A water
【Editor's Note】
Hosted by the Yangtze River Art Museum, the "Original Sound: Taiyuan's Local Soundscape" project was officially launched on June 30, 2021, with Ou Ning as the host, divided into specially invited artist field research, participant recruitment, field recording, workshop discussion, exhibition, publication and documentary sections, etc., to explore the history, geography, humanities, customs and contemporary reality of Taiyuan from the perspective of soundscape, and to stimulate the empathy of participants and visitors through the method of triggering hearing, enhance the sense of local identity, and build a platform for the protection and development of local culture.
1. Fried chicken
Driven back to the hotel early in the evening by a rainy day, there was fried chicken and lemon black tea. At least half of the brain was occupied by fried chicken, a serious discussion suddenly began. Regarding whether sound has the ability to represent, Wang Jing and Yin Yi have different views. Scholars and sound artists discuss the shackles of sound as a representation and how to break free from them. Of course, they have a basis for consensus - sound is a complex process that cannot be restored by simple copying and reproduction. It is both an essential existence and a subtle connection with all things.
"God Fried Chicken" in Taiyuan Food Street zhang Anding photo
At the noon dinner table the next day, Zhang Anding and Qin Siyuan joined the discussion. Qin grabbed the glass drink bottle and compared the artist's accidental cut off of sound and reality to a hallucinogen. Cutting off and exposing the essence of sound will produce the fantasy experience of seeing giant ants through thick glass. The glass bottle in his hand will fly away from the everyday scene and become a "wow what is this, so incredible" alien visitor. Sound experiments that obscure other senses other than hearing are playing this trick on the spot. But just as taking hallucinogens for a long time can drive people crazy, cutting off the link between sound and experience for a long time can also drive people crazy.
Above is a discussion by a group of sound artists and academics. They went to Taiyuan to participate in an art project called "Taiyuan SoundScape". This is the first part of the project, and they have four days to listen to the voice of Taiyuan under the arrangement of the organizer Yangtze River Art Museum. In a few months, they need to turn the sound of the big city that evolved from Jinyang City into a sound art work. The "moderator" Ou Ning has no restrictions on the form, but everyone finds this proposition difficult.
2. Instantly
In Taiyuan at the end of June, they heard gongs, drums and songs, the sound of mass and hail in the afternoon, and the silence of the old pharmaceutical factory that had stopped working in the midst of high-rise buildings. The damp soil after the rain smells of herbivores' droppings, and the brick cracks hold up leafy and delicate weeds. The retired old factory director who took us on a tour continued to guard this heritage, his pants were straight, and he quickly left the piece of armor indifferent when he said this.
A small door was opened in the gray wall of the factory, revealing a thick tree trunk. After walking around, the sky-blue iron door closed, and the roots of the trees that had been glimpsed in amazement were gone. There is no shortage of complex feelings brought about by such momentary changes in life, but they often slip away before they can think about it. The artist's duty is to leave such a moment, to give shape to it, to invite it to come into the world with honor and integrity.
The former site of Taiyuan Pharmaceutical Factory
At least three people were impressed by the sound of the Jinci Temple. Yin Yi's moment is when Li Shimin, like a former tour guide, utters almost identical commentaries through their loudspeakers. Further ahead, in the disabled speaker area, the same vocals are staggered. Zhao Cong's memory is more dynamic. People walk in the Jinci Temple, the tour groups in front of and behind them are staggered, and the same commentary is constantly approaching and moving away. What Kim Zoning heard was the sound of tourists' bags scraping the ring iron horse at the entrance. The iron horses in the next queue widened, and the scraping sound disappeared. She flashed a thought, is this a metaphor for the relationship between sound and order?
But how can it be that a rootless outsider can swallow up the scattered feelings and spit out universal and specific works of art. For those who have experience in sound art installation, even if they are at a loss and lack the stimulation of inspiration, at least a mature methodology can be relied upon. People who focus on sound experimentation in musical scenes are more anxious. Strange cities are full of all kinds of sounds, where is their relationship to themselves, and do they need to make music disappear?
3. Characterization
The discussion of representations is not over. Later, the word "representation" became a secret word within the group, and it was tacitly glossy by the friendships that lived together day and night. In the late-night taxi, Yin Yi and Zhang Anding bumped into the word again. They agreed that the voices of modern society were constantly squeezed, shrinking to a small lump of "music" and leaving only pastime.
But more or less, Yin Yi believed in the mysterious power of the remaining sound. He has been recording in the field for many years, and there are two things he always remembers. Once when the opposite person opened the door to do something, he secretly recorded, and immediately lost his mobile phone. Another morning, there was a song coming from the community at nine o'clock. He followed the sound and found a family singing Christian songs with their windows open. He believes that the window is opened because the singing person wants the sound to spread and have an impact. But why not the need for ventilation due to heat?
Wang Jing, who has heard The Song of Gangbei and studies the anthropology of sound, said that the Song may have been traced back to a kind of witchcraft of praying in the field. Qin Siyuan, who is half Scottish, felt that there was a clear difference between the Song of Gangbei and the music of the Central Plains, closer to the Scottish folk music he was familiar with. The official introduction is only more than a hundred years old Gangbei Yangge, and the blood is much older than the demarcated age.
The performance list of the Gangbei Yangge Troupe
4. Reconstruction
Continue the topic on the taxi. Neither Yin Yi nor Zhang Anding wanted to strip away the sound. Instead, they want to establish a connection between the voice and society, the environment, the mundane, the body and mind.
Yin Yi recently did a project called "True Body". He performed one-on-one for fifty people. The performance deposit is 500 yuan, paid in cash. Both parties will return their respective deposits on time, and the late deposits will not be refunded, and the performance will be cancelled. Throughout the process, the viewer must appear in real body twice. This move challenges the common practice of air exchange, the process is cumbersome, constrained by the spirit of the contract, and the relationship between the two parties has been established before the start of the performance.
When the project is completed, the shortest performance time is 45 minutes, the maximum is three and a half hours, and about half of the time is in chat. Yin Yi tailored the performance content for the audience. Not content with the lack of faces and personalities of the audience at the show, he took a radical step here. Best of all, after the show, each audience member receives a tea drink he makes based on his impression of the other person. The combination of black tea and green tea is given to greasy literary youth, and the taste is difficult to describe.
The artist and the viewer work together to create a piece, a space, a period of time. The artist's whimsy allows people to return to small monomer cells in the era of intensification and intelligence, and to let the sound reconstruct the relationship between the individual in the wrapping of the transparent membrane.
Yin Yi's "real body" is displayed on the spot," in which he will select objects to perform for the audience.
5. Bond
This group of sound artists and scholars came from a very small pond. This field abroad, like what often happens in small pools, everyone defends their own methodological concepts, argues fiercely, and constantly iterates. Although these people knew each other or at least heard about each other, they rarely had the opportunity to be tied together for days and nights like now, and there was a continuous discussion of the "representation" style.
On the penultimate night, everyone went to one of taiyuan's best Live Houses to listen to noise performances. A young girl on the stage was reading the text endlessly, and the remaining two were making noises in their own formations. The audience is running out, they don't care. It was guitarist's birthday and he just wanted to celebrate his birthday. By Zhang Anding's standards, this not-band's fans have not yet reached the point of talking about technology and style. And most of those who play sound art are stuck in technology and style. What's further?
Yin Yi was probably like this before, when he was in college, he formed a band "Death Poetry Society" with two friends, slowly venting the bitterness of college students and young workers at the turn of the millennium. In the era of running forward, such a band will naturally die. But at the same time, the relationship between sound and space, time, social relations, and the inaccessibility of reason continues to be considered by him.
Ou Ning has long studied this matter. Before Taiyuan, he collaborated with the Suzhou Hanshan Art Museum on the project "Local Soundscape: Sound Geography of Suzhou", which studied the contemporary and historical soundscape of a place through field recordings and documents, and sketched out the sonic geography on this basis.
It's more abstract to say this, in fact, it has a human temperature. Because of the presence of people, places are interpreted as "meaningful geolocations." There will be an emotional bond between people and places, so "over time, the hometown will become hometown". In this process, the sense of hearing and smell is the most intuitive, opening the channel of memory faster than thinking.
In 2005-06, Qin Siyuan did a project in Beijing, inviting four British sound artists to Beijing to create works that reflected the city's sound. At the same time, he collects the beijingers' favorite sounds of the city, from the sound of taxis hitting watches and pigeon whistles to the sound of dates on trees and enamel washbasins. He began to realize the richness of sound and the momentary nature of connecting memories, and was later invited to do an old Beijing Sound Museum in Shijia Hutong (which was once his family's old residence).
Before 2017, Qin Siyuan did not make this kind of attempt again. When he regained it, he was still thinking: What should be done to restore the disappeared sound? The sound is hidden deep in people's memories, and how to shake the deep pool of water is not simple.
6. Intervention
When visiting Wang Mingle, the inheritor of Lotus Fall, he happened to be creating a five-minute Lotus Fall work for each old street in Taiyuan. He had an idea, to make a map of Taiyuan, and wherever he pressed, there would be a sound of wherever he went.
Someone has done this for a long time. It is flawed. In unrelated scenes, the keys play the sound of being stripped layered, and I doubt how much bodily sensation it evokes beyond the rough archival effect.
So what to do? Wang Jing studied the anthropology of sound. She gave a lecture at the Yangtze River Art Museum, combing through the artistic and academic history of sound research. Wang Jing's professional background in the master's degree was communication, a discipline that easily hits the wall of theory at the end of the road. She was sensitive to sound and interested in anthropology. To continue thinking from the end of the theory, sooner or later it will meet philosophy. Philosophy uses sound as a carrier, and she became one of the best scholars in this field in China.
Sound artists use mechanical noise to express optimism about the future, write poems with meaningless voices, and even provoke people's expectations of sound with sound.
Sound can be silent, and silence can be noisy.
Wang Jing's lecture at the Yangtze River Art Museum Wang Jing courtesy photo
Puzzle of sound art in early avant-garde art courtesy of Wang Jing
Wang Jing was interested in shamans, witchcraft, and incantations, and the artists were also interested in the spiritual power of sound. For a long time, it has been difficult to retain voices, and spiritual sustainability has always seemed out of reach. In the universe of sound, even with the help of modern recording equipment, the spirit and atmosphere of a musical scene will often be left in the recording work.
Suzhou's local soundscape project has produced 30 sound art works, and there is a story ou ning who loves to tell people.
Among the participants in the project was an architect Guo Liaohui who had been in Europe for nine years. At first, he was a little dim, and from the beginning of telling everyone about architecture, the image gradually became clear. When he was in Suzhou, Ou Ning encouraged him to see a "very interesting space, the scale of which is very wonderful." The spell of sesame opening the door must take effect, and Guo Liaohui carried his school bag into the salsa ballroom in the black hole cave. Before going, in order to show that he understood the scriptures, he opened his mobile phone to show everyone the European dance hall he had been to, and when he entered the door, he found that he had imagined a deviation.
In the cheap space, everyone dances closely, but the lights will be turned on at the end of a song, which is convenient for transferring 30 yuan / dance money. Ou Ning was old, holding his arm to observe secretly, Guo Liaohui opened the computer and began to do PPT pressure shock. After being pulled a few times by the ladies, he thought someone was about to sit on his lap, bounced up and ran.
This story became a work called "The End of the Song". Through the holes of the wooden box, clay statues danced to the sound of disco. The story also tells us that when the observer is touched and really intervenes in space, everything will be different.
Zhang Dajing× Zhou Peiyong × Fang Fenqiu, "Qu Finally Scattered", paint-free wooden box, clay sculpture group portrait (20cm high), electric turntable, vinyl clock, disco sound lamp, flannel, mirror, sound, 2021 (sculpture part)
7. Taiyuan
The Taiyuan City seen in just a few days, the very new and the very old coexist. The old town in the northeast stretches its legs and feet to the south, and the new town is full of high-rise buildings in the shape of a box. There was everything in the stalls of the Liberation Building, and there were fewer and fewer young diners in the Qinghe Elder's Shop. Next, the group had to go to Taiyuan at least twice to complete their homework.
Taiyuan streets, under the shade of trees is always cool
Dou Dafu Ancestral Hall, Tang Dynasty and Ming and Qing Dynasty buildings coexist, the distinction is clear
Coming out of the Liberation Building, I watched a five-o'clock Mass in the Catholic Church across the road. The priest's chanting of the scriptures in a modal pattern was for a moment like rapping, sliding from clear Mandarin into a different track. Catholic rituals, which guided the crowd up and down like waves, reminded Kinzonin of his seven years of Catholic school life.
The ceremony ends with everyone saying "I wish you happiness", which is another kind of one-and-so voice. Why do people have a special feeling for repetitive echoes? Why is the sound of midday hail fascinating? Why is it that opening the windows on the upper floors of the hotel and the never-ending traffic rising below can make people wonder?
Looking forward to the answers of the artists.
The characters in the text appear in order of appearance:
Jing Wang, Curator of Sound Practice, Associate Professor, School of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, Doctoral Supervisor. Current research areas include sound studies, sensory studies, and art anthropology.
Yin Yi, musician, artist, curator. In 1998, he formed the slowcore band "Death Poetry Society", bassist and lead singer, until 2001 turned to digital music composition. Musical practice in recent years has focused primarily on individual live music performances and the functional exploration of music in the social fabric.
Zhang Anding is a sound artist, experimental musician, young culture researcher, and co-founder of Youth Chronicles. In recent years, he has begun to pay attention to the new sound culture landscape driven by social media and mobile Internet, and turned to the creation of multi-media forms such as sound writing, sound theater performance and sound installation.
Qin Siyuan, artist and curator, lives in Beijing. The recently created "Sound Terminal" is a long-term multi-faceted project, which includes the exploration of sound in history, network interaction and sound art. Qin Siyuan is also preparing for a physical organization to open up a new path for a comprehensive exploration of the relationship between voice and people.
Ou Ning, artist, curator, writer. Since 2020, he has re-entered the field of sound research, hosting and curating a series of sound art workshops and exhibitions, including "Local Soundscape: Sound Geography of Suzhou" (Suzhou Hanshan Art Museum, 2020-2021), "Village Sound Workshop" (Suzhou Rongchuntang, 2021), and "Original Sound: Local Soundscape of Taiyuan" (Taiyuan Yangtze River Art Museum, 2021).
His books include Bishan Community: How to Create Your Own Utopia (Chinese, Danish, English, OVO and Antipyrine, 2015), Utopia in Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), and Utopia Fields (Chinese, to be published).
Zhao Cong, the bassist of the rock band "No More" and "Kaoru Abe Has No Future", now lives in Beijing. He is good at playing with ordinary everyday objects, intending to bring strange strangeness by amplifying small sounds and simple movements. https://zhaocong.bandcamp.com
Kim Zonin, Curator, Artist, Music Anthropologist. He has given academic lectures such as "Kunqu Gong and Drum and Auditory Narrative". His sound installation "Gui" was exhibited at the Hanshan Art Museum "Local SoundScape: Suzhou's Sound Geography"; his works include "Yes, I", "Guangxiaozai", "Falling Spoon And Lips with Sisters-in-law", "No. 7 Yudong 2nd Road", "Rényì" and so on. In 2021, Kim Jonin's exhibition project "The Flow of Broken Mirrors: 'Modernity' rewritten in Boundary Perception" was selected as the finalist of the OCAT Research Center's "Research Exhibition Curation Program".
Wang Mingle, the inheritor of Taiyuan Lotus Fall.
Guo Liaohui, the lead designer of Guo Liaohui Studio (Atelier Guo). Founder of the Firewood Collection Society, Master of The School of Architecture of Mendrisio, Bachelor of Architecture of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He has practiced architectural design at Peter Zumto Studio, Caruso St. John's Studio, Francesca Torzo Architecture Studio.
Candidate Guide
Venue: Taiyuan Yangtze River Art Museum
Number of recruits: 16-22 people
request:
1. Candidates should be interested in artistic creation, curation, urban research, historical research, and local construction and have certain knowledge or practical experience;
2. Environmental awareness, mindfulness and patience for deep listening are required, which are the basic requirements for the practice of sound geography;
3. After being selected as a participant, you should bring your own recording equipment. For the selection of recording equipment and the technical application of field recording, sound artists will be invited to provide guidance;
4. Participants can register freely, participate free of charge after being selected after the interview, but need to bear their own travel and accommodation, and the Yangtze River Art Museum will recommend hotels nearby that can enjoy discounts.
Application Method:
1. Please send your resume and work information to the Yangtze River Art Museum mailbox in PDF form before July 18: [email protected], and the subject of the email should indicate #Original Sound: Taiyuan Local Soundscape + Name #
2. The Yangtze River Art Museum will announce the online interview list on July 20, the online interview of the candidates on July 23, and the list of selected participants on the public account of the Yangtze River Art Museum on July 24;
3. The Yangtze River Museum of Art reserves the right to increase the number of places from the vacancy to the vacancy;
4. If you have any questions, you can consult the official WeChat Naomi-bai or telephone 15535106934
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Yan Zhang