#cncptn02

[cncptn]

Martin Rosen - Untitled

The only instruction on this untitled graphic score reads:

Whatever sound(s) you choose, make sure the sound(s) you don't are just as important.

Immeadiately (I hope) this reveals some unwritten intention in the score: that in its performance, there should be a focus on not only making sound, but a focus on the gaps around it.

The recorded acousmatic realization is my own. I wanted to reveal how subtly this instruction could be taken - the space where no sound is made is often fleeting, and masked by other voices or reverb.

Martin Rosen is an American composer and artist, currently travelling Europe.

[cncptn]

Lee Riley - Untitled

I wanted to produce a sound able to fill a large space, and entice an audience into an experience.

My initial fascination was the projection of light when the bowl was raised, and this was something I wanted to capture as much as the sound.

Placing the hydrophone near to the pump added another dimension to the sculpture: an effect inside the bowl, water interacting with the pump and hydrophone, whilst making light reflections through the bowl, projecting on the surface to illustrate this sound as it happens.

Each part of the sculpture was necessary to hold the weight of the bowl and the water, with the clamps and lamp adding a scientific look to the sculpture.

I wanted the experience to be unique, and let the imagination of the audience speak for itself.

The responses to the experience from the piece that I found interesting were that "the water was nurturing the microphone"; the orb "all seeing, all knowing"; and that, as an audience, "we are in the bowl and outside the bowl".

I wanted it to be unusual and strange, but at the same time to have an intrigue that would have the same effect on the audience as it had on me when experimenting that first time. I was excited, and couldn't really understand it, but it amazed me and it still does.

Lee Riley is a sound/visual artist based in Oxford, working under the name Euhedral as well as his own. The sound and light sculpture Untitled was recently installed as part of Blessing Force 4 at Modern Art Oxford, curated by Oxford collective Blessing Force

[cncptn]

Jeevan Rai - Ten Year Threnody

I remember the images. I think we all remember the images. Ten years on, the decade anniversary of 9/11 was surrounded by media talk of how it changed the course of history and its political aftermath - with little attempt to remember, acknowledge, recognise or confront the event itself. And to me that seems odd, because it is the event itself which sums up everything important about how I feel about it. It was the bubble of our western first-world security bursting. In that moment of impact, from that image of the towers aflame screamed one word: helpless.

To me art is something which can take us places we could not otherwise get. Steve Reich and John Adams have both done 9/11-related works which are respectively spectatorial and eulogic. What I have tried to do is connect with the moment right inside the event. Because what few people seem to be willing to do in recollection of 9/11 is really try to imagine what it might have been like in the last few moments of those lives. What happens in that terrible epiphany of helplessness, the realisation that there is no way out? In accounts of those who have brushed with death, the same descriptions keep cropping up: time stops, gravity stops, everything stops.

I used (among other sound sources) sirens of NYC emergency service vehicles, some piano recordings, fire alarm klaxons of the type typically installed in New York skyscrapers, the sound of Boeing 757 and 767 jets taking off, inflight soundscape elements of aeroplane passenger cabins, Northeastern-US news footage from the morning of the event, and the static noise of a phone call being cut off.

May the dead rest in peace.

May we hope for humanity’s future to be better than its past.

By night, Jeevan Rai is a composer, sound artist and improviser. By day, he is a mathematician. He completed an MMus under Stephen Goss and Matthew Sansom at the University of Surrey, where he now does doctoral research on symmetry algebras.