RECALLING -an evening dwelling on the notion of place in sound and music

Re:place presents:

RECALLING

- an evening dwelling on the notion of place in sound and music

with Daniela Cascella, Pete Stollery, Suk-Jun Kim and Ross Whyte

Torsdag 2.mai kl 20.00 Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall

Listening, Recording, Recalling

Daniela Cascella´s reading inhabit the space between the three, questioning the notion of recording as fixed entity and looking at how the space around it (the space of memories actualised every other day) affects it and makes it. From a recalled listening experience to a remembrance elicited by sounds, from the impossibility of tracing back a sound out of memory to the actuality of an archive. On a boundary between listening and the other senses, between the experience of soundscape and its representation, between nature and artifice, between the aural and the all-rounded everyday, between the spatial coordinates of somebody recording in a landscape and the singular, ever-changing coordinates of mediated listening, in turn prompting each listener to reawaken to the sounds around them. The question here is not ‘what is a soundscape?’. It is not structured around a what but around the many ‘where’ that inform and situate the experience of a place, and how a place takes shape in the singular perceptual experiences of each listener as they embody a creative, critical and cultural site.

Three Cities: Aberdeen - Bergen - St.Petersburg

Three Cities Project was inititated by the composers Suk-Jun Kim, Pete Stollery and Ross Whyte, members of Sound Emporium Research Group at the University of Aberdeen. The project focused on the soundscapes of Aberdeen, Bergen and St. Petersburg, three cities at the same latitude that all share a connection to the sea. The main aim of the project was to learn about and engage with aural culture from each of the three areas through working with sound recordings. This evening we will present three of the works composed during the project: 

Ross Whyte: Heritage (Electroacoustic Music, stereo, 2012)

Walking through St Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum was a profoundly emotional experience – a vast building that houses centuries worth of art and artefacts.  During our visit there (which due to time restrictions lasted around an hour), I decided to make a recording of my walk through the endless rooms and hallways. Foucault coined the term “heterotopia” – that is, spaces of otherness or “a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces”. For me, the Hermitage is the ultimate heterotopia: a maze of corridors linking rooms with paintings, sculptures and artefacts from many past centuries, experienced daily by people from all across the world.  Time freezes when you walk through those doors.  The piece I composed, Heritage, is my response to that experience.

Suk-Jun Kim: Three Returns (Electroacoustic Music, stereo, 2012)

Three Returns is the composer's revisit to the sound materials, some of which he himself collected and some of which others did. Through the revisit, the composer wanted to become sensitive to what he has experienced, remembered, forgotten, and imagined. To the composer, Three Returns is evidence of both the fragility of our memory and fascination of place--the very reason for which place haunts us.

Pete Stollery: Three Cities (Electroacoustic Music, stereo, 2012)

Two central ideas drive this composition, as well as the entire  project. The first is Edward Casey’s phenomenon of “re-implacement” within visual representations of place and his three distinctions of  place at - exact depiction, place of - representational transformation and place for - contemplating the ideal, the vision, the “poetic truth”. The second is Suk-Jun Kim’s three “engagements with place” when creating soundscape composition: Visiting and dwelling on and experiencing a place, composing with sounds recorded at the place and finally  listening to the recreation/representation of the experience of the place.

Daniela Cascella is a London-based Italian writer. Her research is focused on sound and listening. Her work explores Writing Sound in connection to voicing, memory, archives and the ephemeral, and the interplay between fiction and criticism. She is the author of En abîme: Listening, Reading, Writing. An Archival Fiction (Zer0 Books 2012).

Upcoming release: http://www.nochpublishing.com/

Pete Stollery (born 1960) studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham, where he was one of the first members of BEAST in the early ’80s. He composes music for concert hall performance, particularly acousmatic music and more recently has created work for outside the concert hall, including sound installations and internet projects.

Suk-Jun Kim has been examining the sense of place through his compositions and sound installations. HIs research interest includes imaginal listening and phenomenological approaches to listening and composition. Kim has been awarded first prizes by the Bourges Competition, Metamorphoses, and CIMESP for his compositions and was a resident composer of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2009. Kim is lecturer in Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art at the University of Aberdeen.

Ross Whyte is a composer based in Aberdeen. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Aberdeen where his field of research was concerned with audio-visual intermedia and headphone-specific composition. He composes in a wide variety of mediums which include solo and ensemble instrumental, electroacoustic, audio-visual installation, dance, theatre and film. His compositional output in recent years has explored erosion through reproduction and often contains the underlying theme of impermanence.

(from Daniela Cascalla´s blog)