cinema of noise

ENCOUNTERS WITH NOISE IN THE DARK: Sound and Moving Image [2016-2020]

Encounters with Noise in the Dark #15: Scale as Spectacle [October 2020]

Watching Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962) at the BFI yesterday - my first cinema visit since February - I realised that what I’ve been missing isn’t the sense of communal experience or “mass intimacy” (though I crave and value this), but the experience of scale; the experience of watching and listening to movies in a large space, on a big screen with sound vibrating in a big room. Movies are made to be big, to stand over and above us like buildings. For me the visual poetry of a movie like L’Eclisse is only really felt when the eye is free to roam across the big screen, exploring the complexity of each shot.

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #14 Image, Sound, Time: Japón [October 2019]

When I saw his [Tarkovsky's] films I realised that emotion could come directly out of the sound and the image and not necessarily from the story telling. - Carlos Reygadas

I believe pretty pictures alone don’t make interesting films. Carlos Reygadas’ debut feature film Japón [2002] successfully proves the point that what we hear greatly shapes how we see the world. Sound and image remain inextricably bound together through the audiovisual contract of modern filmmaking.

Like the film’s protagonist who chooses to colour his surroundings with his own private headphone-driven soundtrack, what one hears always helps establish the mood of the world. Sound magnetises the imagery of cinema, provoking attention and curiousity. Music does something else. It commonly functions to elevate the emotional and spiritual dimension of the images, as is the case in the final climatic sequence of Japón.

The influence here of Bresson and Tarkovsky on the young Mexican filmmaker is no doubt felt. Both of these directors created a unique audiovisual language that foregrounded the everyday sounds of the world. Reygadas likewise is clearly confident in letting his own image and sounds evoke the appropriate poetic atmosphere suited to his film.

Yet while sounds may indeed affect the way we read images, film remains a visually-led, image-first medium. What we hear and how we perform our hearing is ultimately shaped by what the filmmaker chooses to show or conceal from us. This is achieved through choices of camera framing, visual composition, movement, choreography and mise-en-scène. In this way our listening only ever begins with what we first experience with our eyes. And what we see is always framed through time; a container for sound, the emergence of an audible world and the invitation to attend to it.

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #13 Christian Marclay and Bill Viola - Two approaches to the concept of time [February 2019]

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all” - John Cage

From September through to January 2019, the Tate Modern gallery was home to Christian Marclay’s acclaimed installation piece The Clock [2010]. Consisting of thousands of film and television clips of clocks, this epic 24-hour video montage runs on a continuous loop synchronised with real time. Though missing out on the opportunity to gorge at one of the gallery’s selected 24-hour screenings, I did manage to make two trips to see the piece, taking in the hours 10:30 though to 14:30.

At the end of January this year as The Clock drew to a close, across the river at the Royal Academy preparations were nearing completion on a new show titled Life Death Rebirth. An exhibition bringing together the video work of Bill Viola and the drawings of Michelangelo. Though working centuries apart, these two artists express a fascination for a similar set of grand, universal themes - the human condition, the body, soul, death and the afterlife. The exhibition opened in late-January and runs till the end of March.

The first thing that struck me with Marclay’s piece was the surreal playback space. A huge room donned with sofa seats arranged at periodic intervals, orderly, grid-like. I imagined a more conventional, sprawling affair with punters hanging on the edges of a few narrow wooden benches, standing around looking tired or propped up on the floor against a wall. The space created for the piece had none of the atmosphere I would normally expect to encounter in a contemporary art setting. Instead the comfortable sofas invited the spectator to hang out, nap, snooze and enjoy as much of the work as possible.

The viewing experience itself was entertaining and fun. I found my perception gradually shifting as time ticked by; discrete video clips from different times and places slowly unified, forming a kind of emerging mega-narrative that grew in tension and energy as each climatic hour approached. What began like abrupt shifts between different blocks of picture and sound, would steadily be transformed into a continuous experience of film drama. The cohesion here often seemed to be achieved through the mixing of one video clip’s soundtrack into another. Sound might precede the incoming image, arrive afterwards or hard cut synchronously with the picture. During my second viewing the pleasure and fun I first experienced drifted away somewhat. This was replaced with a throbbing awareness of our everyday slavery to clock-time. Modern life: incessant, relentless, agitated, forever ticking towards the next waiting hour.

I recently visited the Bill Viola-Michelangelo exhibition. “Time makes my art possible” says Viola, defining his work as “Sculpting time”. Viola, like Andrei Tarkovsky (who published a beautiful book called Sculpting in Time) shares an interest in film as a medium capable of capturing the minutiae of unfolding time. Where Tarkovsky deploys the carefully choreographed long-take, Viola utilises super slow-motion, overlaying images and reverse techniques. Things develop slowly in a Bill Viola work. A process gradually unfolding steadily culminates in a climatic point of contact, a release of sudden, violent energy. We wait, anticipating the moment we know will arrive.

The comparison with Tarkovsky is a fruitful one to explore. Water, wind and fire feature throughout the films of both artists. These elemental forces suggest an ongoing meditation on life and death, creating a sustained atmosphere of reverence and spiritual contemplation. This is achieved as much through sound as it is with the striking cinematography. Unlike many video artists exploring sound, Viola, through his own particular audiovisual language, is able to not only overcome the challenges of exhibiting in a reverberant art gallery, but actually allow the acoustics of the space to enhance the work. Gallery rooms are turned into resonant chambers as low subterranean murmurings swarm around the space [Five Angels for the Millennium, 2001], or complex masses of water fill the room with an incessant, overwhelming rapture of noise [Tristan’s Ascension, 2005]. As Viola writes, these are “total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound”, what the French novelist Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud described as that “oceanic feeling” - one’s wholeness with the cosmos, infinite time, source of all religious energy.

Image [Top]: The Clock [2010] - Christian Marclay. Source: Evening Standard
Image [Bottom]: Three videos from Five Angels for the Millennium, 2001] - Bill Viola. Source: newmedia-art.org

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #12 Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War [October 2018]

I think it's a mistake to consider Oscar-winning Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski's 2018 film Cold War merely a love story. For me it is a story about love and history and Poland and cultural identity, but more than that I think it's a film about music. The act of listening and performing.

Set in Cold War Europe, the drama of the film's central love story is framed around a number of memorable performance sequences, often shot in one continuous take. The film opens with beautifully abrasive sonic energy; two village men, one with bagpipes and the other armed with a violin, play out a raw, thunderous tune of the country. Wiktor, our central male character, is shown visiting rural communities to record and transcribe their local music traditions. The film progresses through a series of energetic song and dance performance routines.

Hard picture cuts, often led through sound or music, throw the film forward into new performance sequences teeming with energy and life. We move through time rapidly, jumping to different locations, never sticking around in one place to long. Conversations are brief, transitions between places fleeting. The experience is like watching a series of separate episodes rather than a story with a continuous narrative arch. The film also lacks a certain conventional psychological perspective. The director denies us the close proximity that sets up an obvious mood of pathos, so typical in mainstream filmmaking. Instead there is a certain dettachment, a feeling of distance from the two main characters. This is achieved, like in his previous film Ida [2013], by often positioning the two main characters low and off-centre in the frame. This kind of composition has the interesting effect of flattening the image, helping to present the individual within their environment. The overall effect of this style together with the film’s rapid movement of time and character development suggests a wider story at play: Wiktor and Zula's struggles are one among many. Theirs is the challenge of migration, identity and cultural assimilation that so many people like them experienced in the post-war era.

In one of the film's most memorable sequences Wiktor and Zula are shown performing together in a Paris jazz club. The scene opens on a close-up of the saxophone player. The camera then gradually manoeuvres around the stage, slowly introducing other members of the jazz band before revealing Wiktor at the piano, Zula singing in the foreground and beyond her the late-night listeners of 'L'eclipse' - the Parisian club featured throughout the film. There is an incredible intimacy presented in this scene (felt in fact throughout the film), between stage and audience, performer and listener - unique and special I think to music and its performance. This I think is Pawlikowski's greatest contribution; the magic of musical performance rendered as poetic cinema.

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #11 Michelangelo Antonioni [July 2018]

I have always opposed the traditional musical commentary, the soporific function ordinarily assigned to it. It's this idea of 'setting images to music', as if it were a question of an opera libretto, that I don't like. What I reject is this refusal to let silence have its place, this needs to fill supposed voids. [M. Antonioni, Cinema 65 100, November 1965. Originally translated in L’avventura. A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969]

Strikingly innovative and challenging for their time, Antonioni's films of the 1960s and 1970s favour a poetics of atmosphere and place over conventional narrative. While much has been written about the directors bold visual style, a brief look at the literature would suggest much less space has been dedicated to an examination of his work with sound and music. I recently revisited a number of Antonioni films of this period - L'Avventura [1960], La Notte [1961], L'Eclisse [1962], Il Deserto Rosso [1964] and The Passenger [1975] - to briefly explore how he used sound in his work.

It is tempting to consider these films as naturalistic in style. Everything seemingly looks and sounds as something familiar to our everyday experience of reality. But film is artifice. These are heavily constructed images and sounds. Each element has been carefully selected and edited to form a sequence expressing a uniquely cinematic world of the directors making. Like Bresson and later Tarkovsky, Antonioni was fully aware of the need to control all the filmic elements; sound as much as picture. Reality is a cacophony and must be tamed, to paraphrase Bresson. While at the time modern developments in magnetic tape technology and portable Nagra recorders facilitated a greater use of location sound (e.g. sound effects sourced on location), it still was the task of the post-production sound engineers working closely with the director to shape this material into a cohesive, highly organised soundtrack.

At all times we hear what the director intends us to hear. And what the director intends us to hear or even nudge us forward to listen to (consider Pauline Oliveros' concept of Deep Listening in the context of film), is provoked by the camera. This is achieved through careful visual composition, framing, mise-en-scène, the rhythm and pace of picture edits and perhaps most strikingly, through the long-take (see comments on The Passenger below). Ultimately, in the form of the finished work, the sonic domain is not abstracted from the visual domain. The two work in tandem to form a synthesis of sound and image - Antonioni's audiovisual poetics.

I believe that many great sounding films are made first on paper and then brought into being by a great director. Someone who understands the multisensory dimension of human perception, cognition and emotion. Film in their hands is a constructed lie, no doubt (a seemingly familiar everyday reality and yet something wholly unnaturalistic) but a poetic lie towards truth. Therein lies the magic.

Between wonder and despair: Monica Viiti as Vittoria in L'Eclisse [1962] encounters a row of metal flag poles rattling in the wind. This night time sequence for me has a dream-like quality that feels both alluring and yet deeply disturbing. It unfolds as a kind of magical encounter; a random moment of clarity amidst the mundane minutia of everyday life . At the same time there's a sense of psychological discord and tension as we witness Vittoria's diminutive figure drawn to this row of tall, impersonal metal poles.

Ever enlightening on all matters of film and sound, Michel Chion describes Antonioni as "one of the directors most skilled in allowing us to hear the sound of life itself". I very much like this quote and often apply it to aspects of the audiovisual experience that I most enjoy in film: namely, that a cinematic work may compel us to listen to the world of the film, and beyond. There are many examples in Antonioni's work where one feels drawn in this way towards the sound of the world. Vittoria's night time encounter with the flag poles in L'Eclisse [1962] is perhaps one of the strangest moments, while the 7-minute long tracking shot at the end of The Passenger [1975] feels like one of the most immersive experiences of sound to be found in Antonioni's oeuvre. 

The penultimate shot in The Passenger [1975]: A seven-minute long tracking shot that moves from Lock's hotel room, through the iron railings and outside into the road, before returning back to the hotel. As with the use of the long take by directors like Tarkovsky, time here acts as a container for sound; the emergence of an uninterrupted audible world and the invitation to attend to it as an active listener. Time articulated through what is seen, heard and subsequently felt; the framing, composition and movement of the camera. Wind, voices, car engines, distant music, birds, footsteps on gravel, all precise sonic elements organised into a cohesive soundtrack, that still have the semblance of a ‘symphony of the sound of life’ in which ‘the rhythmic cadence is not predictable, there is no search for a rhyme’ (Chion).

It's interesting to consider this particular sequence in relation to Andrei Tarkovsky's own use of the long-take in works like The Mirror [1975], Stalker [1979] and The Sacrifice [1986]. How much was Tarkovsky influenced by Antonioni and to what extent did this slow, carefully choreographed visual style inform how he used sound and music in his own films? Without cutting into time or space the long-take gradually reveals the field of activity, both onscreen and offscreen, which the camera inhabits. The field in which the ecology of sound is granted audibility, expressed as the 'symphony of the sound of life' (Chion). 

There are moments in Antonioni's films where one feels forced rather than gently invited or drawn in as a listener into a field of sonic activity. A cacophony that feels oppressively present, assaulting the inhabitants of a place and confusing all spatial orientation. A noise pollution, if you like, flattening the potential for hi-fidelity in the soundscape (See R.Murray Schaefer). We find this in the incessant chatter and background party banter of La Notte [1961], acting as an impersonal, all-enveloping force that amplifies Lidia's (Jeanne Moreau) growing sense of alienation. We find a stronger variety of this in the chaotic scenes of the Rome stock exchange in L'Eclisse [1962]. Here the air is filled with the incessant noise of the economy; cartoon gestures and voices cry out in a theatre of absurd spectacle as the stock market crashes. Elsewhere in Il Deserto Rosso [1964] the otherwordly sounds of Vittorio Gelmetti's opening electronic score give way to a chorus of industrial noises. Generators, hums, hissing steam, electrical devices and all manner of man-made noises screech out across the landscape. A new industrial soundtrack to the malaise of modernity and the individual. 

Addressing the concerns of the modern world, Michelangelo Antonioni was a poet and painter of sound and image. He helped forge a new cinematic language that was later taken up by the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr. These directors prove that cinema need not pander to those seeking easy answers to the perplexing questions of life.

For a more detailed examination of Antonioni's soundworld, check out Roberto Calabretto's excellent article: The Soundscape in Michelangelo Antonioni's Cinema
Michel Chion quotes: Le sonorità del visibile. Immagini, suoni e musica nel cinema di Michelangelo Antonioni, M. Chion, 1999

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #10 Robert Bresson [April 2018]

I'd rather people feel a film before understanding it [R. Bresson]

Robert Bresson operated in a cinematographic world of his own making. He said in a 1960 interview: “I’m trying to speak cinema in a language all its own”. For over 30-years he occupied a unique place in world cinema, boldly defying the conventions of modern filmmaking. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his widely-documented approach to working with actors, or rather ‘models’ as he later described them. Rejecting the standard style of dramatic, projected performance that he saw cinema had mistakenly inherited from the theatre world (“I refuse to get dragged into making filmed theatre”), Bresson favoured an approach to working with actors aimed at tapping into their own particular inner world. He cast non-professional actors (“less self-conscious, more naive, more straight-forward”) and, through controlled improvisation and repetitive takes, attempted to tease out a naturalism of performance that radically departed from the style common in mainstream film. Bresson’s oeuvre remains to this day utterly unique; a language spoken by him alone.

His work is the very definition of precision. You get the sense watching his films that every cut, every gesture, every sound is full of absolute intention. Each and every element of the audiovisual experience feels precisely placed - what he wants us to look at or listen to. We pour similar plaudits on other filmmakers who command their own particular language, but in Bresson this clarity of precision, this intention feels radically focused; a style of filmmaking concerned strictly with the essentials. Perhaps it’s this austere compactness of expression that leads even the most ardent cinephile to feel a certain discomfort with his work.

Bresson uses music sparingly, in what he described as moments of transformation, “adding a value and significance to the images that they do not have on their own”. Yet even this selective approach gradually changed over time as his sonic language evolved into one consisting entirely of noises. More than the emotive effect of music, what concerned Bresson was the relationship formed between sound and image to produce the rhythm of a scene and the form of the film. Re-recorded foley elements (notably footsteps) together with post-synchronised dubbing replaced much of the cacophony of location sound, affording him greater focus and control in post-production.

Offscreen sound effects are used to achieve a convincing sense of time and space that characters inhabit - the sound of passing traffic heard from within Michel’s apartment in Pickpocket [1959] or the distant footsteps and doors famously in A Man Escaped [1956]. More interesting however is the use of sound in place of the image: “If it’s possible to replace an image by one of more sounds, you should do it without hesitation. In essence: aim for the audience’s ear more than for its eye. The ear is far more creative than the eye.” In Pickpocket [1959] our eyes remain fixed on Michel, closely watching him as he carries out the theft. But somewhere beyond in his field of vision we hear the sound of a race track; the swelling of running horses and crowd noises. Through the relationship he establishes between sound and image Bresson eloquently tells us where we are, what’s happening and crucially what we the audience are to attend to. Throughout Mouchette [1967] we hear the noise of passing trucks, marking off the passing of time as cases of alcohol are delivered to the provincial towns of France. There are also curious passages in which Bresson uses sound to heighten the emotional atmosphere. In the sublime Au Hasard Balthazar [1966] the death of Arnold, collapsing alone on a country road at the dead of night, is solemnly marked by the sound of a distant car engine. Or in Pickpocket [1959], where busy crowd scenes - metro stations, city walkways, bars - possess a strange stillness; a noticeable absence of background chatter and ambient noise that we might expect. Instead our ears are drawn to the sound of footsteps, doors, the steady rhythms of passing traffic. The experience is unusual but no less compelling.

And what of the use of voice-over in the films Diary of a Country Priest [1951], A Man Escaped [1956] and Pickpocket [1959], why so detached? Why in general does the voice in Bresson’s films so lack emotional projection? “My characters borrow a tone that is neither of the theatre, nor of ordinary films, nor exactly of life, although it is very close. I surprised myself one day by saying to one of my performers: Speak as if you’re talking to yourself. The point of this was only to emphasise the movement from the exterior toward the interior that I understand to be the central movement of cinematography, an inverse movement from that of theatre (from interior to exterior).”

In Bresson we encounter a world of precisely executed, poetic gestures that, when strung together form an emotional atmosphere. Like Andrei Tarkovsky his audiovisual language is uniquely his own; a direct influence, among many, on Michel Haneke who some 30-years later echoes Bresson: “…with an image, you cut the imagination short. With an image, you see what you see and its ‘reality’. With sound, just like words, you incite the imagination. And that’s why for me it’s always more efficient, if I want to touch someone emotionally, to use sound rather than image.” The Bresson experience is like no other. It returns me to the world with a strange hypersensitivity to sound and gesture. Every footstep, every door handle, every gentle contact radiates with a profound sense of hidden meaning. For a short time I feel like one of Bresson’s models, absentmindedly being in the world of all things.

All interview quotes from: Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #9 Ingmar Bergman [January 2018]

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. [The Magic Lantern, 1988]

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to revisit a number of Bergman films on the big screen. These have been included in the extensive Ingmar Bergman retrospective currently taking place at BFI Southbank in London, part of the worldwide centenary celebrations of the Swedish director. My cinema outings have including Persona [1966], Hour of the Wolf [1968], Cries and Whispers [1972], Fanny and Alexander [1982] as well as lesser known television works like Scenes from a Marriage [1973] and Face to Face [1976]. These experiences have confirmed to me Bergman’s status as one of the greatest artists of the last century. I consider the depth of his probing examination into human psychology to be on a par with some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 200-years; a hugely significant, timeless body of work that offers insight, hope and ultimately guidance in these divisive times.

In the realm of all things sound and music, it is Bergman's films of the 1960s and 1970s that most interest me. A period marked by an intriging absence of conventional score. Gone are the orchestral strings of the earlier period. In their place emerges a more fragmented, modernist sound. Dynamic and atmospheric, the music of this period shifts between a sense of quiet atmosphere and violent atonal drama. This change in musical language, its subtle hues of expression, for me makes sense given the increasing intensity of psychological drama developing in Bergman's work. While films like Persona [1966] and Hour of the Wolf [1968] employ a bold contemporary sound, works scattered throughout this period tend to make sparing use of musical accompaniment, if at all. Instead what we hear are soundtracks composed almost entirely of location sound and studio sound effects.

The effect of less music significantly alters the way we attend to the films. I believe it pulls us closer to the actuality of the drama, re-enforcing the tactile presence of the world. Bergman time and again demonstrates his mastery of the close-up, not only with what we see (the details of the human face) but also with what we hear (the sounds of the body). At the same time a new layer of environmental sound is free to be heard. A character in its own right, these worldly sounds strengthen the atmosphere and tone of the film helping to situate the story in a specific time and place. In this way a kind of Bergman-esque soundtrack emerges consisting of particular sounds and sonic ideas identifiable in a number of his films from this period. Owe Svensson, sound supervisor on much of Bergman's work of the 1970s and 80s, would later go on to achieve the apotheosis of this cinematic expression in Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice [1986]. A soundtrack of precisely orchestrated noises and diegetic music, lingering between different planes of reality.

For further information see The Bergman Suite page.

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #8 Ben Russell and the Psychedelic Ethnography [2018]

Tate Modern, Starr Cinema, Feb 7th

Ben Russell's latest film Good Luck [2017] is a deeply immersive audiovisual trip. A quasi-documentary on the horrors and environmental destruction of the mining process, this piece demands a big-screen experience to fully appreciate the totality of it's physical audiovisual force. Sensory overload for a distracted age.

The Psychedelic: An understanding of the self through a subjective experience.

The Ethnographic: An understanding of the self through an objective record of someone that is not the self.

My particular interest in Subject comes out of an interest in trance which I connect through noise music or experimental music but also Christian Ska bands and laying-on of hands or in different contexts we have something like the whirling dervishes, Indonesian self-flagellating rituals, the Yanomami Indians who use hallucinogenic snuff to produce shamanic rituals [...] this idea of the trance ritual is something we find across the world; its incarnation is specific to culture but its manifestation is universal.

- Ben Russell [Sonic Acts Feb 2017, Source here].

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #7 Film Sound and the concern for Fidelity [2017]

The hi-fi soundscape is one in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of the low ambient noise level … In the hi-fi soundscape, sounds overlap less frequently; there is perspective – foreground and background … In a low-fi soundscape individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdense population of sounds … Perspective is lost … there is no distance; only presence. There is cross-talk on all the channels, and in order for the most ordinary sounds to be heard they have to be increasingly amplified. (R. Murray Schaefer, Tuning of the World. p. 43)

Fidelity:

1. Strict observance of promises, duties, etc.:
2. Loyalty: fidelity to one's country.
3. Conjugal faithfulness.
4. Adherence to fact or detail.
5. Accuracy; exactness:
6. Audio, Video. the degree of accuracy with which sound or images are recorded or reproduced.
 

Andrei's principle was - and he told me from the start that during filming, his focus is always on the picture, while the sound comes later. I agreed with this completely but the producer asked that I still record usable sound on location, but when we arrived on the Swedish island Gotland, the set was built in a bird sanctuary - in the month of May, when all of Swedish fauna is breeding right there and the noise is overwhelming - it defies description. You could not use the sound from there. 

During shooting,Tarkovski told me in passing: "You know, Owe, in the end we must hear no birds" And I thought to myself: "OK, fair enough".  I knew I was wasting my time but I still wanted good location sound for post-synchronization purposes.  (Interview with Owe Svensson, The School of Sound Seminar, http://filmsound.org/owesvensson/)

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #6 Some thoughts on sound, world and understanding [2017]

"Any understanding has its being in an act of understanding" (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p.118-19)

Alan Lamb is a sound artist and scientist who for the past 30-years has been exploring the vibrating properties of long telegraph wires. I recently acquired a copy of his Primal Image release from 1995 that captures the beautifully evolving textures of long wires in Australia. His engagement with the physical world seems to me to nourish a fascination for the mystery of sound in nature, that invigorates his scientific and artistic activities with purpose and meaning. This spirit clearly comes across in this excerpt from a 2016 BBC Radio 4 documentary with sound recordist Christ Watson:

Primal Image is a stunning set of recordings that documents only a small portion of Lamb's ongoing sonic explorations. Aside from the sheer beauty of the listening experience, what greatly interests me with Lamb is how he encounters the world through sound. How the world is disclosed through his engagement with it in his particular practice.

Jerry Thompson worked as Walker Evans' principal assistant from 1973 to Evans' death in 1975. In 2016 he released a small book called Why Photography Matters. The following few extracts are striking in that they are applicable to sound and sound recording technology:

"Fox Talbot, and the cohort including Evans and Cartier-Bresson seven decades later, proposed a new kind of epistemology, a new, hitherto impossible way of learning about the world [...] The opposite of Mathema (a model projected to enable understanding), Pathema is an experience passively received: acquiescence to what is seen [...] When a pathema holds sway, the artist will no longer be Master of the Universe. He or she will be instead an attentive observer, a willing participant in, perhaps a servant of, a system larger than that artist's individual, personal, particular needs." (Jerry L. Thompson, Why Photography Matters, p.14-15)

Thompson goes on to speak about how photography is "at its best" when the inner world of the artist and the outer world of the material environment exists in balance, cooperating as in a dialectic: "one side presents a proposition, the other counters in a similar fashion, and on and on as a progressively refined result appears, something neither partner in the dialectic could have produced alone" (p.19).

Sound is an expression of space, of the physical world we are thrown into. It remains, as Lamb's work demonstrates, an expression of mystery and reverence for all that surrounds us. Bringing together Thompson's description of photography and Lamb's deep sound activities, we remind ourselves of the kind of meaning and value in work that emerges through our engagement with and in the world. A world not only made from nature, but one populated by people and all their social and creative affairs.

Often physically isolated from others in our expanding global village it's easy to neglect the importance of our worldly engagements. While convenience makes economic sense, it can at the same time weaken the sacrifice and so diminish the meaning. Consider recorded sound as one example: Commercial sound libraries provide sound editors access to a vast array of high quality recordings from around the world. Together with computer software, these sounds can be selected, edited and arranged to create a working soundtrack, quickly. In our anxious haste, we demote sound to the status of mere fodder. Reduced to pure utility, all preciousness is gone. All worldly engagement removed and understanding denied. This couldn't be further from the deep practices of Alan Lamb.

As practitioners of sound, passionate about all its forms and modes of sonic and musical expression, we would do well to listen to what Lamb's work teaches us about the world and the potential for our involved engagement in it. If nothing else, a trip outside every once in a while is always a good thing.

Further information about Alan Lamb: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s873159.htm

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #5 Battle of Algiers [2017]

I recently re-watched Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 classic The Battle of Algiers. Much of the visceral power of the film lies in the soundtrack. Not only in Morricone's expressive score but through the use of sound recordings to evoke everyday life in the casbah. Crowds, markets, vehicles, public address announcements, mosques, prayers, the harbour atmosphere - an endless texture of noise and human activity. While the increasing presence of the French military is marked by the sounds of marches, military vehicles, gunfire and explosions.

In the films penultimate protest sequence, the soundtrack erupts in a cacophony of treated crowd noise, distorted effects and female ululations before Morricone's drumming theme gradually returns. The overall effect is breathtaking; a masterpiece in audio-visual storytelling.

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #4 Interaction [2017]

Last year I saw some fascinating video work at the INFINITE MIX exhibition in London. Many of the pieces used multiple screens and loudspeakers, allowing the audience to construct their own viewing-listening experience. Will the fixed, single screen experience of traditional cinema one day be a thing of the past? Possible futures: (1.) Virtual Reality - long-form, embodied user-defined experience (2.) Installation, video performance spaces - short-form, immersive, multiple audiovisual projection. Crucial to the success of the exhibition was how each work occupied its own specific space. Entering into each room I could fully immerse myself in the work, much like in a cinema. And yet the relatively short length of each piece created a kind of festive, social atmosphere with people coming and going in a relaxed and enjoyable manner. It reminded me those wonderful all-night Wayang Kulit (shadow puppetry) performances that I used to enjoy in Java. Like the INFINITE MIX exhibition the occasion allows more social intermingling, more ambient aswell as focused modes of engagement with the work. These communal experiences to me feel far removed from the European classical conventions of a stage and an obedient, motionless audience.

Throughout the night the audience comes and goes, engaging with the performance in different ways from different perspectives. Food stalls are often setup nearby, and the general ebb and flow of human activity mingles with the sounds of the gamelan and the flickering display of shadows. Performances of all kinds in Java and Bali always felt first and foremost like an occasion to celebrate community. Musicologist Christopher Small expressed these ideas through his concept of Musicking.

"The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world." [Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, 1998]

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #3 Peter Tscherkassky [2016-2017]

Commercial film production values seem to demand a kind of maximum closeness. Every image and sound sparkles with reassuring clarity and sharpness. In post-production dialogue editors surgically remove all undesirable elements from the production sound. Clicks, pops, lip-smacks, microphone bumps, passing planes, belly growls, all such extraneous sounds are suitably air-brushed out to create an intelligible, clean dialogue track. Careful balancing of levels and use of background fill tracks help to stitch together picture cuts, smoothly unifying the action in time and space. At every such stage throughout the post-production sound process, clarity and consistency is sought towards the creation of a coherent, unified soundtrack - a highly organised composition of sounds often serving a narrative arc.

Filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky presents an altogether different kind of audiovisual experience. A central figure in the Austrian avant-grade, Tscherkassky has been making films since the early 1980s. Often using found 35mm footage as his source material, he constructs densely layered textures through extensive editing, celluloid maltreatment and film processing from his dark studio in the remote Austrian countryside. Out of these long seasons of labour emerge films of incredible beauty; twisting, repeating and fragmenting found narratives into new and unusual compositions. From the outset he writes, “I wanted to unravel and dissolve the medium, “destroy” is not the right expression, but, yes, some type of “breaking”, and in breaking, allowing something else to become visible”.

While much of the final marrying and inter-editing of image and sound may lie with Tscherkassky, many of the soundtracks to his films are created in collaboration with others. Iranian composer Kiavasch Sahebnassagh offers a mysterious and eerie score for Dreamwork (2001), while Armin Schmickl is credited for the sound collages in the Parallel Space: Inter-view (1992). Where sound and music begin and end remains part of the mysterious fascination of the Tscherkassky experience, such is the dense intermingling of signal and noise, each undergoing seemingly endlessly iterations of maltreatment and processing. Berlin-based composer/sound designer Dirk Schaefer is responsible for the richly layered soundtracks of the more recent body of work - Instructions for a light and sound machine (2005), Coming Attractions (2010) and The Exquisite Corpus (2016). Frequently working with German filmmaker Matthias Muller, Schaefer has been composing sound for experimental films since the late 1980s. He writes to me saying: “Collaborating with artists who usually conceive their films in a purely visual form, I am used to work on films that are complete in any regard but one, and that’s the sound track worthy of the name, and to do it more or less on my own.”

Unravelling through the kaleidoscopic imagery I find myself drawn to the sound-world of Tscherkassky’s films. Soundtracks of volcanic surfaces; the delicious crackle and hiss of film, like the turntable escapades of Christian Marclay or Otomo Yoshihide. What we hear are the raw optical distortions of the medium itself, breaking up and contorting into new sonic shapes. From within these granular nettles emerge fragments of original soundtrack - grainy voices and snatches of music, footsteps, sounds of doors, broken glass and gunshots. These ghostly sounds of the past surface and resurface through a sea of optical clicks and pops, sometimes drifting into the foreground or repeating in time with the images. Elsewhere they erupt in violent bursts, building into chaotic layers of percussive noise. Like the extensive optical treatment, the soundtracks throughout retain and yet mysteriously expand the residue of the medium - a joyful cinema of noise.

More information: www.tscherkassky.at

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #2 Walter Ruttmann [2016]

"Everything audible from all over the world becomes material" - Ruttmann, Film Kurier, 1929

Walter Ruttmann [1897-1941] was a German filmmaker best known perhaps for his 1927 city symphony film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. Three years later he created Weekend, an image-less experimental film using sounds he recorded around Berlin.

Encounters with Noise in the Dark: #1 Andrei Tarkovsky [2016]

Wow. Andrei Tarkovsky's films have been digitally remastered, and a major retrospective of his work is currently underway across the UK. Tarkovsky is up there as one of the great directors who was willing to explore cinema as a truly audiovisual experience. Something in sound itself I think, that helped serve his metaphysical and spiritual line of enquiry - "sound's potential for ambiguity and abstraction [...] allowing a sound source to remain a figment of our imagination, mystifying rather than orienting" (And Then There Was Sound: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, 1992, Andrea Truppin).

This is the railway cart ride into The Zone. A four-minute sequence near the beginning of the film showing the three main characters riding a small motorised railway cart into the zone. The scene consists of four shots that slowly drift between the anxious faces of the men and the passing landscape behind them. In the soundtrack we hear the metallic rhythms of the cart grinding along the track. As the journey continues a series of soft electronic sounds, like metallic coils of unknown origin begin to become audible. At first we detect them as diegetic elements from within the picture, perhaps from the rusty metallic surfaces or drifting across the land as distant sonic events. Gradually they grow in intensity, echoing in odd counterpoint to the steady rhythms of the cart. We begin to consider the origin of these sounds; they seem to linger outside the frame somewhere between sound and musical score. As the electronic texture continues to swell, so the sounds of the cart slowly change. The heavy weight of the metallic rhythms begin to strangely transform into new timbres that coalesce with the echoes of the electronic sounds. This new soundtrack of electronic tones and processed cart sounds continues until the men arrive at their destination. They have left a decaying civilization and are now in unknown territory, bound up in the enigmatic power of the zone.

Excerpt from Booms, Bells and Distant Voices - The Ambiguity of Sound, 2013, Rob Szeliga