being cut, of paper planes and muddied recordings on Dictaphones, combined with the sound of what early linguist Ferdinand de Saussure called the sound-image—what words sound like in the mind's ear, while one is reading silently. This was as much our performance, as active and willing participants, as it was Migone's.

Erin Donovan and John D. S. Adams, a collaborative pair based in Toronto, created a more typical formal or modernist sound-art experience by combining electronic and digital technologies with almost-anthropologic instruments. The most striking instrument, played with a bow by Donovan, is a large, freestanding, human-form sculpture. This six-foot-tall iron percussion instrument is one of Donovan's most recent acquisitions, a sound sculpture entitled Sagromides of Venus, by artist John Little. This performance was more theatrical, insofar as it operated within a more conventional audience relationship. This theatricality was maintained through the artists' use of props, which, we would suggest, held such an acoustic presence that they themselves were rather like anonymous conduits through which the sculpture could vibrate, resonate, and become.

For Within Shouting Distance, Kingston-based artist Clive Robertson worked with a group of student-artists to narrate a convict-lover romance, which took place not quite a century ago within shouting distance of Robertson's home in Portsmouth Village. Video was employed as a contextual backdrop for a series of imaginative actions and tableaux which developed each chapter of the performance. The performers—John Murnaghan, Bitsy Knox, Darryl Bank, Emilie Allen, and Courtney Ross—who are later recognized as doubles of their simulated video-counterparts, enter against a video backdrop of heavy rain, carrying black umbrellas with small appliances dangling from their rims. The appliances were then used as sound-generating props in a later action, which competed with the (sound) image of a lawnmower shown simultaneously on video, alternating with a quiet scene where white lights are carried to a meeting point in a park on a dark, autumn night. The layering of sounds and images presents a complex whole through which more figurative, gestural scenes are interspersed with more narrative scenes.

Mike Cassells, composer, jazz musician, improviser, and member of Tonesucker, a live electronic ensemble from the United Kingdom, played a session of long-distance musical improvisation connected in real time via the Internet. This improvisatory piece started quietly, with ambient sounds and quiet drones, followed by an abrupt introduction of atonal, rhythmic, and penetrating drones. Cassell's sonorities provided a tonal foreground to the noise-like sounds of Tonesucker's music. This gradually evolved into a more chaotic, dense climax, gradually becoming more pitched and tonal. Real-time musical performance and collaboration over the Internet is certainly challenging, due to issues such as the transmission delay time, the lack of visual contact, and the limited bandwidth. This performance provided by Cassells and Tonesucker, however, gives a taste of the possibilities.

From Montreal, composer Jean Piché, presented five video-music works titled, Spin, Normance, Xenons, Bharat, and Express, using three screens and providing a stunning display of sound and images. Spin, Normance, and Xenons displayed computer-generated visuals combined with electroacoustic music; together, these elements gave a powerful sense of fluidity of movement. My personal favourite was Bharat, a powerful work depicting scenes from India combined with intricate abstract textures and contemplative music. The visuals provide an overview of the village and the surrounding countryside, accompanied by a recording of a speech by Ghandi. Later the visuals zoom in to the village itself, providing a glimpse into the daily lives of the villagers. The music uses ever-changing evolving drones, streams of sound interacting with gradually moving visuals. Particularly notable is the use of lush violin melodies which provide an effective contrast to the thicker drone and percussive textures. The ending is poignant: the visuals—accompanied by the sound of a solo violin—focus on an open window through which is seen the image of a single person. This beautiful and moving piece creates an aura of magic, mysticism and spirituality. The final work, Express, consists of fast, vertical streams of colour combined with relentlessly driving percussive music. The overall impression is one of climactic energy.

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