What is given is not a fully formed song
Noémie Cecilia Huttner-Koros & Josten Myburgh (2020-)
Composition for actor, dancer, three musicians & electronics.
Composition for actor, dancer, three musicians & electronics.
IntroductionHalf-heard, whispered words, unspoken, repeated, misremembered, songs you can’t feel but can hold, memories of something unsayable, ungraspable…
What Is Given Is Not A Fully Formed Song takes place across multiple stages, spheres and universes. Sounds meet words meet gestures. If recorded sounds are a kind of time travel, how do live bodies move with, speak to, their past and present selves? The ghosts of extinct animals and vanished places appear at the edges. How do we hear them and feel them? What can they say? Following three interrelated stories – a reincarnating mushroom trapped in a fire, two ghosts in an alleyway behind McDonalds stumbled upon by a late-night reveler and the plight of the vulnerable boodie (burrowing bettong)… It’s a slightly spooky time. It’s not good to mess around with ghosts and I’m definitely not qualified to be poking around those bins in the alleyway, the slimy mushroom-sprouting spots… In everyday life, there’s a lot of talking. That’s all for now. We would like to thank The Blue Room Theatre for supporting this work through the Winter Nights Festival development program. We'd like to thank our co-makers Mararo Wangai, Joshua Pether, Djuna Lee & Jameson Feakes. We would also like to thank Stuart James for assisting us with acquiring a space for making recordings at The Soundfield Studio. |
Photo by Duncan Wright. Image description: Two people (Noémie & Josten) stand in a suburban backyard shed. Between them is a speaker on a stand, about waist-height. The person on the right is holding a chicken, and there is a second chicken in the foreground, pecking at the ground.
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Scores
Image description: Three different chords in traditional Western music notation, hand-drawn, spaced in a line down the middle of the page. Each chord is numbered (1 to 3) and has a sign to be repeated.
Image description: Hand-written text that reads: "Imagine you are a mushroom. You are content in your damp, moist little nook. Grow slowly. Attach yourself to others. Emerge from unsuspecting places. Play until the mushroom (you) is relocated, picked or eaten."
Image description: Hand-written text that reads "Score for everyone! A sound you make while experiencing the sunset. A sound you make when you remember being a child. A sound you make when patting a dog. A sound you make as you think about Perth being covered in ice. A sound you made with someone or something who is no longer with us. (Read the instructions aloud before doing them.)"
Image description: Hand-written text that reads "a song to fall asleep."
Image description: Hand-written text that reads "Guitar / Take a chord you like / play it one note at a time, leaving the notes to ring for a while / play it again, removing one of the notes this time. / and again, until no notes are left. /then repeat with a different chord." A demonstration using musical notation is then provided, with six quavers, a breath mark, five quavers, a breath mark, etc. going down to a single quaver.
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AudioMany of these excerpts and sketches are designed to be layered, so please feel free to play around with different combinations.
Dissolving Mararo's voice into The Blue Room's studio.
TRANSCRIPTION
Fungal attractions… Lately, I’ve been attracted to mushrooms. Perhaps this is love. I marvel at their contours, their bright shapes, the surprising locations of their appearance, Eyes attracted to the soft mound growing out of timber on a demolished city block. The mushrooms sing out. The mushrooms wait and grow and multiply. The mushrooms take over. The mushrooms are alive, they go BAM. The mushrooms make me pause, aware of my own mortality, of where my fingers hovers. Perhaps once I was a mushroom, or I am still a mushy, damp, moist, ground-dwelling, possibly-poisonous-to-humans-fungi. I have friends on what-you-call this ‘demolished block’. We are all rubble. Once, I am growing near someone’s kitchen and I hear her berating her partner for putting glad wrap over a bowl of soup. “What about the micro-plastic?” She whispers to him horrified. He replies nonchalantly: “no chance of avoiding that now, there are micro-plastics in rain.” Some years later I am clinging to the underbelly of a railway track. It’s a more difficult existence but at regular intervals, I feel the whoosh of a great lumbering machine narrowly avoid my top mucus. At first I found it scary, now it’s strangely erotic. The train goes WHOOSH and I go ZZZ…MMM… Once upon a time I live in a swamp. I reproduce with other spores. We cling to one another, to our stink, to our own slimy toxins. Motorbike frogs amble by. When the moon has completed three rotations since my initial burst through soil, a girl begins to visit. Every day, she sits. I speak. She is silent. Humans are known to chitter-chatter incessantly. But not this one. The only time she speaks is when she gets tangled in thorns “SHIT” (that’s all she says) Once upon another time, I grow on the outskirts of a clearing. Near a cattle farm. Noisier than the train. It’s hard to get any sleep. Worlds receding. Two monologues.
Transcription
I see him hovering behind Maccas. It’s one in the morning and I’ve just left Connies; mad cos I was looking hot and no one noticed. Big mac in one hand and heels in the other. And he…he is…is smoky misty hazy divine. And with that, I become absolutely sure that there are no pure ghosts. No pure apparitions. No pure encounters. No pure breath. We are all tainted now. He hovers arm-in-arm with another. Another ghost. Two ghosts in the alleyway behind Macdonalds. They look like dulled snow. When was the last ice age? When was the last train home? When was my last meal? When was this brick laid? When was Maccas invented? When was this burger mooing? When did this alley become the smokers corner? When was my first drink? When did my toe start bleeding? When did these ghosts claim this Maccas as their own? When when when Boodie: burrowing bettong To burrow: verb Definitions: To make a hole or tunnel, typically for use as a dwelling. To dig into or through something solid. To hide underneath or press close to something To make a thorough inquiry; to investigate Boodie: a macropodiform marsupial, potoroidae family, genus bettongia That is to say, macropodiform a fancy word for a macropod, That is to say, a suborder of the large marsupial order of diprodontia. That is to say, that according to the Linnaeus biological classification – animals are divided into three kingdoms, divided into classes and they, in turn, broken down into orders, genus and species. But back to the boodie. See it now: small powerful paws. Sharp, pointed teeth. Hairy, thick tail. Short, rounded ears. See it doing what it does best: digging. There is a bush and a boodie and they are friends. Good friends. Best friends, in fact. The bush is a poison-pea bush. Poison-pea bush: gastrolobium Poison-pea bush and boodie are friends because poison-pea bush needs freshly aerated fertile soil to grow and who better to create that than a small rat-like marsupial? Poison-pea bush is poisonous to foxes. Fox: belonging to the family Canidae, most likely of the Vulpes Vulpes specie. Foxes decimate boodie populations. Foxes die from eating poison-pea bush. But without little boodie dig dig digging, conditions are not ripe for poison-pea bush to flourish. So they wait for each other. For the friendship to continue. As they know it will once again. Boodie and poison-pea bush are friends in memories. Even when they haven’t felt each other in a long long time. There is a boodie shaped hole in poison-pea bush’s roots. There is so much anger in me towards the things that can no longer be undone. It’s fruitless, this anger. A short collage - finding a voice. A motif. A presence. Ghost language. Conversation with a tree.
Transcription
What’s that? No, I’m not here alone. Can’t you see? Big clumps of mushies all around, all around us. Not as bright as me. Oh – no, there’s no one around here that’s as big as you. (To audience) Hmm…cocky tree... Perhaps this is love? I do need a new home… A ground dwelling existence is not quite for me. Perhaps a tree is what I need after all, you know to cling to. Um…so… (slides over to the tree, looks it up and down and across, checking it out) Look, I was just thinking…well um…that maybe, you know, like only if you’re interested too – but that maybe you and I could like, maybe, um, get together symbiotically maybe and like have some fun? Not just a one night stand kind of thing – I mean sorry if this is moving too fast – I’m just um like really quite nervous because I admire you and your deep roots like sooo much – but yeah maybe it could be like a lunar cycle thing or we could even try a seasonal relationship? [Tree creaks in response.] Yeah I’m hearing you. Of course, we need to take it slow – uh huh. [Tree creaks again.] What? Oh yeah – I know we have vastly different timescales. We can work with that? It might even be a bonus?! A found object. A train turning into a wetland. |
TOO MUCH TALKING / CLICK HERE TO READ A SHORT ESSAY
One of the premises of this piece is that sound recording, fundamentally, is strange, illusory, magic, weird. Pressing the record button on a device with a microphone plugged in renders a trace of whatever is occurring in the space, through the unique 'ear' of the microphone, via a complex system of transformations and processes. This rendering can then be re-rendered back through some kind of transducer - usually a speaker. The speaker, ostensibly a bit of paper flapping back and forth extremely fast, creates a kind of illusion, whereby we might say to the aforementioned flapping paper, 'that's so-and-so's voice', or 'this is a Tasmanian forest', and expect others to understand what we mean.
These are naive observations in some sense, albeit with plenty of possibility for deepening, such as in the below excerpt from Francois J. Bonnet's "The Order of Sounds":
"A sound that is three seconds long, for example, will only last, as such, for three seconds, and will inevitably disappear and fade to nothing, until the next time it is 'played', at which time it will then have become an other sound. So it is incorrect to say that the phonograph fixes sounds; what it fixes is their imprints. Now, the imprint is always ambivalent. It may allow us to re-present a sound, to create a simulacra of presence, but at the same time it reveals that which is no longer present: 'The imprint makes of absence something like a power of form.' [1] This ambivalence is intrinsic to the phonograph. It is always poised between that which seems to be once more, and that which definitively is no longer, between that which seams ceaselessly to live again and that which is forever lost." [2]
Sound recording & reproduction, historically extremely new, have been completely normalised as ways of hearing and experiencing sound in our world. They have become ubiquitous and ordinary, and the poetry and strangeness of them as processes has largely been overshadowed.
Is there something to gain from re-enchanting the recording process - from exposing its strangeness from within its ubiquity? Jonathan Stern's "The Audible Past" notes that sound reproduction is "historical all the way down", and also reveals the origins of its technology in many epistemologies of the time, including those interested in eugenics - in language instruction for deaf & hard-of-hearing people, as a means of eliminating deaf culture [5]. Coming to know this process in new ways might be rejuvenating.
It is not surprising that recordings can be and already are understood in very different ways. In the Daly River region of Northern Australia, the word for 'recording' is the same as the word for 'song-giving ghost' - ancestor-figures that visit people in dreams to share songs with them to pass back onto the world of the living [3]. In Steven Feld's article "Waterfalls of Song", he speaks of a singer he was recording, Ulahi, adding a tag at the end of her song which asked the imaginary future audience of Australians and Americans to the recording "what are your names?" [4]. The presence of the active recording device - the possibility of the distribution or travel of the recorded sound, and the poetics of the process - changes the world and the responsibilities and actions of those in it.
There are plenty of contemporary artists whose work amplifies the 'recording-ness' of recordings rather than obscuring it. In the realm of sound art & experimentalism, everywhere from Robert Machiri & Memory Biwa's Listening at Pungwe, Graham Lambkin's idiosyncratic 'domestic musique concrete', or Moniek Darge's curiously layered field recordings, politicise or confuse the process of hearing and being allowed to hear via recording technologies. In hip hop music, J Dilla's structuring of tracks such as Don't Cry so that the sample is first presented in an unaltered form before being chopped up almost unrecognisably, ensures that the haunting presence of the original sample remains at the forefront of one's listening, even whilst technological and human processes involved in its radical transformation come into play. In Sydney-based improviser Peter Farrar's album Avocado, he occasionally turns away from the microphones whilst still playing. As the direct sound of the saxophone goes out of phase and one starts to hear more of the room, the traditional and somehow sacred relationship of an inert performer sitting still in relation to the microphones to ensure optimal fidelity is replaced by the feeling of eavesdropping or overhearing something that in many ways is quite ordinary to its maker, sonically remarkable though it might be. The relationship between recording device and recorded subject continues to be an infinitely expansive field that all kinds of experimentalists have traversed along different paths.
In July 2019, I (Josten) attended Phonurgia Nova's workshop La radio performée with radio artist and composer Alessandro Bosetti. Bosetti's workshop arrived at many extraordinary and playful places through investigating the idea of bringing the concepts and techniques of radio art onto the stage: "radio without radio". What if microphones were seen not as mere tools to make sound louder, but as objects which create otherworldly zones on stage where sound is translocated and changed? What if the stereo field - the psychoacoustic space that two speakers can create an impression of by playing tricks on our perception - was a "stage within a stage", where action can unfold in counterpoint to or between the "real" stage? What if speakers were actors, or characters, sitting on the stage rather than above it?
These thoughts combined with a sort of frustration at the background role sound always seemed to take in many film, theatre and dance productions, rather than a symbiosis, and led me to think of an idea for a piece that would put the poetics of sound recording and making as part of the real fabric of meaning-making in a work for the theatre space. Is it possible to reveal this artifice and confuse one's understanding of what they're hearing in the same way that contemporary music has been doing for many years? Sound designer as unreliable narrator? Microphone as a window, door, gate, portal? Psychoacoustic parallel universe? Staged radio silence? It seemed to me exciting to think of working in this way - not necessarily radically new, but still full of richness, possibility, electricity.
This is the premise for this piece and it continues to be exciting to share its possibilities with co-creators Noémie Cecilia Huttner-Koros, Mararo Wangai, Joshua Pether, Jameson Feakes & Djuna Lee. I hope you enjoy exploring the documentation as it exists now and hopefully we can stage it for you some time soon!
[1] Didi-Huberman, L'Empreinte, 39, quoted in Francois J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago.
[2] Francois J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago (2019), 45.
[3] Alan Marrett, The Ghost Songs (2007), ABC Radio National.
[4] Steven Feld, Waterfalls of Song (1996).
[5] Jonathan Stern, The Audible Past (2003).
These are naive observations in some sense, albeit with plenty of possibility for deepening, such as in the below excerpt from Francois J. Bonnet's "The Order of Sounds":
"A sound that is three seconds long, for example, will only last, as such, for three seconds, and will inevitably disappear and fade to nothing, until the next time it is 'played', at which time it will then have become an other sound. So it is incorrect to say that the phonograph fixes sounds; what it fixes is their imprints. Now, the imprint is always ambivalent. It may allow us to re-present a sound, to create a simulacra of presence, but at the same time it reveals that which is no longer present: 'The imprint makes of absence something like a power of form.' [1] This ambivalence is intrinsic to the phonograph. It is always poised between that which seems to be once more, and that which definitively is no longer, between that which seams ceaselessly to live again and that which is forever lost." [2]
Sound recording & reproduction, historically extremely new, have been completely normalised as ways of hearing and experiencing sound in our world. They have become ubiquitous and ordinary, and the poetry and strangeness of them as processes has largely been overshadowed.
Is there something to gain from re-enchanting the recording process - from exposing its strangeness from within its ubiquity? Jonathan Stern's "The Audible Past" notes that sound reproduction is "historical all the way down", and also reveals the origins of its technology in many epistemologies of the time, including those interested in eugenics - in language instruction for deaf & hard-of-hearing people, as a means of eliminating deaf culture [5]. Coming to know this process in new ways might be rejuvenating.
It is not surprising that recordings can be and already are understood in very different ways. In the Daly River region of Northern Australia, the word for 'recording' is the same as the word for 'song-giving ghost' - ancestor-figures that visit people in dreams to share songs with them to pass back onto the world of the living [3]. In Steven Feld's article "Waterfalls of Song", he speaks of a singer he was recording, Ulahi, adding a tag at the end of her song which asked the imaginary future audience of Australians and Americans to the recording "what are your names?" [4]. The presence of the active recording device - the possibility of the distribution or travel of the recorded sound, and the poetics of the process - changes the world and the responsibilities and actions of those in it.
There are plenty of contemporary artists whose work amplifies the 'recording-ness' of recordings rather than obscuring it. In the realm of sound art & experimentalism, everywhere from Robert Machiri & Memory Biwa's Listening at Pungwe, Graham Lambkin's idiosyncratic 'domestic musique concrete', or Moniek Darge's curiously layered field recordings, politicise or confuse the process of hearing and being allowed to hear via recording technologies. In hip hop music, J Dilla's structuring of tracks such as Don't Cry so that the sample is first presented in an unaltered form before being chopped up almost unrecognisably, ensures that the haunting presence of the original sample remains at the forefront of one's listening, even whilst technological and human processes involved in its radical transformation come into play. In Sydney-based improviser Peter Farrar's album Avocado, he occasionally turns away from the microphones whilst still playing. As the direct sound of the saxophone goes out of phase and one starts to hear more of the room, the traditional and somehow sacred relationship of an inert performer sitting still in relation to the microphones to ensure optimal fidelity is replaced by the feeling of eavesdropping or overhearing something that in many ways is quite ordinary to its maker, sonically remarkable though it might be. The relationship between recording device and recorded subject continues to be an infinitely expansive field that all kinds of experimentalists have traversed along different paths.
In July 2019, I (Josten) attended Phonurgia Nova's workshop La radio performée with radio artist and composer Alessandro Bosetti. Bosetti's workshop arrived at many extraordinary and playful places through investigating the idea of bringing the concepts and techniques of radio art onto the stage: "radio without radio". What if microphones were seen not as mere tools to make sound louder, but as objects which create otherworldly zones on stage where sound is translocated and changed? What if the stereo field - the psychoacoustic space that two speakers can create an impression of by playing tricks on our perception - was a "stage within a stage", where action can unfold in counterpoint to or between the "real" stage? What if speakers were actors, or characters, sitting on the stage rather than above it?
These thoughts combined with a sort of frustration at the background role sound always seemed to take in many film, theatre and dance productions, rather than a symbiosis, and led me to think of an idea for a piece that would put the poetics of sound recording and making as part of the real fabric of meaning-making in a work for the theatre space. Is it possible to reveal this artifice and confuse one's understanding of what they're hearing in the same way that contemporary music has been doing for many years? Sound designer as unreliable narrator? Microphone as a window, door, gate, portal? Psychoacoustic parallel universe? Staged radio silence? It seemed to me exciting to think of working in this way - not necessarily radically new, but still full of richness, possibility, electricity.
This is the premise for this piece and it continues to be exciting to share its possibilities with co-creators Noémie Cecilia Huttner-Koros, Mararo Wangai, Joshua Pether, Jameson Feakes & Djuna Lee. I hope you enjoy exploring the documentation as it exists now and hopefully we can stage it for you some time soon!
[1] Didi-Huberman, L'Empreinte, 39, quoted in Francois J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago.
[2] Francois J. Bonnet, The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago (2019), 45.
[3] Alan Marrett, The Ghost Songs (2007), ABC Radio National.
[4] Steven Feld, Waterfalls of Song (1996).
[5] Jonathan Stern, The Audible Past (2003).
