Her Noise Archive

Consolidate, Save, Migrate: My Sonic Bio

A journey that began in 2013 has definitely been one that put process first, patience second. The piece, composed through interviews, captures my sonic journey with Lee Ingleton who invited me to curate this piece and gave me space to think and reflect as well as the tools to create by teaching me the basics in Pro Tools, which has been empowering, a part of the journey I had not foreseen.

We are part of an American tradition that was arcane 40 years ago: the non-virtuoso artist, the artist that should not have been, birthed of suburbs and average intelligence. Hitting the subconscious by accident, communicating out of a sweaty desperate want. Magik Markers have always been that. Basement, mouth-breathing, know-nothing nobodies itching to get at something they don’t understand.

I recently came across this quote by Elisa Ambrogio, of Magik Markers, in The Wire (November 2013, 357, p16). When I first met Fatima Hellberg of Electra who introduced me to Her Noise, and again later when approached to be a guest curator, I felt exactly like a ‘know-nothing nobody itching to get at something I didn’t understand’. This instinctive reaction to my own set of knowledges and awareness of lack of knowledge; my own specialisms and conversely my propensity towards generalism in my magpie-ing artistic practice, sets the tone for this blog.

My visits to the Her Noise Archive helped me get an overview of discussion and research at the intersections of gender and experimental music while also hinting at numerous specific paths. Such lessons have also impacted my research practices. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction, my work consists of multiplicitous mapping and potentially homogenizing but, I hope, carefully conducted tracing of American ‘free folk’ / psychedelic music scenes. This blog post connects items, performers, and labels to ideas and interview aspects explored in my theses, especially 2012’s Gender construction and American ‘Free Folk’ music(s).

I remember a moment of bass massage in Kaffe Matthews Sonic Bed in her studio in 2006 in London with Eliane Radigue, Kaffe Matthews, Ryoko Akama and me eight months pregnant with my daughter Lumi. I cherish this memory like a precious rare stone I will never throw away. Generations of dedication to sound in one bed. I have known Kaffe’s work since the 1990s and have been her friend and collaborator and I distinctively remember the moment when she was creating her concept for Music for Bodies. While digital music had been largely listened to by a specific group of nerds, code music was now massaging the bodies of the art lover in a wider sense. Kaffe Matthews sonic bikes for instance go even further and perform in public space. I am inspired by the crossover of music and sound into the everyday lives of people and I think Kaffe’s bed marks an important step, not just of some sci-fi idea of sleeping in bass, but of a sustainable and ecological embedding of sonic art into society.

Watching, listening, writing to the hernoise archive

Watching the video interview with Christina Kubisch on Hernoise, I am reminded again of the importance of this multi-faceted and growing archive for contemporary research in sound, gender and technology. I have read quite a bit about Kubisch in the past, but the video and its informal conversational tone gives access to her thinking and work in a new way, providing more context, letting me see and hear her reactions to questions. She talks about how she came to her method of working with magnetic induction, and her interest in letting audiences construct their own sonic experience using technology that she and her team had developed to make electrical signals audible. I think this aspect of Kubisch’s work is very important. On an electrical walk, the audience really participates in the creation of their sonic experience. I did such a walk in Montreal several years ago. I was not asked to follow a set route or constructed narrative, as I might with a sited audio walk or listening guide. Instead, Kubisch provides her walkers with a technology (special headphones) and a map with points of sonic-electrical interest, facilitating an exploration of the place. Then, as a listener I am left to my own devices, and wander through the city, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and electrical signals become audible all around. At the end, I am left with a conscious sense of connections between kinds of power made audible, thinking viscerally about how nodes of financial power (such as banks) and institutional power (like government buildings and libraries) are surrounded by dense walls of invisible (and usually inaudible) electrical power. Questions about the social, political and health effects of these power systems and hotspots persist and are brought to the surface by this work. The Goethe Institut in Montreal retains two sets of electrical walk headphones that continue to be signed out by interested audiences, an unusual persistence of artistically-inspired practice through time.

I would like to contribute to the Her Noise Archive by introducing topics from the field of trans studies and activism on the intersections of sound art and sound engineering.

In electronic and electroacoustic music, the process of recording music or to amplify the sources coming from the stage in a concert situation is something I regard as an artistic process. Sound engineers who differ from the norm of the white cis male mixer are rare. From my own experience of working with all-female or queer bands, I have the perception that as a live sound engineer I have always been treated as a member of the band equally with the musicians on stage. Also being a musician and band member myself, I discovered and understood the mixing console and the P.A. system as a musical instrument. Live Sound engineering is often or traditionally perceived as a technical supplement, which assists the band or the orchestra but which is not rendered as a musical agent by itself. The reasons also rest on the historical position of the sound engineer who is treated as the controller of the sound rather than as the co-producer of a collective sound production. My ideas on sound engineering, especially on Live Sound are driven by my practice as a musician and engineer combined with my position of being a transgender identified person.

The Shaggs may not be one of the first examples that come to mind when thinking of notable female sound practitioners and role models for women in the sound arts. They are often not taken seriously: their music’s “ineptitude” something to marvel and laugh at – “so bad it’s good”, a joke listeners and collectors of their music are in on but the band themselves are not.

From the Her Noise Archive, I have chosen Frances Dyson’s book, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in Arts and Culture. Though not the central focus of her book, she addresses two things that have always intrigued me about sound; that it provokes a listening experience that is ontologically profound and that it is married to space, to corporeality while not needing to adhere to realism at all. Through a discussion of this and other characteristics of New Media Art, Dyson discusses the various ways in which we experience it.

My selection from the Her Noise Archive is the interview with Else Marie Pade by Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen for Free Utv in 2005. The film’s informal nature provides a charming, mostly sonic, portrait of Pade. She converses in Danish and as I am not a Danish speaker, I watch the film not in order to gain insight into her compositional methods or creative history, but for other reasons. The device of her speaking to an interviewer, but without hearing her words, only her compositions, also proves hypnotic. This adds another aspect to the film’s sound world. Items located within the domestic scene provide clues about her creative life: a piano, accessorised with a rubber and pencil sharpener; the boxes of tapes; reel-to-reel machines and what appears to be, perhaps, an oscillator. An enchanting and important film about a composer hitherto unknown to myself.

At the outset of An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1972), Daphne Oram greets her readers with this declaration: “Music, sound and electronics… each of these subjects has been well covered recently by sober academic textbooks; I am certainly not going to write another of those!” Sure enough, the roughly 150 pages that follow are animated by her whimsical sensibility and wide-ranging imagination.