Venue / McAulay Studio, Hong Kong Arts Centre
Date / 2014.04.29
Featured Artists
Alex Yiu (Hong Kong), Tsang Sin-yu (Hong Kong)
Alex Yiu, winner of the 2013 RTHK new generation young composer’s competition, is a musical omnivore with interests in contemporary classical, harsh noise, post-rock, sound poetry and beyond. His Sonic Anchor debut will feature a set of new compositions for chamber ensemble and field recordings, which involves both through-composed / highly crafted musical materials and naturally-occurring environmental sounds and noises. Tsang Sin-yu, in her own words, “reconstructs situations” for listeners. In this edition of Sonic Anchor Sin-yu, will take us into her living room, where housework is not a chore, but a sonic-theatrical event that warrants our attention.
Concert review
Sonic Anchor #16 - Signs, purpose and clarity
By Samson Young
In certain sound art communities there is a tendency to highlight the fragility of sound, and the importance of protecting them from the assaults of modern civilization. This almost romantic notion of sound as pure and untainted is also evident in the very language that we use to describe sound recordings – high / low fidelity, lossy compression, decay. To quote Rey Chow and James Seintrager, “…sonic objectification is almost by default organized through a Romantic paradigm, whereby sonic capture is understood implicitly as the capture of that which is lost.” In many field-recording based sound performance, one observes a relentless devotion to the quality of sound – where pristine recording conditions and the most restrained in-studio processing (therefore leaving the original recording mostly untouched) are seen as signs of respectable craftsmanship.
This “romantic discourse of loss” is certainly not evident in Alex Yiu’s offering at the last edition of Sonic Anchor. The field recording that his performance was captured at the waterfront of the West Kowloon Cultural District. The quality of the recording is rough – wind noises and recording “flaws” abound. One sensed that there is no desire on the artist’s part for the audience to listen to the field recording with any degree of care: minutes into the performance, the field recording became overwhelmed by a cacophony of sound consisted of synthesized noises, outbursts of energetic gestures on the violin that resembles clichés in contemporary classical music, and heavily processed recording of Handel’s Messiah. As if this wasn’t adequately complex, a video recording of the waterfront that is subtitled with the English texts from the requiem runs parallel to the music.
Juxtaposition is certainly one way to open up imagination – it has the possibility to construct intriguing associative networks of signs. Where Alex might have fallen short in this performance was not a lack of sense of purpose or clarity (for I am convinced that being articulate is not a pre-requisite of a thoughtful artist), but a lack of imagination. The massive overload of signs acted not to enrich each other’s associations, but instead they flattened and held one another hostage. The result is a relentlessly repetitive production of their most obvious and logical associations, given the political climate au courant. Little new meaning could be generated by such an act of juxtaposition. In this sense, the piece is not at all confused or muddled, but instead it progressed with the most severe sense of certainty, underpinned by the most logical (though probably quite appropriate) formal structure – one that resembled the romantic arch of a 19th century symphony. While the eclectic combination of contrasting elements was daring and refreshing, the piece was perhaps not as quirky as it first appeared.
Venue / McAulay Studio, Hong Kong Arts Centre
Date / 2014.04.29
Featured Artists
Alex Yiu (Hong Kong), Tsang Sin-yu (Hong Kong)
Alex Yiu, winner of the 2013 RTHK new generation young composer’s competition, is a musical omnivore with interests in contemporary classical, harsh noise, post-rock, sound poetry and beyond. His Sonic Anchor debut will feature a set of new compositions for chamber ensemble and field recordings, which involves both through-composed / highly crafted musical materials and naturally-occurring environmental sounds and noises. Tsang Sin-yu, in her own words, “reconstructs situations” for listeners. In this edition of Sonic Anchor Sin-yu, will take us into her living room, where housework is not a chore, but a sonic-theatrical event that warrants our attention.
Concert review
Sonic Anchor #16 - Signs, purpose and clarity
By Samson Young
In certain sound art communities there is a tendency to highlight the fragility of sound, and the importance of protecting them from the assaults of modern civilization. This almost romantic notion of sound as pure and untainted is also evident in the very language that we use to describe sound recordings – high / low fidelity, lossy compression, decay. To quote Rey Chow and James Seintrager, “…sonic objectification is almost by default organized through a Romantic paradigm, whereby sonic capture is understood implicitly as the capture of that which is lost.” In many field-recording based sound performance, one observes a relentless devotion to the quality of sound – where pristine recording conditions and the most restrained in-studio processing (therefore leaving the original recording mostly untouched) are seen as signs of respectable craftsmanship.
This “romantic discourse of loss” is certainly not evident in Alex Yiu’s offering at the last edition of Sonic Anchor. The field recording that his performance was captured at the waterfront of the West Kowloon Cultural District. The quality of the recording is rough – wind noises and recording “flaws” abound. One sensed that there is no desire on the artist’s part for the audience to listen to the field recording with any degree of care: minutes into the performance, the field recording became overwhelmed by a cacophony of sound consisted of synthesized noises, outbursts of energetic gestures on the violin that resembles clichés in contemporary classical music, and heavily processed recording of Handel’s Messiah. As if this wasn’t adequately complex, a video recording of the waterfront that is subtitled with the English texts from the requiem runs parallel to the music.
Juxtaposition is certainly one way to open up imagination – it has the possibility to construct intriguing associative networks of signs. Where Alex might have fallen short in this performance was not a lack of sense of purpose or clarity (for I am convinced that being articulate is not a pre-requisite of a thoughtful artist), but a lack of imagination. The massive overload of signs acted not to enrich each other’s associations, but instead they flattened and held one another hostage. The result is a relentlessly repetitive production of their most obvious and logical associations, given the political climate au courant. Little new meaning could be generated by such an act of juxtaposition. In this sense, the piece is not at all confused or muddled, but instead it progressed with the most severe sense of certainty, underpinned by the most logical (though probably quite appropriate) formal structure – one that resembled the romantic arch of a 19th century symphony. While the eclectic combination of contrasting elements was daring and refreshing, the piece was perhaps not as quirky as it first appeared.