Articles

Lyndon Blue

Decibel Presents 'Camera Obscura' @ PICA, Monday September 19

September 21

Sight and sound have always been conjoined twins, to the point where a word like “audiovisual” is almost superfluous. The most disembodied sounds carry visual associations: thunder, mysterious and siteless, has lightning close by. And, as John Cage reminds us, true silence is elusive if not impossible: no object or image can exist independent from the world of sound. Nevertheless, a discourse arose around music or sound-as-art that largely disregarded the intrinsic visuality of the art form. Today, more than ever, music shares a symbiotic relationship with visual formats – film, television, video games, advertising – and this, it seems, is the departure point for Decibel’s latest performance. It’s called ‘Camera Obscura’ – the third and final of a series of concerts at PICA in 2011.

‘Camera Obscura,’ of course, refers to a proto-photographic device that projects an image of its surrounding, inverted, onto a screen; the words themselves mean ‘darkened chamber,’ which is exactly what PICA’s central gallery becomes as we enter it on a moist Monday evening. The last time I saw Decibel was at their ‘Pretty Things’ concert in June. Tonight, back in the same space, they pick up where they left off, but with an altogether different focus.

‘Mothlight,’ composed by young New South Welshman Austin Benjamin Buckett, is up first. The piece takes its name from a 1963 film by Stan Brakhage, which is to be projected alongside but, notably, not synchronously. Brakhage’s films were silent and he eschewed soundtracks, so the film will be projected on 16mm film after the piece is performed.

Malcolm Riddoch sits behind one of Decibel’s standard-issue aluminum macbooks, triggering captured audio. A disembodied flute flutters capriciously, a cluster of breathy semitones in quick and erratic succession emanating from a small ring of speakers. The sampled sound is near-identical to that which soon emerges from Cat Hope’s live instrument: the visible, human flutist and the phantom digital one chase each other through the air, dashing among a scant selection of pitches. Stuart James joins on snare drum, creating ashen textures with brushes, and while there is no clear musical dialogue between the percussive and melodic parts, there is a certain formless beauty to the amalgam. The piece concludes with a sustained high pitch, and the projectionist takes his cue to begin. The film gurgles its way to life. ‘Mothlight’ the film was made without a camera, and comprises moth wings, flower petals and other found objects pressed between two layers of mylar film. Red-brown detritus flashes across the screen with a grotesque poetry. All the while, the hum, rattle and croak of the old projector can be heard, providing an inadvertent but inextricable soundtrack – one which we would normally tune out, but which seems to be afforded fresh dignity and importance in light of the performance.

The next piece is a joint effort from decibel members Lindsay Vickery and Cat Hope. Called ‘The Talking Board,’ it employs a peculiar and rather fun form of notation. Each performer (there are four) is assigned a coloured circle, which appears projected onto the large screen at the stage’s rear. The circles move across a huge map of lines and collaged images, modulating in size, eliciting sounds from their corresponding musicians when they pass over pictorial forms. If I wanted to be unforgivably crude I could liken the technique to, say, Guitar Hero. Sound is produced not according to any consciousness of rhythm or notes, but rather by responding to pairings of objects on a screen. Of course, there’s a little more to what’s on this screen – including images that pay tribute to Franz Liszt, who’s 200 years old this year (happy birthday mate). Nevertheless, ‘The Talking Board’ is reminiscent of video games, exploring a playful but thought-provoking approach to notation and chance performance.

Soon we encounter Samuel Dunscombe’s ‘West Park,’ which is named after an abandoned mental hospital in London. Like Cat Hope’s ‘Kuklinski’s Dream,’ referencing a serial killer and performed on carving knives at their Pretty Things concert, ‘West Park,’ once again betrays Decibel’s penchant for the eerie and the macabre. And, as per all Decibel shows, we experience the genuine synthesis of live acoustic instrumentation and electronic manipulation: here, Hope and Vickery’s woodwind work is sliced into fractured chunks of sound, converted to an image for them to re-interpret, and recordings of rehearsals played as musical ghosts over the speakers. Crucially, the relationship between the live sounds and electronica is not superficial or gratuitous – it’s an ongoing reciprocity.

That reciprocity extends even more clearly to the visual realm in Kynan Tan’s Split Mirror Planes, a work commissioned for decibel and written by the young Perth composer this year. The title nicely poeticizes a curiosity of the piece: while there are distinctive audio and visual elements throughout, their connections are mysterious. We know they are linked, but the relationship is cryptic – one can’t readily identify what sounds trigger which imagery, and assumptions about visual signifiers of particular sorts of sounds are turned on their head. Nevertheless, it’s a beguiling rather than frustrating work – the stark and haunting soundscape, performed on cello, bass flute, bass clarinet, and percussion, is a poignant counterpoint to the otherwordly psychedelic auroras that traverse computer screens in an enigmatic choreography.

Post-interval, a single piece comprises the show’s second half. This is Marina Rosenfeld’s WHITE LINES. The basic premise of the work is simple. The piece grows from a visual stimulus: superimposed over film and animated footage are two white lines, that vary in two ways – in width, and in opacity. These variations occur constantly and with seeming randomness; performers then respond to the changes. The intrigue arises from the ways in which they do so: the musical parameters which the lines control change from one performance to the next, and depend upon which instruments are on hand. Stringed instruments here seem to swell and adopt various timbres according to the appearance of the lines. Turntables (guest-performed by Rosenfeld herself), woodwind and percussion get in on the action too (an intense drum solo performed by Stuart James, in real-time response to the lines being projected over footage of some hair metal band, proves one of the night’s highlights). At first I feel that the footage projected behind the white lines is uncalled for – a distraction, an aesthetic addition inserted to add visual interest in case audiences get bored. But upon the piece’s completion it seems apt: the constantly shifting and seemingly irrelevant visuals (flowers, aforementioned glam rockers, clouds, blocks of colour) emphasize that despite the piece’s endless malleability and unpredictability, there will always be a constant: those two mighty, imposing white lines, creating a beautifully simple thread of continuity as the piece mutates over the years from one concert to the next.

Despite being visually driven, ‘Camera Obscura’ was overall more visually – and perhaps sonically, too – reserved than its predecessor, ‘Pretty Things.’ But ‘Pretty Things’ featured some ostentatious moves (destroying a piano, punching meat), tonight’s performance was no less daring in its creative explorations. The camera may have contributed to an age of mass image reproduction, coinciding with pop music’s burgeoning obsession with repetition and formula. But decibel seem intent on never repeating themselves, constantly investigating new territory, with an ongoing focus on electro-acoustic fusion and unconventional techniques. Sights and sounds may be joined at the hip, but as always, Decibel spurred us this evening to observe that relationship in a fresh, illuminating way.