Sonorous Objects

Julius’s preeminent status within the exhibition aside, the centerpiece of the show was Japanese artist Tomoko Sauvage’s In Curved Water (2015), which grew out of her practice as an improvising musician playing amplified bowls tuned by water level—itself inspired by jal tarang, a traditional Indian percussion instrument. The title of Julius’s work, as well as its association with Indian classical music, harkens back to the oeuvre of American minimalist composer Terry Riley, known for his 1969 album A Rainbow in Curved Air. In the gallery’s main room, blocks of ice wrapped in twine rope hangs from the ceiling, refracting light from isolated spotlights in the dark; they are slowly dripping water into bowls, some of which are connected to hydrophones. The resonance of the bowls transform the pitter-patter of the melting ice into an unpredictable pulse reminiscent of wind chimes. Sauvage gave a brief performance in the eerie, cave-like room at the exhibition’s opening reception, highlighting how, in a sense, the installation itself was improvised. As she created a thick droning sound using additional water bowls and electronic echo sound effects, the melting ice provided random, live accompaniment—a role that might have otherwise been occupied by another musician or computer program.

For cristo fué y gaucamaya (2015), Venezuelan artist and self-taught musician Rubén D’Hers also left elements of his project up to chance, by using analog means to create sound. The installation consists of two wooden birdcages, each with steel strings and feathers attached to motors inside. Recordings of bird songs trigger the speed and activity of the motors, causing the feathers to brush the strings and let out guitar-like twangs. The feathers would occasionally become stuck, preventing a regular pattern from emerging and giving the disconcerting impression that the installation is alive rather than mechanized.

A similarly disquieting tone inhabited a set of films by French musician and filmmaker Marc Hurtado. Considering Hurtado’s association with noise music, one might have expected a cacophony accompanied by intense imagery; but Aurore (1989), Royaume (1991) and Bleu (1994), which are screened in a backroom, present grainy, oversaturated film footage of trees, shimmering water, and people, edited together in a flickering manner that brings to mind artist and poet Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine experiments of the 1960s. The soundtrack of the work is comprised of field recordings that seem connected to the footage, but also sound like unintelligible whispering—which makes the films at once soothing and uncomfortably intimate, as if the audience is intruding upon a private moment.

Such juxtaposition of relaxing calm with an underlying current of tension tie together the constituent pieces of “Sonorous Objects,” with their quiet gestures heightened, and occasionally given a sinister edge, by their pitch-black surroundings. By reaching back to sound art’s original antecedents—from Indian tradition to American minimalism—the exhibit feels somewhat disconnected from a new generation of sound art, one filled with digital gloss and dance-music references. Yet its emphasis on tactile sound creation and interaction with the natural world also felt like a much-needed antidote to the information overload of today’s media art.

“Sonorous Objects” is on view at The Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, until October 22, 2015.