Talking About Sounds Like (An Experimental Opera Response)

The artist seems to be riding the feedback from a microphone on something metallic, catching buzzing sounds, tamping down rushing frequencies, and projecting noises of physical surfaces in contact.

It fades to a mid-range drone with mechanical and industrial detail. Vague tones add to one another, making a mid-frequency cluster, a shimmering harmony like a triple stop on a violin, alive with vibrato and a hollow wooden quality.

I end up sitting on the floor next to one of the sub speakers in one of the geometric corners of this full acoustic space. I am in a terrarium of sound. Time passes peacefully, then a slow fade to silence as everyone looks up and cheers.

An enormous wave of harsh noise and broken audio fragments fill the room. Screeching sounds, metallic and sharp, strike the air. Indistinct remains of dismantled music escape through the smallest cracks in the flurry, like dialing a radio across stations.

The artist is body checking the table and moving it around the floor. Things are falling off, and the audience is closing in for a closer look.

After what feels like centuries, the piece fades and we return to consciousness.

Screeching mid-range noises like a guitar solo or a distorted vocal line interrupt a bent harmonic background. A clean arpeggio staccato line drives the rhythm until deep bass and drum programming settle into electronic dance music.

The audience surrounds this area on three sides, looking in, and we’ve been invited to get up and walk through, to explore near and around the speakers.

The artist is working directly on the records and on the record players. Speed changes make frequency slides, like long slow sirens. A powerful sub tone punches in to ground the motion above.

I feel underwater, consumed by the sound. I look up and see that it’s sheets of paper. The artist is rustling sheets of paper beside a microphone.

Then it starts again, building the same welcoming harmonic foundation, and the fiddle begins to make small sounds and articulations that weave through and connect.

Fragments of singing voices add to the mix in staccato bursts. It feels a bit eerie.

At times throughout the performance, the artist and an assistant enter the middle area to reposition the speakers. There is a geometry in this, vaguely ritualistic, kind of like numerology.

I’m reminded of distant mechanical noises, the sound of an underground parking lot turned up loud.

Some of this almost feels funny, like a slide whistle going up or down, or maybe not funny, but playful and disarmingly cute despite being set alongside a powerful construction of layered noise and static.

This is heavy, industrial, and noisy. I think I hear manipulated field recordings, like acoustic spaces captured and compressed.

A huge growling sound fills the room, a full frequency spectrum humming like industrial acoustic pollution, an amplified noise floor marked by bursts of static.

Voices and voice-like sounds reach us from small speakers on stands set around the floor in the centre of the room.

There is a persistent harmony in the noise, not exactly consonant, but also not dissonant. It feels misaligned.

A new mid tone hum appears, a clear and singing tone over waves of sand.

An enveloping white noise takes over, and mid-frequency resonant pulses measure out time. The white noise subsides, and a new low tone appears, climbing in frequency, sweeping the full spectrum upwards, like the end of a cassette tape.

Getting close to the sounds being projected vertically into the air from simple light wood boxes, a uniquely personal relationship to the piece is possible.

It feels like this music is already where it’s going. We’re in this new space, and it isn’t about clever reveals or jump cuts or dramatic effect. This is an environment, beautiful and full of life with lots to discover.

We arrive to a harmonic drone, a crystalline smooth acoustical construction with clear tonal relationships and spectral detail. It is astonishingly beautiful, and then my breath is taken away when the artist picks up a wooden recorder and begins to play.

The heavy drone noise is dropped, leaving a background hum, like the composition wanted to remind us of silence. And in this, little rustling sounds, the room is full of small things.

The harmonies are pleasant, calming even, and a drone throughout anchors the music around subtle percussive and bass elements that mark time passing.

The low frequency cuts out abruptly, fiddle scratches and trills are exposed alongside an icy high tone, fragile and light.

Sounds spin around us, and time is a material in the artist’s hands. He’s tossing us forward and back, back again.

At the end of the performance, we hear a beautiful, spectral cloud, a chord hanging in the air, as if from a pipe organ made of glass, a sweet harmony and a feeling of resolution.

It ends abruptly like an engine turning off. The feeling in the room is unbelievable.

Sharp musical sounds, breathy embouchure, like birdsong—there is something familiar about these articulations and the instrument’s natural overtones. I am so charmed by this, amazed at the musicality, creativity, and control.

Distinct parts break up the larger structure.

The performer’s repetitive motions create a slow rhythmic pattern that never repeats. I can hear a progression, with new sharper sounds, striking sounds like hitting rocks together.

The music is unrelenting. A distant soft siren sound reaches us in a moment of relief, like an alarm just as we catch our breath, and then we punch back in and the music drives to a high point and ends.

Never overwhelmed or overtasked, the artist is calm throughout, while the mix he is creating is full of tension and bubbling energy. I feel the shift at the end when a delicate harmony fills the room, a mist of consonant notes, like bells rattling and trilling. It’s a nice way to finish.

Every sound seems mapped to the artist’s movements. Countless parts are at play, systems are set in motion and disrupted. The table is an instrument and an installation.

The artist grabs a leather whip and holds a flashlight in her teeth. Piercing sounds strike around us as whip cracks break the sound barrier. The audience braces themselves without retreating.

After a flourish, as simply as it started, the performance ends. Tone arms up, the audience bursts into applause.

A rustling noise, brief pauses, laughter sounds, bumps and bass noises, a loud low note, and indistinct pitched material.

A slowly oscillating lighter noise pushes forward with the motion of a saw, repeating and wearing down.

The loud booming returns, a new whistle tone, even higher frequencies appear and descend. The beeping is still here from before.

This is improvised, as I understand it, but I imagine the musicians have prepared well in advance what they “might” play, or maybe they’ve played together so often that this is second nature.

It starts with a locked groove, a familiar kind of record skipping sound, a loud click and booming bass as the record needle jumps back a groove. It’s loud, and other quiet noises fill out the loop, circling back on themselves to create a rhythmic pulse.

As the sound rises, a clear tone rings out quietly, set against a growing mass of bubbling low frequencies and noise.

In a brief pause, we cheer and the sound comes back as loud and strong as before. Everyone is losing it.

Along the way this composition arrives places. Like a tour, we are brought along through different scenes or views, arriving somewhere and pausing to look. The performer is the tour guide, drawing our attention to different elements in each scene.

Higher and higher frequencies swirl and dive around crashing bass clicks and sharp rattles in asynchronous orbits. Then for a moment it cuts to just the bass and a scattered few full spectrum noise bursts.

We hear wind-like noises, soft friction sounds, rising and falling waves.

Everyone is standing around the artist who is in the center of the room. We’re like a punk music crowd.

My mind wanders back to the introduction. It’s a big deal that these artists are here, in Saskatoon of all places, for their first Canadian show. Interestingly, there isn’t anything in the music itself that seems to be asking for special celebration or for a spotlight. What a curious mix of significance and understatement. Absolutely beautiful.

The next view gives more industrial vibes, like we’ve entered a new room in a crumbling concrete architecture. It’s a stark view, and there is a sense of imminence and gravitas to the volume and weight of the sound around us.

The artist picks up a kind of music box. Pacing the room and using her teeth to tear a long strip of paper through the mechanism, creating glimmering distorted saccharine clusters of notes. The microphone is turned up loud enough to feed back, like an electric guitar.

A second voice arrives, with a new set of clicks and a looping rhythmic phrase. A high tone sings out over the noise, and it doesn’t loop. It sustains for a breath until degrading into crunchy white noise static. Then it returns, only now captured inside of a locked groove, making a beeping sound.

Nothing feels like a loop. If the composition is moving, it is moving on geological time.

As the visuals change from scene to scene, the sound remains constant through a clear evolution.

More as sweeping and sliding frequencies combine into a ramshackle Shepard Tone. Sounds nearly leave the audible range.

The patience in their improvisation is inspiring, and this creates a sense of timelessness. Elements return again and again, and the artists go over similar terrain through the hour-long performance, but there is no sense of repetitiveness.

I hear something like a direct signal from a contact mic. This has an effect of grounding the piece directly to the actions of performer. We are hearing the artist’s hands, his gestures, and this lead part stands out from the other sounds.

In one moment, a sweet note on the fiddle stands out. Later, the drone is louder and higher pitched. It feels colder.

At one point, I watch my friend walk around in the middle by the speakers. It becomes something to look at. There are other people inside the piece, and I can imagine what they are hearing, how it is different than where I am, and how their bodies in the space are changing how the sounds move out into the room.

Like turning a corner, the low tone returns, anchoring the higher frequencies. That was a big change, but more like shifting light than a change of setting. This music reminds me of weather.

As the visuals change from scene to scene, the sound remains constant through a slow evolution.

It is getting louder, and there are more vibrations and a boiling energy beneath.

The minimal aesthetic and discovery of sound as a material is amazing.

Short pauses mark different sections, and the next begins with a heavy low moving bassline that morphs into a resonant propellor sound, loud like a prop plane.

Spoken word fragments loop and repeat, and a single phrase cut up in real time and set on itself reveals the complexity of the performer’s direct action. The words are often recognizable, the meaning less so. We hear the wickity whickity sounds.

The result is a dense and deeply composed piece.

It ends simply, no turn arounds or grand cadence, just like closing a window.