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The art of noise: What happens when artists use sound as their medium of choice

The sounds greets you with a controlled cacophony: Beeboobeep! Tweeeeeet! Kzzzzzkzzzzz! Weeeeeee-kzzz-kzzz! Chugga-chugga-beep! Grzzzshhhzeeeeee!

The sounds greets you with a controlled cacophony: Beeboobeep! Tweeeeeet! Kzzzzzkzzzzz! Weeeeeee-kzzz-kzzz! Chugga-chugga-beep! Grzzzshhhzeeeeee!

No, I’m not standing in a construction site, nor am I in the presence of R2-D2. I am, in fact, standing in an art gallery surrounded by what’s probably the noisiest bunch of artworks assembled in a single room.

Zulkifle Mahmod’s ongoing exhibition at The Private Museum, titled Sonically Exposed, is made up of sculptures, reliefs and an installation — all of which makes some, well, noise, be it feedback, white noise or bleeps.

On one table are what looks like small insects made from wires. Hanging on the wall, standing on pedestals are what looks like naked circuit boards with little speakers, buttons and knobs. And with most of them all switched on ... let’s just say, after half an hour, I wished I had brought earplugs.

 

HEAR YE, HEAR YE

 

Zul’s solo show isn’t the only exhibition dealing with sound right now. Over at LASALLE’s Institute Of Contemporary Arts (Singapore), there is SOUND: Latitudes And Attitudes, a Singapore survey show featuring 17 artists (including Zul) who deal with sound in one way or another.

If you’re not able to check out the performances that take place every time the central installation piece is changed, you can always put on the headphones at their sound stations. Here, you’re treated to, say, some feedback and then some from performance artist Kai Lam’s awesomely titled Retro-modernists Dissecting Cod Surrealism On Mother Joe’s Kitchen Table. Or a gamelan-meets-discordant melodies-booming drums piece by The Observatory. Or works by experimental composer Joyce Koh that feature the phone ringing, kids laughing or a burp.

“We wanted to look at the wide scope of sonic practices. Where does it start? Why is it overlooked in Singapore?” said ICAS’ Joleen Loh, who co-curated the show with Bani Haykal, himself a practising sound artist, spoken word poet and member of the band The Observatory.

But just what is sound art, you say? That’s a tricky question: Even the show’s curators can’t give a definitive answer. Is it noise made from laptops? Someone screaming into a bowl of water? A painting of a treble clef? Silence?

“As a term, it’s hard to define and I would not like to define it. It’s a perspective more than anything else,” offered Bani. “I look at sound simply as a medium, a language that’s floating. Every creative personnel who looks at sound and interprets and expresses it has their own way of understanding it and funnelling meaning into their practice.”

Indeed, as the SOUND exhibition reveals, not only is the range of practitioners wide — from theatre people to performance artists to experimental musicians — the kind of works and the approaches to them are also just as vast.

“The definition is up for grabs,” said Song-Ming Ang, a conceptual artist who loves to “think about sound and music”. For many, his self-professed “academic” approach could be the furthest thing that comes to mind when you say “sound art”. For SOUND, he offered an old Singapore Biennale work featuring recordings of school bands warming up before their actual performance, and a work that invites a group of people to walk in silence. Meanwhile, his ongoing solo show at FOST Gallery, Logical Progressions, features a series of painstakingly hand-drawn music sheets in various permutations and a video of him playing a Bach piece “forward” and “backward”.

 

BLAST FROM THE PAST

 

While sound art in the West can be traced back to movements and groups like Dada, “concrete music” and Fluxus — as well as like Cabaret Voltaire, Edgar Varese, Yoko Ono and John Cage; Singapore’s own history of sound art has links to its distinct, but occasionally overlapping, visual arts and experimental music scenes.

At SOUND, an archive assembled by Mark Wong gives a glimpse of its beginnings. In the ’80s and ’90s, Singapore artists were starting to incorporate sound into their practices, as seen in The Artists Village’s 24-hour Time Show in 1990; or in performance artist Tang Da Wu’s collaborationwith composer Joe Ng in 1989. Sound artists like Yuen Chee Wai and George Chua worked with TheatreWorks in the early 2000s, said Bani, who himself began as a musician with indie rock band B Quartet and, eventually, ventured deeper into experimental sound and creating his own sound sculptures.

Song-Ming Ang, who was in an experimental band called Hearing Hill, and later on, created music under the name Circadian, remembered the experimental music scene during the mid-2000s. “There was this record store called FluxUs and they would do in-store gigs. One time I did a gig there and I kept (my music) so low you could hear the sound from the jamming studio beside it spill over,” he recalled.

Zul, meanwhile, began as a visual artist doing sculptures but a residency in Norway in 2001 opened him to the wonders of computer music. He would eventually combine sound elements into his installation work.

Nevertheless, Singapore artists didn’t start using the term “sound art” until much later. “It was only around 2005 that artists and musicians started using it more,” said Loh.

That was also the year Una Voce, a 24-hour sound art festival at The Substation organised by Zul and Kai Lam, was organised. “Every hour we had different artists performing, but because you don’t have many artists doing sound back then, we had to get three experimental turntablists at night,” said Zul. “At sound performances, you’d have the usual crowd, but at that time, there was a new crowd, which was quite good.”

 

TURN IT UP

 

But perhaps sound art’s very nature hasn’t been all that conducive to a broader audience base. For one, it’s very hard to describe sound. “You can only give it descriptive terms; it’s loud, soft, happy ... there’s often no object, nothing to see. It’s very subjective,” said Loh.

Bani used the analogy of a movie and its musical score — the sound makes sense if you see something, but what if you remove the movie itself? “You might get a little bit nervous,” he said. “What’s all this? Where does it come from? The ambiguity is what might makes it a little bit daunting. With a visual work, it’s ‘I see that, I know what it is’.”

But never mind the audience new practitioners are still stepping forward. The Substation’s Sound Art Open Call programme, which welcomes proposals from emerging artists for exhibitions, has been featuring eight artists a year since 2011. (By comparison, the Performance and Visual Art Open Calls receive around 20 and 40 proposals, respectively.) Why this disparity?

“We believe that this is due to various reasons, among them, the fact that there just aren’t as many sound art practitioners out there as there are visual artists and performance artists. Comparatively, the visual arts and performing arts scenes are much more mature,” said programme manager Annabelle Aw.

“No one can survive as a full-time sound artist in Singapore unless they’re able to build a strong conceptual work that can tour the festival/gallery circuit,” said Vivian Wang of The Observatory. “Several international sound artists I know depend either on a part-time day job, a full-time teaching position or significant funding from the state.”

Zul is one of the luckier ones — his sound works at The Private Museum are being sold as sculptural pieces. He also gets commissioned to do works, and gets invited to exhibitions and festivals. His breakthrough came when he was chosen as one of the artists representing Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2007, with a “Sonic Dome” installation.

At that time, there were only a handful of artists presenting sound works even at that prestigious contemporary art event. Last year, there were more. “But it’s still a niche market,” Zul said.

That said, while the visual arts scene still has to come to grips with this unusual animal, it’s the music scene that might prove to be more open. The Observatory is perhaps one of the more prominent examples of artists versatile enough to perform at exhibitions and theatre shows while making albums and playing at music festivals like the recent Laneway festival.

Said Wang: “I don’t think sound art will feature in the forefront of art or be auctioned off and collected as prized art pieces for heaps of money. But it has crossed over into music in general. It’s no longer weird to include ‘soundscapes’ in contemporary pop music.”

Sounds like music to our ears — but do these sound artists have any tips on how to appreciate this often misunderstood art form? “It really depends on what one is looking for and what we consider beautiful or a racket! Some might find the sound of a pure sine tone or a wall of white noise exceptionally moving,” offered Wang.

“It’s just like any other art form — come with an open mind. And there’s no need to bring ear plugs,” quipped Zul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOUND: Latitudes And Attitudes runs until March 16, 10am to 6pm, Earl Lu Gallery, LASALLE College of the Arts. Free admission.

 

Logical Progressions runs until March 2, 11am to 7pm, FOST Gallery, 1 Lock Road, Gillman Barracks. Free admission.

 

Zul: Sonically Exposed runs until March 9, 10am to 7pm, The Private Museum, 51 Waterloo Street, #02-06. Free admission.

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