Happy New Year

DJ Light

DJ Light is an interactive light and sound installation. Well, it’s not interactive for all visitors; there is one person who can orchestrate the light and sound performance. Move your body and conduct the installation like an orchestra. 

The installation was created by Cinimod Studio. 85 inflatable globes shift colors according to the ‘conductor’s’ movements and a multi-directional sound system adds a field of sound to the experience. An impressive job. 

Urban Resonances

The beautiful snowy Macedonian landscape

I am currently visiting Macedonia for the Urban Resonances project. With a group of artists and teachers from the Utrecht School of Music and Technology we travel from our home base Skopje through the country for concerts and master classes at schools and faculties of music. 

The project is an initiative of the Zoey foundation for arts and culture in the Netherlands and Public Room in Macedonia. You can read more about the project at their websites: ZOEY / Public Room. 

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Five Sound Questions to Davide Tidoni

Earlier this year we looked at his A Balloon For… a Water Tower, a good illustration of how Davide Tidoni experiments with sound-space. With projects like these Davide wants to raise awareness of sound. A great mission! Learn more about him and his projects on www.davidetidoni.name.

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you? 

The soundscape coming from downstairs. In my childhood and early adolescence , my ears were constantly tuned to the spaces below my room. By listening to the soundscape beyond my walls I was able to understand the emotional atmosphere and tension level circulating among members of my family.

This sensitivity shaped my way of sensing the sonic space within the sphere of the family and, more generally, it led me to understand the production of sound as a key parameter for control of territory and the organization of social agency.

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Job Field

Right now the earth is packed with snow in the Netherlands, but this picture was taken on a sunnier day. And even without hearing it this installation the image of Job Field inspires my imagination. A group of old-style telephone horns peak out of a field. 

Each of the telephone receivers of this sound installation - created by Benoit Maubrey - announces job openings in the earea. The job openings are downloaded from the internet and played ‘live’ through the installation. 

Five Sound Questions to Alison Ballard

Alison Ballard works with sound, space and the moving image, exploring the relationships between those media.

 

“Exploring the physical effects of sound upon the listener, she looks at ways in which architecture can influence the listening experience and how spaces can be used as a tool or an instrument and not simply a setting.” 

For more information about Alison and her work, visit her website: www.alisonballard.com.

 

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you? 

As a teenager I suffered from insomnia and I used to lay awake at night listening to a nightingale sing. It returned year after year and remains today the sweetest nightingale I have ever heard. I never spoke about it at the time and I never tried to record it’s song. I never felt like it was meant to be heard as a recording, it was something that needed to be experienced first-hand.

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

At the moment I listen to the world as though it were one continual hearing test. For the last 18 months I have suffered from reduced hearing  and a feeling of pressure in my left ear caused by an allergic reaction. Whilst I can still hear within a ‘normal’ hearing range I have lost the ability to hear some lower frequencies and my ear doesn’t always respond to sounds in the way that it should. I recently went to an Alvin Lucier performance and effectively missed the whole experience because my left ear wasn’t responding to the different frequencies properly.

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Yesterday

I know, a lot of people are talking about the Beatles’ music finally being available in the iTunes store. But the concept for this sound installation was developed long before that fact. In Yesterday, 21 music boxes play the Beatles song together, but not in sync.  

The walls and the floor of the room resonate as the mixture of the Yesterday’s notes form a new composition. The makers, Evelien van den Broek and Dyane Donck created the installation as a “tribute to yesterday (the day all troubles seemed so far away)”, for the November Music Festival.

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Journal de Nîmes - The Sounds of the City

Cycling through Amsterdam in the fall might well plant the seeds for the melody of a new song in an artist’s mind. Crossing the Vondelpark, the colorful leaves of fall set the mood. They sound crispy under your bike’s tires, creating an unpolished background sound while you pedal a little slower to get the rhythm right. The sounds of the concert you visited the night before are still reverberate in you ears. They mingle with the inspiration from the colorful world around you.

To find out in which way Amsterdam inspired them musically, I asked Dutch artists: 
I - What was the most inspiring concert your attended in Amsterdam?
II - What was the nicest venue in Amsterdam you ever played yourself?

Read the answers in the new Dutch-themed issue of Journal de Nîmes. You can read the digital version on Isuu by clicking on the article above. 

Five Questions to Pablo Padilla Jargstorf

Architect, sound artist and composer Pablo Padilla Jargstorf specializes in the field of soundscape. We had a look at his Visual Soundscapes before, but being an architect, he also works with space in his installations. 

Have a look at his website to learn more about Pablo and his projects: www.jargstorf.com. Here are his answers to the five sound questions: 

1. What sound from your childhood made the most impression on you?

Plenty of them. But I remember, when I was five or six, in my garden, I had a very intense experience. A very strong feeling, something uncanny. It was silence.

2. How do you listen to the world around you?

In two ways. As as a wanderer, I don’t like to perceive sound separately. It is a part of a complete scene, of a whole sensual environment. We have to understand sound with its colours, textures, smells, temperature…

As an artist, I like to observe the capacity of expression of every single sound, and, most of all, its potential of creating a different world by its disfiguration.

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186 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes

Another wonderful installation by Zimoun, this time created using 186 prepared dc-motors, cardboard boxes 60x60x60cm, apparently this is also the title of this sound installation. The audience can use their imagination.

If you have not done so already, be sure to also read Zimoun’s answers to the Five Sound Questions, and while you’re at it, the included video gives a nice overview of his work. His work can be seen at upcoming events in Venezuela, Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

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