Sounding Painting
Listen to album on SoundCloud (released 2021)
Essay by Adam Harper Continuity and Change: Reflections on Sounding Painting PDF
NOTES:
SOUNDING PAINTING – Slow Looking and Deep Listening
PROPOSITION
Paintings were exchanged with four composers for sound. Each composer agreed to install the work in their domestic space or workplace and create a sound piece with title in response.
PAINTINGS EXCHANGED
Archetype Painting, niche (series three, four, five and six)
BACKGROUND
Sounding Painting is part of a body of work that uses exchange to test structures of distribution and recognition. In these works, paintings circulate through multiple modes – encounter, dialogue, writing and sound. Painting becomes a catalyst, a speculative object, a synthesis of interpretation and response. Through this process the painting exists at the nexus of a growing network of collaborators – each contribution adding new layers of complexity and individual insight to the archetype.
COMPOSERS
Claudia Molitor is a composer, artist and improviser whose work hovers between music and sound art, extending across contemporary art practices, such as video and installation art. Exploring the relationships between listening and other senses as well as embracing collaboration as compositional practice is central to much of her practice.
Niels Vermeulen is a composer-producer of electronic/acoustic music. He uses piano, his voice, vintage synthesizers and a modular system to make music with a strong melodic/harmonic connection, combined with minimalistic rhythms. He likes to collaborate with theatre-makers and visual artists. Besides working solo he is part of synth-rock band Zebra Lasers. You can find his work online (nielsvermeulen.com) or in several (performing) arts spaces.
Fred Frith is a songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist (bass, keyboards, violin) and improviser performing mostly on various permutations of the electric and acoustic guitar. Occasionally he uses crude home-made instruments, either of his own invention or in collaboration with his long-time colleague Sudhu Tewari in the band Normal. Fred learned how to compose in rock bands, starting with Henry Cow in 1968. This meant writing for and with people that he knew, and then arriving at the final result through a collective rehearsal process. During the Henry Cow years he fell in love with the recording studio and its endless possibilities. Fred embraces the idea of the ‘work’ as an unfinished and constantly mutating entity. Collaboration, improvisation, sculpting sound in the studio, and treating composition as an open-ended process remain central to how he makes music.
Pia Achternkamp (loh) is researching on the borderlands of music, performing arts, language and fine arts – an obscure and yet fruitful landscape as a basis for multi-sensory experience and experimentation. She interrupted her studies of philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin in order to dedicate herself fully to the composition of music and soundscapes for theatre/dance projects. As she had always been curious about the interdependencies in sound, space and movement, Pia is usually playing her music live on stage when working with actors/dancers – this is how her artistic practice transformed towards a point where it became unavoidable to move her own body and explore its performative qualities and potentialities (piaachternkamp.com).
See TEXTS for publication
E. Jackson 