Throughout six weeks in July and August, this series will aim to critically engage with the surrounding environment through sound, and to explore the influences it has on new ways of making and experiencing visual forms.
The series includes a broad range of artists and creators that are increasingly blurring genre lines and sensibilities in the realms of sound and visual culture. Participating artists will do this by recording the sounds of architectural spaces, re-inventing musical instruments, using sound as a sculptural material, or working with music and cinematography.
Guest curated by Alexa Kusber
24 July / From Music to Sound
Janek Schaefer: Local Radio Orchestra
Live, interactive performance and film screening by the artist
31 July / Sound Tracking
MUSE Radio
Hackney Sound Walk and Live performance by Tim Gill
7 August / Synesthesia
Pure Evil and Lucas Price
Live performance and installation by artists
14 August / PHONO: GRAPHIC
In collaboration with Soundfjord
Live performance by Formanex and Tim Yates
Evening includes artworks and installations by David Chapman, Claudia Molitor, Steve
Roden, Gary James Joynes, Jo Thomas, Bill Thompson, Luke Munn and James
Saunders
21 August / Rhetorical Visions: Sound & Text
James Mathe & Friends
Live performance by special guests
28 August / Sound Rider: Sound & Cinematography
Vincent Moon
UK Premiere film Screening of Petites Planètes
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24 July / From Music To Sound (and back again)
Music (as a form of expression) is a perfect symbiotic model of unity; matter, form and content are one. Music allows the individual to experience deep and intense emotions. Sound is a ‘unifying’ sense —creating an immediacy of effect.
From Music To Sound (and back again) is an evening with the renowned sound artist, musician, and composer Janek Schaefer – a journey beginning with his early thoughts studying architecture to the relationship between sound and our sense of space and place.
During the evening there will be an artist discussion, film screenings, and a live interactive performance of his new work. Local Radio Orchestra consists of 12 portable radios and 24 FM transmitters that saturate the radio dial and allowing the audience to tune out and into a composition of broadcasts where participation creates a shuffling and shifting orchestra – a community radio station!
The event also serves as a launch night of the Sunday Sound Waves series alongside Schaefer’s retrospective catalogue and the release of his two new album editions.
www.audioh.com
www.audioh.com/projects/soundartretrospective.html
www.audioh.com/releases/phoenixandphaedra.html
www.vimeo.com/janekschaefer/videos/sort:plays
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31 July / << Sound Tracking >>
In collaboration with Sunday Sound Waves, museradio.fm will create a sound track, Hackney Sound Walk, inspired by a walking tour of the area and photographer Tara Darby’s collection of images that document the ordinary and everyday life of the borough and its inhabitants.
Museradio.fm is a curated online radio platform founded by Lilly Ladjevardi and Olivia Koerfer, created to share a broad range of music through an accessible and unspecialised format. In 2010, they composed the sounds for The Museum of Everything, reflecting the strange and wondrous nature of the Museum’s collection as well as the Malick SIdibé London exhibition, sourcing inspiration from the artist’s iconic images of the newly independent Bamako, Africa in the 1960s and 70s and its residents. Ladjevardi and Koerfer’s approach is one in which each sound track tells a story about the places, moods, or images the playlists are inspired by.
The evening will also include:
Live performances by a variety of musicians including Tim Gill, a young English viola player and former resident of the borough.
A reading by Sean Borodale from his highly acclaimed topographical poem Notes for an Atlas, as well as lyrigraphs – field poems, live documentary written on location, transcripts, notes, dramatic elements of the area. The Guardian described Notes for an Atlas as ‘an extraordinary poem … [which] rings with sadness, haphazardness and utterly modern beauty.’
Writers on Hackney will guide listeners on a walk through Hackney with four authors. Borodale’s poem Notes for an Atlas guides us through the burough, we rise early to join Iain Sinclair for his morning perambulation to the A12, Lemn Sissay takes us from his local shop Palm 2 (where all walks begin) to hear of his tale of going barefoot for a year, and Stewart Home walks us from Kingsland Basin to where he used to live in the 80s near Victoria Park, finding it now just a pile of rubble.
About the Artists:
Tara Darby is a photographer based in London and has exhibited at numerous galleries including the Dazed and Confused Gallery, Printspace and Guest Projects. She is also a contributor to publications including The Wire, The Independent, The New York Times, W Magazine, and others.
Characterised by a focus on improvisation, Tim Gill draws together electro-acoustic sound, blues, and classical composition into a cohesive live experience. Soundscapes here are sometimes created by layering chords with a loop pedal, building them into crescendos, or using subtleties of applied pressure on the bow to create highly emotive performances.
Writers on Hackney was developed by Hackney Podcast in 2010 and is produced by Francesca Panetta and showcases authors, reporters and musicians such as Mike Brooks, Felix Carey, Chapters, Francesca Panetta, Andrew Pekler, and Robert Worby.
To listen to the Hackney Sound Waves at museradio.fm click here.
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7 August / Synesthesia
Pure Evil and Lucas Price
For many visual artists, music creates impulse and inspiration in the search for a pure and transcendental art form. By listening, performing and experimenting with sound, artists have discovered unconventional techniques in their approach to making art.
For Synesthesia, Sunday Sound Waves has invited visual artists Pure Evil and Lucas Price to transform the GALERIE8 atrium into their own imaginative space and explore the music and sound that extends from, and in turn influences, their artistic practices. Recreating speakers, constructing their own inventive instruments and creating impulsive work, these artists will engage in a one-off jam session blending music and art to create an all-encompassing transformative environment.
Synesthesia, or the blending of senses, means that sensory perception of one kind can manifest itself as a sensory experience of another – sounds can be seen, colours can be heard, words can be tasted. Within the arts, the concept of synesthesia links the visual and the auditory, revealing ways in which music can influence and inspire art and art making – in the form of a muse or as an escape.
With the many ways in which sound and vision are linked, what will actually be seen and heard comes down to the individual. Both music and art are ultimately idiosyncratic and the experiences that result can be thought of as form of synesthesia, as the synesthetic experience comes from uniting the senses within the mind, transforming and transposing the experience of sound.
However you do experience it, we invite you to listen – and to feel.
www.pureevil.eu
www.lucprice.com
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14 August / PHONO:GRAPHIC
In collaboration with Soundfjord
Musical graphic notation is a written representation of music that uses none or only few of the elements of traditional staff notation. Musical graphics, on the other hand, has its own aesthetic value as a visual art and does not have to be defined through its translatability into music. Like visual scores—that is, images instead of graphics—musical graphics are composed not with the intent of producing concrete music; it may, however, be translated into music.
For PHONO:GRAPHIC, Sunday Sound Waves and SoundFjord have decided to look at graphic/alternative scores. “Alternative scores” suggesting the possibility for artists and musicians to play and extend upon the conventional vocabulary of music; to liberate the performer from rigid orchestration; and to open up this form of representation to individual or group interpretation.
SoundFjord will focus on the use of visual elements with reference to standard notation and will extend this format outwards to notations that may not have any connection to the stave or to quavers or semibreves. Representations of melody and form will depend on the relationships of composer, performer, and listener.
The evening will feature an eclectic mix of performance complimented by works made for screen, and on paper. The audience will be given the opportunity to listen to scores and look at the objects, drawings and notation the works have been realised from. Visitors will also be able to talk to the performers and to ask questions about their performances and how they themselves became interested in extending their musical vocabulary.
Featuring live performances by Tim Yates, Noura Satania and Benedict Taylor; Jan Hendrickse; Patrick Farmer, David Lacey and Daniel Jones and realisations of the texts and graphic scores of Ella Finer and Bill Thompson.
The evening includes artworks, film and installations by David Chapman with David Cottridge, Claudia Molitor, Steve Roden, Gary James Joynes, Jo Thomas, Luke Munn, James Saunders and many others…
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21 August / Rhetorical Visions: Sound & Text
James Mathe & Friends
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In Simon & Garfunkel’s iconic folk song ‘Sound of Silence,’ the strong visual imagery, imaginative literary devices and powerful lyrics convey Paul Simon’s message of human engrossment with technology and lack of real emotion of communication. A song that has been re-released, remixed and reworked through the years, what remains consistent is it’s lyrical form.
In the process of conveying intangible emotion and feelings, various routes can be taken in going about such a task. Some people draw, some paint, some debate, and others write. Paul Simon, a genius with words and music, used sound and text to express his complex ideas of politics, love, and the difficult ways of life.
An extremely well written song is powerful. While sound has a large part to play and the singer’s voice is an important element, the emotion of a song also grows from the lyrics – a combination of words metaphorically pointing the listener towards the writer’s senses, combined with their own associations. This idea can also be looked at in an alternate way with the music or combination of sounds taking the listener on the same journey of connotations.
It is this combination of sounds, words, and the listener’s own perceptions and experiences that what we aim to consider.
Sunday Sound Waves is pleased to present Rhetorical Visions: Sound & Text – an evening with singer/songwriter James Mathé alongside secret guests, taking us through a journey of music, lyrical forms and the visual subconscious, daring to disturb the sound of silence.
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28 August / Sound Rider: Sound & Cinematography
Vincent Moon
“My point is exploring traditional sounds and playing with them. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with my films for the past years, taking traditions and not respecting them too much. I call it my quest of experimental folklore.” – Vincent Moon, NYT, 2011
About five years ago, a prodigious young French filmmaker reinvented film and sound. Using an intimate cinéma vérité style in off beat locations, Vincent Moon creates raw, enigmatic clips that strip away everything but the performer and the song – here the sound comes first. For Moon’s style of filmmaking, place, space and natural light is used as context with which to enjoy the sounds.
Sunday Sound Waves presents Sound Rider: Sound & Cinematography, an evening with independent filmmaker and nomadic artist Vincent Moon. This will be the UK Premiere of Moon’s new work, Petites Planètes, a collection of recordings dedicated to experimentation between images and sounds, shot around the world.
In Petites Planètes, we are also given the opportunity of understanding the artist through his distinctive film-making process together with essays written by Moon and various contributors. The evening will also include a screening of earlier works and discussion with the artist.