Static Change-Day Two

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static change: exploring "nature" and "culture" through sound.

Before describing what our sound installation is about, it is probably useful to briefly tell you what it is NOT about. The purpose of this piece is not to create music that is necessarily recognizable or enjoyable, or to offer a piece that can be consumed through easy spectatorship. This might sound confrontational or difficult, but it is not meant to. This piece is not meant to offend anyone's musical sensibilities, or their sense of performance.

That being said, we think the sounds that we'll be creating in this piece are most certainly "music," and we think that performing them live (as opposed to having a pre-recorded installation) is essential to the experience. Using the human body as a piece of technology to mediate the sounds is key to the concept.

So what exactly is this concept that you're listening to? This sound installation is a combination of field recordings of sounds taken from all around the GTA, cut into loops and processed through computer technology, juxtaposed against more "natural" sounds. The purpose of our piece is to blur the line between the false dichotomy of "nature" and "technology" by creating a soundscape where the two become difficult to separate.

We've divided the piece into three parts:

part one (roughly 10:30am - 11:15am) - boundaries: In this section, staticky field recordings are played back and processed into subtle washes of noise as traditional percussion is simultaneously played in ways that are fairly familiar to the ear. This part of the performance builds slowly in volume and intensity.

part two (roughly 11:15am - 11:45am) - blurring: As the volume intensifies, lines begin to blur. the percussion begins to sound more and more atmospheric, playing with overtones and undertones of various intruments, while still retaining some of it's rhythmic quality. As this is happening, the washes of static from the field recordings begin to transform into something more rhythmic, with bumps and bangs emerging from the noise.

part three (roughly 11:45am - 12:30pm) - broken: In this section, roles have been reversed and the bursts of noise sound have been integrated into looping, layered patterns of rhythm. Likewise, by this point the so-called natural percussion has taken on an abstract aspect, and is sounding less and less familiar. We hope by this point that it would be hard to tell where the sounds are originating from.
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