25 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Platform Performances

release date: 22 June 2021 This episode presents interpretations of sound works I developed for participatory performances in the PLATFORM series staged at Articulate project space in Sydney’s inner-western suburb of Leichhardt. PLATFORM is a project coordinated by Tess de Quincey and curated by Tess and collaborators including Linda Luke, Marcus Whale, Martin del Amo, Eugene Ward and others. It is a salon afternoon of informal performance by artists from different disciplines including dance, theatre, visual art, ceramics, performance, sound art, and music. The pieces are carefully curated to flow together, occupying every available space within the three level gallery building, its back lane, surrounding streets and nearby urban infrastructure. At Tess’s invitation I’ve created performances and performance scores for Platform in which whoever of the other artists volunteer become the largely unrehearsed players in a sonic event involving soundings of post-consumer waste - bottles, boxes, tins, containers - from which sound is teased using breath, hand-made mallets, motions and gravity. The scores involve a simple instruction that all performers enact for a loosely predetermined period of time. For example, while walking slowly around the space, hold two small empty glass bottles and blow across the mouth of each bottle to create a tone. Listening to the other players, choose when to make a sound and how long it lasts. Continue for ten minutes. Another performance for only two people involved constructing two 4-metre long tubes from plastic water bottles. Small quartz pebbles were dropped into the top of the long hanging tubes by two performers on the first floor of the space, to rhythmically rattle down and drop into a large water-cooler bottle on the ground floor below - one filled with water, the other empty. These and my other Platform projects explore the production of sonic events through simple gestures and/or the performative application of simple instructions. My interest is to explore the intentional production of randomised sound fields that parallel those naturally produced sound fields we experience and respond to as intriguing, emotive or pleasurable, usually involving some captivating stochastic or aleatoric musicality arising, for example, from transitory natural processes or aggregations of communicating creatures. Thanks to Tess de Quincey and all the performers in the Platform series who generously enacted these works.